The malaise on our own doorsteps
Kenneth Roy, Scotish Review

Many years ago I was introduced to the small town of Newport-on-Tay by perhaps its best-known inhabitant, the poet and academic Douglas Dunn. I loved the Victorian solidity of the place and remember its sense of vitality. We went for lunch to the local pub – formally called a hotel in the traditional manner – a buzzy establishment serving plain food well-cooked. And, of course, the company was good; I think Douglas Dunn was then much involved in the anti-poll tax campaign. Yes, it was that long ago.

But I didn’t imagine that Newport-on-Tay would have changed much; in many matters Scottish I remain a sentimentalist. So when it was decided that Islay McLeod should do her Thursday photo feature on a small town in winter, I said at once: ‘You could do a lot worse than Newport-on-Tay’.

The results – you can see them for yourself in this edition – are not what I was expecting. The pub where Douglas Dunn and I once enjoyed a convivial lunch is in a poor state, awaiting redevelopment into flats. The area around the pier, where ferries once set off across the river to Dundee, has been left to rot. Last Saturday afternoon, when the Scottish Review visited, the streets were deserted and it was hard to tell whether the few eating places were simply closed for the winter or closed for good.

Yet it would not be hard to imagine Newport-on-Tay, so easily reached by car across the Tay bridge, as a stylish, bustling coastal suburb, full of smart bistros and boutiques, a fashionable place for a weekend excursion or Saturday night dining.

Instead it has become just another small, neglected Scottish town. It is part of a national malaise.

In 1970, another Douglas – Douglas Young, the poet and romantic nationalist who lived in Tayport, the small town next to Newport – wrote a wonderful book about the state of modern Scotland. Its first chapter was entitled ‘A Peculiar People’. One of the peculiarities Douglas Young identified early in the book was our preference as a people to live, not in an urban environment, but in small towns. He added up the population of the four cities and the eight largest towns (Paisley, Motherwell and Wishaw, Greenock, East Kilbride, Coatbridge, Kirkcaldy, Dunfermline and Clydebank) and calculated that these 12 centres accounted for less than half the total population. With the continuing dispersal of population from Glasgow, it may now be much less than half.

The point Douglas Young was making – one which appears to have been forgotten or conveniently ignored by politicians and policy-makers – is that, in his words, ‘for very many Scots the wee burgh is the natural environment; they are basically small-town types’.

The other point he was making was that all of these ‘wee burghs’ were self-governing communities, some with charters going back to the 12th century. He found 16 with populations of under a thousand, and it is worth naming them if only for the melody: Fortrose, Falkland, Dornoch, Inverbervie, East Linton, Elie and Earlsferry, Aberchirder, Kintore, Gatehouse of Fleet, Doune, Abernethy, Tobermory, Cromarty, Culross, Inveraray and, smallest of the lot with 331 people, New Galloway. As Douglas Young asked, do you not find these names much more inspiring than most modern verse?

He discovered 36 burghs with populations of between 1,000 and 2,000; 23 with populations of between 2,000 and 3,000 (including his native Tayport); 16 with populations of between 3,000 and 4,000 (including Newport); and so up the scale to such relative giants as Kilsyth, Stranraer, Denny and Dunipace, Lochgelly and Thurso; and further still, on and on, to the Hamiltons and Falkirks, Ayrs and Perths. He concluded that, ‘from Kilmarnock down’ – I am not sure why the home of the Scottish Review should have been the selected marker – the burgh environment was a ‘readily comprehensible and intimate one, really an extended village neighbourhood’. This was the lovely, chaotic, functioning Scotland, each community fixing its own rates, administering its own budget, and for all but the largest services determining its own priorities, which Douglas Young described and celebrated. Within four years of the book being published, it was all gone.

The towns remain, of course, but shorn of all responsibility for their own affairs. Is it any coincidence that many, if not most, are sadly diminished communities? It will be argued that the decline of the small town owes more to economic forces than to the deprivation of self-governing status brought about by local government reorganisation. But the malaise has deeper roots. When human beings lose the capacity to exercise a degree of immediate control over their own conditions, when intimacy of scale is sacrificed, the result is Newport-on-Tay; or, from my own experience, the derelict small towns of Ayrshire, sullen places from which all vibrancy and hope seems to have been sucked. (An exception is the recently revived West Kilbride, which never enjoyed burgh status, and has been re-born as a craft town as a result of local initiative).

