Thinking On Sunday: How Britain Enriched the Few and Failed the Poor – A 200-Year History

Stewart Lansley reveals how Britain’s model of ‘extractive capitalism’ – with a small elite securing an excessive slice of the economic cake – has created a two-century-long ‘high-inequality, high-poverty’ cycle, one broken for only a brief period after the Second World War. Why, he asks, are rich and poor citizens judged by very different standards? Why has social progress been so narrowly shared? With growing calls for a fairer post-COVID-19 society, what needs to be done to break Britain’s destructive poverty/inequality cycle?

His book The Richer, The Poorer charts the rollercoaster history of both rich and poor and the mechanisms that link wealth and impoverishment. This landmark book shows how, for 200 years, Britain’s most powerful elites have enriched themselves at the expense of surging inequality, mass poverty and weakened social resilience.

Stewart Lansley is a visiting fellow at the School of Policy Studies, University of Bristol. He has written on inequality, wealth and poverty for academic journals and newspapers. He is the author/co-author of a number of books including The Richer, The Poorer (2021), Breadline Britain (2015), The Cost of Inequality (2011) and Top Man (a biography of Philip Green, 2007). He has also written on the transformative potential of a guaranteed income floor.