The Lives of Seven Children Tell the Story of UK Inequality
The lives of seven children, each representing a different income bracket, reveal the stark realities of inequality in contemporary Britain. Even the best off of the seven is disadvantaged in the country with Europe’s fastest-rising child poverty rates.
Children hula-hoop on a playground in London, England, on June 4, 2020. (Dan Kitwood / Getty Images)
One way to try to understand the health and priorities of a state is to look at how its children are treated. In the fall of 2018, there were about fourteen million children in the UK. If you divide those fourteen million into seven groups, ranging from the poorest to the richest families, and select the middle child from each group of two million, you have seven representative children by income. By chance, these seven children might also reflect the distribution of other aspects of life in the UK — through their ethnicity, for example, the range of geographical areas they have grown up in, or whether they live with one parent or two (or very occasionally none).
Few British families with young children have much wealth, making income the best measure to differentiate their circumstances. In the UK, income largely determines children’s life chances. Seven is the minimum needed to represent the range.
Why choose 2018? Because it was a year of peak income inequality, a year before the pandemic, when social statistics were still reliably collected. Comparing these numbers with recent post-pandemic data, we can get an idea of current social and economic trends. In the fall of 2024, each child will have their sixth birthday. The graph below shows how much money their families have to live on each year after they have paid their taxes and paid the rent or mortgage.
Note that almost everyone who publicly comments on these issues (myself included) either currently belongs to, or grew up in, a family that was better off than the best off of our seven typical children. However, even within the top 7 percent of the British income distribution, there exists a wide range of incomes, meaning one can be a part of this exclusive group and still financially disadvantaged — even though, compared to our seven typical children, they are extremely well-off. This short article provides a summary of key findings from the book Seven Children, which will be published in September 2024 in the UK and November 2024 in the United States.
Readers in the United States may be surprised by how low the annual disposal incomes are for families with children in Britain today. Factors like Brexit have contributed to making Brits poorer than people in most of mainland Europe in recent years. However, it’s important to note that these British families do not have to set aside money for health care. Roughly a tenth of adults in Britain use private health care every year, but almost no family with young children in the UK can afford it.
At the time of writing, a pound is only worth 27 percent more than a dollar (1 pound equals 1.27 dollars). Therefore, the family of the best-off child has a disposable annual income of $63,500 a year. Note that this has been adjusted (equivalized) to account for the number of people in the family, making it comparable to the living standard of an adult couple with no children with that annual income. In 2019, if you were living with another adult, had no children, and brought home more than $63,500 a year between you, after taxes and after paying for your housing expenses, you were better-off than the families of the wealthiest seventh typical child in the UK.
The future for Britain’s children hinges not on their own actions, but on decisions made by adults in the coming years. It depends on whether the British are willing to tolerate the high human toll of increasing inequality across the British nations. If enough choose to stay silent, then nothing will improve. However, if people start speaking out and taking action, this moment could mark the peak of inequality, rather than the start of a long plateau or the beginning of another mountain of inequality to climb.
Each of the seven children could be assigned a number, but they would not feel very human to you if they were, so below they have a name as well. It’s worth noting that the family of the seventh children has a disposable income — money available for food, heating, vacations, and expenses other than rent and taxes — that is greater than the disposable income of the first three typical children’s families combined.
1
Anna
Anna represents the poorest seventh of children born in the UK. Her situation reflects the aftermath of societal division in British since the 1970s — a terrible tear that has left lasting scars. While high inequality was initially a shock, the enduring and deepening inequality in the twenty-first century has proven far more damaging to families in Britain.
2
Brandon
Brandon is the second poorest of the seven. His family lives in constant fear of benefit sanctions because his father sometimes falls short on job applications, despite occasionally finding paid work when available. Few realize that the number of financial penalties, known as “sanctions,” imposed on benefit claimants by the UK Department for Work and Pensions now exceeds the number of fines imposed by the magistrates’ courts for all crimes across England and Wales and all such fines for crimes imposed by sheriff courts in Scotland. These extreme punitive measures for benefit claimants were introduced in 1998 under Tony Blair’s New Labour and were further tightened under the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government of 2010–15, implicating all three major UK political parties. Brandon’s growth has been stunted due to his family’s struggle to afford adequate nutrition.