Remoteness or perceived remoteness – it amounts to the same thing – from centres of decision-making contributes inevitably to a haemorrhaging of civic esteem and pride. That is a truth so obvious that it should scarcely need stating; it is simply how we operate, or fail to operate, as human beings. But it is not a truth which has influenced policy on how decisions are taken in this country.

The burghs were destroyed in the interests of a greater efficiency. Where is the evidence of this efficiency? Does anyone seriously believe that Scotland is a more efficient, better governed place than it was in 1970 when Douglas Young wrote his book lauding the eccentricities of the wee burghs, among other national peculiarities? I doubt that many people even know the name of their councillor. The former system had many imperfections, but it was essentially human-shaped. What we have now suits the executive. It is convenient because it is a long way from the people. But, as we have seen in the last few months of SR’s various campaigns, what suits the executive is not what suits us

Author: Regeneration and Renewal

The founders of the Social Enterprise Mark (SEM) have faced a good deal of criticism since the mark’s launch at the Voice 10 conference last week. As reported in Regeneration & Renewal last week, any social enterprise can apply to purchase the mark for £99, provided they can demonstrate that they reinvest at least 50 per cent of their profits in activities to support social or environmental goals.

This has been loosened from last year: the SEM pilot in the South-West required 65 per cent of profits to be reinvested in social or environmental goals but RISE, the organisation behind the mark, changed it to ensure faster take-up of the mark (it’s aiming for 2,000 mark holders in the first year).

Now Senscot, the voice of social entrepreneurs in Scotland, has refused to act as the Scottish partner for the mark, saying that the relaxation of this asset lock “doesn’t feel right” and that the “broad church” approach could blur the boundaries between social enterprise and other sectors. “We believe that the Scottish social enterprise community would rather be regulated by tighter criteria,” Senscot founder Laurence DeMarco says in an email bulletin last week.

Business author and social entrepreneur, Robert Ashton, agrees: “As with any so-called ‘quality mark’, once you achieve it there’s less incentive to follow it.”

Other sector representatives have argued the opposite case in the lengthy, online debate that questions whether the SEM is a valuable “quality mark” at all. The main thrust of the argument is that simply awarding a social enterprise recognition based on profit distribution is not enough – many organisations are achieving huge social and environmental impact but have not yet reached a point where they can reinvest that much profit in these goals. They might also be vehicles structured in a different way to formal social enterprises or community interest companies (CICs) that are set up specifically for profit reinvestment.

It’s an interesting point. RISE and the Social Enterprise Coalition’s defence is that the SEM is intended largely to boost the profile of the social enterprise sector, which it no doubt will. But many feel that this shouldn’t be its raison d’etre.

Take this extract from Rob Greenland’s blog, The Social Business: “The mark [is supposed to] represent businesses working for social and environmental aims. Except it doesn’t. It represents businesses working for social and environmental aims that spend at least half their profits on these purposes. There’s a [negative] value judgement there about profit, which rules a lot of us out.” He goes on to say: “I’d be right behind a Social Business Mark which was awarded to businesses that have clear social aims and can provide externally verified evidence of their impact…But given that it’s not, I’m finding it hard to get enthusiastic about the mark.”

Another blogger highlighted the fact that The Phone Co-op, which was named 2008 Social Enterprise of the Year by the Social Enterprise Coalition, did not meet the criteria for the mark.

It seems to me that the SEM risks inviting Government and the public to judge the value of social interprise in monetary terms rather than on the ‘softer’ outcomes that social enterprises seek to achieve in the first place – albeit by doing good business. But at the same time, at least this is one solution to the eternal problem facing all social/community-facing organisations: how do they demonstrate their value to the wider world?

Theology Influenced Modern Scottish Land Reform – New Research Paper
 
1 February 2010
 
Religious factors played a marked role in the run-up to the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, according to a new study involving researchers from the University of Strathclyde – Professor Alastair McIntosh and an intern student from the Netherlands, Rutger Henneman.
 
McIntosh, who was heavily involved in the Eigg community buy-out during the 1990s, is a Fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology and a visiting professor in the Department of Geography and Sociology at the University of Strathclyde. 
 
Their research, published in the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture from the University of Florida, is built on 15 interviews with key land reform figures on Assynt, Eigg and Gigha, including some of the national church leaders who took a stand.
 
