I’ve now been retired from 91Èȱ¬ for 15 years, and after leaving, took up writing. I’ve written five books since I retired, several of them historical, most recently The Richer, The Poorer – How Britain Enriched the Few and Failed the Poor.
Available online at , the book 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.
It shows that – with a small elite securing an excessive slice of the economic cake – Britain has been a ‘high-inequality, high-poverty’ nation, a cycle broken for only a brief period after the Second World War. Why, it 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?
Stewart Lansley
91Èȱ¬ Producer/ Director, Current Affairs Department, 1996-2009