3
Candice
Candice is nearly the middle child in the UK, but determining the true middle is challenging in such a divided society. In such contexts, distrust becomes prevalent. Many people tend to think of themselves as concerned, sensible, logical, fair, decent, hardworking, and trustworthy, but under such broad deprivations and fears as are now common in the UK, we often perceive others as less concerned, sensible, logical, fair, decent, hardworking, and trustworthy than we are. It becomes common to attribute personal achievements to hard work and attribute shortcomings to insufficient effort or to others cheating you or holding you back. Candice’s family can no longer remember what life was like in 2008, a decade before she was born, when people could buy so much more with their money and were less stressed.
4
David
David is the typical child growing up in the UK — his is the average experience — and his parents’ anxiety about future security is representative of the pervasive feeling of precarity. Insecurity and extreme precariousness will only diminish when income inequality begins to fall — but such a prospect seems far off. For those relying on an insecure income to keep a family afloat, the experience is often terrifying. For parents of young children, such fear is the last thing they need.
5
Emily
Emily is a little better off than average, and her parents try to be hopeful about the future. It seems unlikely that the UK will continue to have the most extreme income inequality in Europe (other than occasionally Bulgaria). After all, recent UK governments’ modest tax schemes, particularly light on the rich, nevertheless allow for future governments to reverse austerity cuts and increase public spending (and decency) without looking at all out of line with other rich countries. The UK currently taxes at one of the lowest rates in Europe.
Emily’s parents likely voted Labour in 2024 and perhaps 2019, as did many in their age group, including better-off parents. These seven children were born in the year after Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party resulted in the largest annualized swing to Labour ever recorded (between 2015 and 2017). However, by the time they were one-year-olds, Corbyn’s reputation had been crucified by the British press as an alleged antisemite. This cynical move was aimed at discrediting the popular policies of 2017, which had offered a feasible alternative to extreme inequality. By 2024, no progressive plans were offered to the public.
6
Freddy
In mainland Europe, a child in Freddy’s position would fare much better because of greater equality. Despite being from the second most prosperous group of seven families in the UK, Freddy’s family occasionally struggles. The success of the few in accumulating great sums of wealth depends on an increasing number of others remaining poor or barely getting by. This relative poverty drives people into debt, including by trying to sustain mortgages they find grow as interest rates rise. It also compels them to do all the work that employers delegate — far more than might be reasonable, including working very long hours. Freddy’s family have not accumulated great wealth. They simply “get by,” residing in one of the poorer countries of the Global North, where child poverty has seen the most significant rise in recent years.
7
Gemma
Today Gemma, our most privileged child of the seven, no longer wins solely by dint of her birth. Only one million children in the country are in better circumstances than her and yet her parents are increasingly fearful, anxious, and less satisfied with life. Their situation has improved since the financial crash. Despite this, their anxiety remains higher than ever.
From the 1950s to the 1970s in the UK, the extremely wealthy were far rarer. As a result, there were far fewer in dire straits and more who managed happily as members of the middle class. Even the people who did lose out back then did not lose out by so much. More importantly, almost all of those who were economic winners only won by a little. And most importantly, the economic winners of that time were generally well-off rather than megarich, and so the immiseration of so many at the bottom was not necessary to ensure their enrichment.
Policies built on the crushing of compassion and the evisceration of empathy in the 1980s and 1990s led these children’s grandparents to believe that there was no such thing as society. The ascension of this belief had a profound impact: their children suffered and now their grandchildren live separate, parallel lives as a result, making them the most divided children in Europe and the most divided in Britain for almost a century. Life in the UK is now growing increasingly precarious for everyone, especially for the poorest of all. Even death rates are rising.
But how does the rest of Europe fare? And what does the future hold?
Inequality rates have declined in more European countries than they have risen in the last couple of decades. Nothing is foretold, but keeping a state like the UK so unequal is a very expensive business. Those staunchly upholding these enormous economic divisions that British children and their families now endure may find their efforts increasingly unsustainable as resources dwindle.
For those hopeful for a better path, examples from mainland Europe provide inspiration. There are many ways in which housing can be better organized, schools and universities better run, private for-profit interests kept out of health care, and the rich taxed more effectively than is currently the case in the UK.
One thing is now certain: the British must move their focus away from the legacy of free marketeers in the United States, from which so much bad advice came. The UK has tried to emulate the United States since 1979, and it is the grandchildren of Margaret Thatcher’s generation who have suffered most as a result of that mistake.