The idea that Biblical challenges to landlordism can help to legitimize land reform is a part of liberation theology in Latin America. The work of Professor James Hunter and Professor Donald Meek has shown that similar ideas were also powerfully at work during the run-up to passing the 1886 Crofting Act in Scotland. The significance of this new study is that it demonstrates that ideas like “the Earth belongs unto the Lord” can still be activated even today, when the country is relatively secular.
 
Many of those interviewed considered that religion had no direct political effect, but it helped to deepen the debate. For example, Dr Alison Elliot who, in 2004, became the first female Moderator of the Church of Scotland, said:
 
I think the theology provided not a justification [for land reform], but it provided depth and a focus…. In other words a lot of people are involved in land reform who would not have said they were religious in their commitment, but there was a deep sense of connectedness with the land, a sense that the land was something that was beyond ourselves … and the theology provided a way of articulating that.

Some islanders saw spirituality as having a central role in social transformation. Mairi Mackinnon, a Roman Catholic from Eigg said, “The hand of the Lord is in all the processes. The buyout is part of that.” And John Martin, a member of the Church of Scotland from Gigha said that land reform had dispelled “the Monday-morning feeling … the time of social justice has arrived. The time of social injustice has gone.” He added that the challenge post-land reform “is to strengthen the church again.”

Dr Graham Blount, a senior Church of Scotland figure, especially praised the Free Church of Scotland for its radical land theology. The study quotes the view of Free Church Professor, Donald Macleod, that land reform is “driven by the most irresistible of all forces: the divine spark of discontent.”

Professor McIntosh, the report’s co-author, said, “We are living in an era where theology has a new-found political relevance, but often in regressive ways. Our research hints at progressive possibilities that help to regenerate communities and give life.”

 For full copy of the article click here

Park Homes Legislation Action Group – PHLAGS
http://www.phlags.org

PHLAGS exists to increase the profile of residential park home living in Scotland and to create a bottom-up demand for changes in legislation which will serve to protect the some 4,500 people in Scotland who choose park home living – through the support of MSPs and Local Authorities.

PHLAGS is an action group that intends to deal solely with legislative issues and raising the profile of residential park home living here in Scotland and is already accomplishing this at the highest levels of the Scottish Government and Scottish Local Government.

Through the good offices of Ms Angela Constance MSP (SNP Livingston) PHLAGS  secured a meeting, in June 2009, with officials of the Scottish Government to review the current position on amending legislation and to urge speedy action in this regard.  Ms Irene Oldfather MSP on behalf of the Scottish Labour Party, is also took a keen interest in developments.  See the initial briefing sent to Scottish Government Officials on the briefing page. and the outcomes of the meeting are included in our ‘News’ section.  

The most significant outcome of this initial meeting was a meeting between PHLAGS and the Scottish Government Minister responsible for Park Homes.   Our comprehensive news coverage of this meeting and the subsequent Scottish Government announcement is covered n our news pages.

As a result of this meeting, PHLAGS Directors and Associates have embarked on a project to provide officials with documentary evidence of the problem issues affecting park home residents in Scotland and highlighting those areas where changes in legislation are urgently needed – all in preparation for participating in the coming consultation on new legislation.

If you are a park home resident in Scotland, help PHLAGS to help you by contacting us with details of your park and any issues you face.  If you have a resident’s association, please have your secretary contact us so that we can liaise with you.

DEMOLITION workers began tearing down a Victorian school in the heart of Penicuik yesterday, despite a campaign to buy it and restore it as a community arts centre.

Campaigners, who have raised £150,000 to buy the Jackson Lane School and collected a petition of 1,500 names, say Midlothian Council has ridden roughshod over the wishes of local people.

Chairman of the Penicuik Development Trust Roger Kelly said: “It is crazy for anybody to be pulling down a building when people say they want it.”

A spokesman said the demolition of the school had been agreed at a full council meeting and that the building was deemed to be unsafe. 

He said the building had been on the market for three years, but that it had not received a formal offer and business plan from the trust.

West Harris Buyout Makes History

Crofters on the scenic coast of south west Harris are set to take over three crofting estates from the Scottish Government today (Monday 25 January).

MSP Roseanna Cunningham, Minister for Environment, will make a keynote speech at Seilebost School and officially transfer areas in excess of 6,500 hectares of land into ownership of the local population.

