The Fair Society series

We often frame societal risks in terms of immediate, visible threats: pandemics, climate disasters, or geopolitical conflicts. Yet one of humanity’s most persistent dangers—economic inequality—rarely occupies the same urgency in public discourse. David Lay Williams’ compelling book,  The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx , challenges...

UK politics is focused on short-term crises, at the expense of thinking about and acting on long-term problems. Among other things, this is a barrier to building a fairer society, undermining opportunity and growth and damaging our democracy and our society more broadly. Thinking and acting in the long term is possible, as the Welsh government has proven over the last decade, and brings multiple b...

President Trump is in power once more. His victory is complete but the business of understanding just what happened has only just begun as we seek lessons – and warnings – for UK politics and this year’s European elections. Why were the Democrats defeated? Is America’s surging inequality the root cause of President Trump’s victory? What connections can we draw between growing inequality...

What does the future hold for Britain, and how can we reclaim our prosperity? In his latest book, Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back , economist and politician Torsten Bell offers his vision for revitalising the UK's economy and society. A former Chief Executive of the Resolution Foundation and now Labour MP for Swansea West, Bell dissects the economic stagnation that has gripped Britain fo...

On 15 October the Fairness Foundation published the Wealth Gap Risk Register , an online evidence resource on the impacts and risks of the wealth gap. The report is designed to address limited awareness among policymakers of the causal relationship between the wealth gap and these negative ‘spillover effects’, by communicating the evidence base as clearly and concisely as possible through a range...

What does declining prosperity mean for Britain’s next generation? In his latest book, author and professor Danny Dorling constructs seven “average” children from millions of statistics – each child symbolising the very middle of a parental income bracket, from the poorest to the wealthiest.  Seven Children explores the realities facing Britain's youth in the aftermath of the pandemic and the...

In his bestselling new book, Failed State , Sam Freedman outlines how it feels like nothing works in Britain anymore. It has become harder than ever to get a GP appointment. Many property crimes remain unsolved. Rivers are overrun with sewage. Wages are stagnant and the cost of housing is increasing. He asks why it feels like everything is going wrong, at the same time? It's easy to blame dysfunct...

One of the new Labour government’s five missions is the  opportunity mission , which aims to “break down barriers to opportunity”. It's clear that Labour understands that breaking down barriers to opportunity requires action outside the school gates as well as within them, to tackle barriers to opportunity such as poverty and poor housing. But there’s a risk that, as they start to implement t...

The UK is a very unfair country. Inequality – whether socio-economic, regional, racial, gender, class-based, or disability-based – has got out of hand. This is morally wrong, but it's also bad for our economy, society and democracy. It's no surprise that 85% of people are concerned about inequality in Britain today. And the bad news is that most experts believe that inequality is going to get even...

Left behind places can be found in prosperous countries – from South Yorkshire, integral to the industrial revolution and now England’s poorest county, to Barranquilla, once Colombia’s portal to the Caribbean and now struggling. More alarmingly, the poorest countries in the world are diverging further from the rest of humanity than they were at the start of this century. Why have these places fall...

Political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues that the 17th century concept of the Protestant work ethic has been perverted, and is now used to justify policies that promote the wealth and power of the richest in society, at workers’ expense. In her latest book,  Hijacked: How neoliberalism turned the work ethic against the workers,  Anderson says we should reclaim the original goals o...

In his new book,  This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain , political economist and Observer columnist Will Hutton analyses how the left and right have gone wrong over the course of the last century. He believes the nation’s continuing inability to invest in itself is at the heart of our problems, which have their roots in a fixation on free markets and a minimal state. To ward off the w...

We all take notice when the poor become even poorer – when we witness more rough sleepers and longer food bank queues. However, when the rich amass greater wealth, it often goes unnoticed in public, and for most of us, our daily lives remain ostensibly unchanged. In her book  Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth , philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns sheds light on the alarming...

The super-rich have never had it so good – but millions can't afford a home, an education or a pension, argues former Treasury minister  Liam Byrne MP  in his new book,  The Inequality of Wealth: Why it Matters and How to Fix it . He says that unless we change course soon, the future will be even worse. Much worse. But things don't have to be like this. In the book, Byrne explains w...

What factors drive political turmoil and societal breakdown? How do elites sustain their dominance, and why do ruling classes occasionally lose their hold on power? Peter Turchin, an expert in researching the origins of political instability, uncovers a recurring trend in his book End Times . When the scales of power heavily favour the ruling elite, it leads to a surge in income inequality, enrich...

In their influential and award-winning 2009 book  The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone , Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson argue that societies with the biggest gaps between the rich and the rest are bad for everyone, including those who are most well off. They contend that everything from life expectancy, mental illness and obesity to violence and illiteracy is affected not...

How do politicians from the Conservative and Labour parties think about what a fair society looks like? Are their differences intractable, or are there areas with as-yet unrealised potential for cross-party consensus? If we can find common ground between the fairness principles and priorities of those on the left and the right, what might this look like in terms of concrete policy solutions? In hi...

In his book, Value(s): Building a Better World for All , former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney argues that fundamental problems – such as growing inequality in income and opportunity, mistrust of experts, and the existential threat of climate change – all stem from a common crisis in values. Drawing on the turmoil of the past decade, he says that “market economies” have evolved i...

In May 2023, the Fairness Foundation published National Wealth Surplus , a report on public attitudes to wealth, based on polling carried out by Opinium. The report launch webinar took place on 23 May 2023 and was chaired by Polly Toynbee (the Guardian), with contributions from Dr Lucy Barnes (University College London), Gary Stevenson (inequality economist and former city trader) and Will Snell (...

The Fairness Index was launched on 19 October 2022 with a webinar chaired by Will Hutton , and with presentations by Will Snell (Fairness Foundation), Ann Phoenix (University College London), Torsten Bell (Resolution Foundation) and Richard Wilkinson (University of Nottingham). Click the link in the description to see the slides and recording of the launch webinar. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/p...

What does society owe each of us? And what do we owe in return? Our answer to these inescapable questions – known as the social contract – shapes our politics, economic systems and every stage of life, from raising children and going to school to finding work and growing old. Yet today, many believe that this contract is not working for them. In  What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Cont...

Travelling up or down the social ladder has been a British obsession for over a century, but can political leaders continue to claim that social mobility is a real and just reward for hard work? In her book Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth , Professor Selina Todd draws on hundreds of personal stories to reveal the hidden history of how people have really experienced socia...

Dramatic differences in health are not a simple matter of rich and poor – poverty alone doesn't drive ill health, but inequality does. Indeed, suicide, heart disease, lung disease, obesity, and diabetes are all linked to social disadvantage. In his book The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World , Professor Sir Michael Marmot argues that in every country, people at relative social disadvant...

What accounts for our polarised public life, and how can we begin to heal it? Political philosopher Michael Sandel offers a surprising answer: those who have flourished need to look in the mirror. In his latest book, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? , Sandel explores how "meritocratic hubris" leads many to believe their success is their own doing and to look down on those wh...