The West Harris Crofting Trust is the first group to buy land owned by the Scottish Government under proposals first introduced a decade ago. The land is made up of three estates covering the townships of Scaristavore, Borve and Luskentyre. 

The trust has a development plan and intends to build affordable houses and create new crofts on the land to encourage more young people to settle there. The trust also hopes projects to create jobs and develop small scale renewable projects will reverse the trend of depopulation. There have been fears for its long term prospects unless new people are attracted into the community of West Harris which currently has a population of 123, with only one child under school age.

Around 60 people will attend tonight’s celebrations. Among them will be Director of Strengthening Communities at Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE), John Watt who said: “HIE has worked closely with the trust for some time and we believe that community ownership is the key to growing the population and enhancing the area. HIE is very supportive of this aspiring social enterprise  and we look forward to the benefits that community ownership and a dynamic development plan can deliver.”

To acquire the land and to enable the trust’s project plans to get underway, the Community Land Unit at HIE has provided £23,600. In addition, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (CnES) has approved £15,000 towards the plans and the trust has also secured a loan of £20,000 from Tighean Innse Gall. The BIG Lottery Fund supported the trust by giving them £10,000 from their Investing in Ideas fund to carry out initial feasibility studies and consultation with the community.

Convener of CnES, Alex MacDonald, said: “I very much welcome the news that the West Harris Estate will now be in the hands of the community and this is another historic milestone for the Western Isles. After three years of efforts, the buyout will hopefully secure the future of the area and reverse the decline in population as well as improving economic activity. The Board of Directors are to be praised for their hard work in securing the buyout and I wish them every success for the future.”

Murdo Mackay, chairman of the West Harris Crofting Trust has a tenancy of a croft in Luskentyre with a small number of Highland cattle and runs a self-catering accommodation along with his wife Isobel. He said: “We want to promote Harris as a great place to live and work and we hope to get more families into the area and create new crofts and bring currently underused land into production. 

“We are very excited about the fact that control of our own land will breathe new life into the community and encourage people to set up homes and raise families. Also, we have broadband links through the Connected Communities network and many people already use it to work from home. We are delighted with the funding from CnES, HIE, and TIG towards the £59,000 needed to purchase the entire estate.”

MSP Roseanna Cunningham, Minister for Environment attends the West Harris crofting transfer event which coincides with her visit to the Future of Crofting Conference which takes place in Stornoway on Tuesday 26, organised by CnES. 

David Blaney, chair of TIG said: “It is very appropriate, as we near celebrations for our own 20th anniversary, that we are able to make a loan of £22,000 available to West Harris Crofting Trust for the community buyout of West Harris from the Scottish Government.

“We are pleased to assist the communities of West Harris in achieving their aim of a community buy out which will place control of their destiny in their own hands. Tighean Innse Gall believes that West Harris will be a major success and we look forward to working with the community in assisting them to delivery affordable housing in the area for local people. Tighean Innse Gall has the expertise and a proven track record to assist bodies such as West Harris Crofting Trust in realising those objectives.”

The trust’s board has members from each of the townships involved and have been encouraged by events in the north of Harris, where locals succeeded in a buy out of the North Harris Estate in 2003. 

Invitation to support the Better Banking campaign 

The Better Banking campaign is led by a coalition of third sector organisations. They came together during summer 2009 to run a campaign to address the problem of financial exclusion: the lack of fair access to financial services and credit to those who warrant it. The different areas of the third sector represented by the coalition reflects the far reaching implications of financial exclusion: it increases poverty levels amongst the lowest-income groups, which has a huge negative impact on those struggling with debt, poor housing, old age, ill-health, physical and mental disabilities, and social exclusion. Because third sector funds are spent helping those affected by these issues, financial exclusion indirectly drains third sector funds. Further, it also directly impacts on third sector organisations and small businesses serving or operating in less wealthy communities, negatively affecting the economy as a whole. To address the issue, we are campaigning for full financial disclosure by financial institutions, a cap on unfair credit rates for those who cannot afford them and obligations on banks to demonstrate that all who merit it have fair and equal access to credit.

Some worrying statistics:

The problem is not that financial institutions should be undertaking high-risk, unprofitable lending and are not. The problem at hand concerns others: potential borrowers who are financially excluded because of financial institutions’ inability to understand their needs, accurately assess the risk they represent, develop the products to service their needs, or to proactively utilize the market they represent.

– Approximately 5-7 million people cannot access credit, either because they do not have a bank account, or, for example,- they have no credit history: no overdrafts, no credits, no penalty payment charges, no late payment fees, no missed bill payments.

– Alternative credit comes from door-step lenders with interest rates of between 300% and 1,000%, or worse, from illegal loan sharks.

– Low-income households spend an estimated £1,000 more per year on basic essential services like electricity, financial services and telecommunications. This makes it harder to climb out of the cycle of poverty and indebtedness

– Because 6 lenders account for 90% of the home credit market, (with Provident accounting for 60%) there is little competition to drive interest rates down.

-Current sky-high interest rates on loans from payday lenders and Home Credit companies (up to 2,500%) mean that those who have no option but to borrow from these companies are left in a cycle of debt they cannot escape, and those suffering poverty become increasingly poorer. Because of a lack of competition among the Home Credit lenders, they can continue to charge such rates. A legal credit cap would mean that the excess profits these companies make would not be drained from the sections of society needing it most: profits in excess of capital of £75 million a year, for the last 10 years, but would be directed back into the community.

Small businesses and third sector organisations serving or operating in less wealthy communities are also constrained by lack of access to credit:

– some 25,000 businesses a year with viable propositions are unable to access finance. ,

– undercapitalization is the single most important cause of failure among small firms ,

– business failure rates among micro- and small enterprises are higher in the UK than in other OECD countries. 

The government has invested in a number of initiatives to address the problem . But there are massive gaps, relative to demand, in both coverage and capacity of third sector lenders:

– The current Growth Fund capacity target is £100m lending p.a. – in contrast, credit lenders lent around £1.3 billion to around 2.3 million customers in 2005, profiting around £500m in a single year.

– A forthcoming report from the OFT estimates the high cost credit sector may be worth up to £35 billion annually. 

What is the solution?

The coalition aims to encourage financial institutions to: be more transparent about how much they lend to underserved communities, increase the amount they lend to such communities, lend at reasonable interests rates and become more active in local communities.

1. Transparency

Financial institutions should disclose where their money comes from and where it is invested, with the data broken down by demographic group. This would allow government to understand the size of the problem and increase efficiency by targeting spending on the areas where it is most needed. 

However, this alone will only clarify the size and nature of the problem, without addressing it. Therefore:

2. Obligations to support communities

As one of only a handul of EU countries without a legal cap on interest rates, and interest rates on credit often at 2,000%, we are calling for a legal cap on credit interest rates.

3. Incentives for financial institutions

Financial institutions should be encouraged to engage with communities, third sector organisations and small businesses. 

1-3 together will expose the size and nature of the problem of financial exclusion, provide individuals and organisations with funds without extra cost for the taxpayer, and without extra risk for the financial institution, decrease poverty and increase economic growth, and encourage best practice amongst financial institutions. 

You can find out more and sign up as a campaign supporter at: www.betterbanking.org.uk.

Should you have any questions, please contact the campaign co-ordinator Lucy Marples (lucy.marples@acevo.org.uk, 0207 280 4926

Author: Tim Jackson

Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet

Prosperity is understood as a successful, flourishing or thriving condition: simply, a state in which things are going well for us. Every day the system in which we live tries to persuade us – via TV news, politicians’ speeches, corporate pronouncements, inducements to consume and so on – that our prosperity is intimately linked to whether or not gross national product is growing and whether stock markets are riding high. These are the two main measuring sticks for the version of capitalism on which most countries base their economies today.

Other ways of measuring prosperity, such as employment and savings, follow these two. If GNP – the total national output of goods and services – is in recession, then unemployment will rise, and that means growing numbers of unprosperous people without salaries. If stock markets are falling, that means falling pension values, and rising numbers of unprosperous people in retirement. So what’s not to like about growth?

Tim Jackson states the challenge starkly: “Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must.” And that is the core mission of this perfectly timed book. Had he published it before the financial crisis, he would probably have been dismissed as another green idealist, at best. But in the wake of the crisis, more people are questioning the primacy of growth at all costs. President Sarkozy, the Nobel-prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz and elements of the Financial Times’s commentariat are among those now arguing that prosperity is possible without GNP growth, and indeed that prosperity will soon become impossible because of GNP growth. A new movement seems to be emerging, and this superbly written book should be the first stop for anyone wanting a manifesto.

Jackson, who is economics commissioner on the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission, skilfully makes the relevant economic arguments understandable to the lay reader. He is not slow to simplify where that is warranted: “The idea of a non-growing economy may be an anathema to an economist. But the idea of a continually growing economy is an anathema to an ecologist.”

This is the core of the debate. Endless growth is a ridiculous notion to the typical ecologist because we live on a planet with finite resources, the mining and use of some of which is undermining our planet’s life-support systems. But the typical economist believes we can “decouple” GNP growth from resource use through the increased efficiency that tends to be intrinsic to capitalism: that we can grow our economies and reverse environmental degradation too. Tesco, as it were, can keep building more stores for ever, provided they are increasingly resource-efficient.

Jackson argues compellingly that such “decoupling” is a myth. A key area of argument, as with so much else in the current world, involves climate change. If we keep growing GNP, Jackson explains, then we fail to cut greenhouse gases deeply. This means we stoke destruction of prosperity beyond the short-term horizons – “next quarter’s growth figures” and all the rest – on which we routinely put such emphasis today.

In terms of a worldview for the new decade and beyond, this could well be the most important book you will read. Who to believe if you don’t have time? Well, I invite you not to believe the profession that so thoroughly disgraced itself with its systemic acceptance of the case for complex derivatives as a prime example of increasing economic efficiency in the financial services industry. The economists, and their friends the bonus cultists, have taken us to the brink of a collapsed global economy with that little oversight.

The last chapter of the book looks at opportunities for achieving “a lasting prosperity”. They are many and varied, and most of them – unsurprisingly – start from the grassroots. High on the list is the need for us all to consume less “stuff” and to seek a type of prosperity outside the conventional trappings of affluence: within relationships, family, community and the meaning of our lives and vocations in a functional society that places value on the future.

Is that still capitalism? “Does it really matter?” Jackson asks. “Perhaps we could just paraphrase Star Trek’s Spock and agree that it’s capitalism, Jim. But not as we know it.” And for what it’s worth, as a creature of capitalism – a venture-capital-backed energy ¬industry boss, a private equity investor, and an Institute of Directors director of the month – I am convinced that capitalism as we know it is torpedoing our prosperity, killing our economies and threatening our children with an unlivable world. Tim Jackson has written the best book yet making this case, and showing the generalities of the escape route. The specifics, post-Copenhagen, are all down to us

Author: Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

The Spirit Level  : Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better 

reviewed by Lynsey Hanley, The Guardian

We are rich enough. Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries, and in some cases appears to be damaging health. If Britain were instead to concentrate on making its citizens’ incomes as equal as those of people in Japan and Scandinavia, we could each have seven extra weeks’ holiday a year, we would be thinner, we would each live a year or so longer, and we’d trust each other more

Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett don’t soft-soap their message. It is brave to write a book arguing that economies should stop growing when millions of jobs are being lost, though they may be pushing at an open door in public consciousness. We know there is something wrong, and this book goes a long way towards explaining what and why.

The authors point out that the life-diminishing results of valuing growth above equality in rich societies can be seen all around us. Inequality causes shorter, unhealthier and unhappier lives; it increases the rate of teenage pregnancy, violence, obesity, imprisonment and addiction; it destroys relationships between individuals born in the same society but into different classes; and its function as a driver of consumption depletes the planet’s resources.

Wilkinson, a public health researcher of 30 years’ standing, has written numerous books and articles on the physical and mental effects of social differentiation. He and Pickett have compiled information from around 200 different sets of data, using reputable sources such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the US Census, to form a bank of evidence against inequality that is impossible to deny.

They use the information to create a series of scatter-graphs whose patterns look nearly identical, yet which document the prevalence of a vast range of social ills. On almost every index of quality of life, or wellness, or deprivation, there is a gradient showing a strong correlation between a country’s level of economic inequality and its social outcomes. Almost always, Japan and the Scandinavian countries are at the favourable “low” end, and almost always, the UK, the US and Portugal are at the unfavourable “high” end, with Canada, Australasia and continental European countries in between.

This has nothing to do with total wealth or even the average per-capita income. America is one of the world’s richest nations, with among the highest figures for income per person, but has the lowest longevity of the developed nations, and a level of violence – murder, in particular – that is off the scale. Of all crimes, those involving violence are most closely related to high levels of inequality – within a country, within states and even within cities. For some, mainly young, men with no economic or educational route to achieving the high status and earnings required for full citizenship, the experience of daily life at the bottom of a steep social hierarchy is enraging.

The graphs also reveal that it is not just the poor, but whole societies, from top to bottom, that are adversely affected by inequality. Although the UK fares badly when compared with most other OECD countries (and is the worst developed nation in which to be a child according to both Unicef and the Good Childhood Inquiry), its social problems are not as pronounced as in the US.

Rates of illness are lower for English people of all classes than for Americans, but working-age Swedish men fare better still. Diabetes affects twice as many American as English people, whether they have a high or a low level of education. Wherever you look, evidence favouring greater equality piles up. As the authors write, “the relationships between inequality and poor health and social problems are too strong to be attributable to chance”.

But perhaps the most troubling aspect of reading this book is the revelation that the way we live in Britain is a serious danger to our mental health. Around a quarter of British people, and more than a quarter of Americans, experience mental problems in any given year, compared with fewer than 10 per cent in Japan, Germany, Sweden and Italy.

Wilkinson and Pickett’s description of unequal societies as “dysfunctional” suggests implicit criticism of the approach taken by Britain’s “happiness tsar” Richard Layard, who recommended that the poor mental health of many Britons be “fixed” or improved by making cognitive behavioural therapy more easily available. Consumerism, isolation, alienation, social estrangement and anxiety all follow from inequality, they argue, and so cannot rightly be made a matter of individual management.

There’s an almost pleading quality to some of Wilkinson and Pickett’s assertions, as though they feel they’ve spent their careers banging their heads against a brick wall. It’s impossible to overstate the implications of their thesis: that the societies of Britain and the US have institutionalised economic and social inequality to the extent that, at any one time, a quarter of their respective populations are mentally ill. What kind of “growth” is that, other than a malignant one?

One question that comes to mind is whether the world’s most equal developed nations, Japan and Sweden, make sufficient allowance for individuals to express themselves without being regarded as a threat to the health of the collective. Critics of the two societies would argue that both make it intensely difficult for individual citizens to protest against the conformity both produced by, and required to sustain, equality. The inclination to dismiss or neuter individuals’ complaints may, Wilkinson and Pickett suggest, go some way towards explaining the higher suicide rates in both countries compared with their more unequal counterparts. Those who feel wrong, or whose lives go wrong, may feel as though they really do have no one to blame but themselves.

What Japan and Sweden do show is that equality is a matter of political will. There are belated signs – shown in the recent establishment of a National Equalities Panel and in Trevor Phil lips’s public pronouncements on the central place of class in the landscape of British inequality – that Labour recognises that its relaxed attitude to people “getting filthy rich” has come back to bite it on the rear.

Twelve years in power is long enough to reverse all the trends towards greater social and economic stratification that have occurred since 1970; instead they have continued on their merry way towards segregation. Teenage pregnancy rates have begun to rise after a period of decline; there is a 30-year gap in male life expectancy between central Glasgow and parts of southern England; and child poverty won’t be halved by next year after all (though it wouldn’t make as much difference as making their parents more equal).

There are times when the book feels rather too overwhelmingly grim. Even if you allow for the fact that it was written before Barack Obama won the US presidency on a premise of trust and optimism, its opening pages are depressing enough to make you want to shut it fast: “We find ourselves anxiety-ridden, prone to depression, driven to consume and with little or no community life.” Taking the statistics broadly, they may be correct, but many readers simply won’t feel like that.

However, the book does end on an optimistic note, with a transformative, rather than revolutionary, programme for making sick societies more healthy. A society in which all citizens feel free to look each other in the eye can only come into being once those in the lower echelons feel more valued than at present. The authors argue that removal of economic impediments to feeling valued – such as low wages, low benefits and low public spending on education, for instance – will allow a flourishing of human potential.

There is a growing inventory of serious, compellingly argued books detailing the social destruction wrought by inequality. Wilkinson and Pickett have produced a companion to recent bestsellers such as Oliver James’s Affluenza and Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety . But The Spirit Level also contributes to a longer view, sitting alongside Richard Sennett’s 2003 book Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality , and the epidemiologist Michael Marmot’s Status Syndrome , from 2005.

Anyone who believes that society is the result of what we do, rather than who we are, should read these books; they should start with The Spirit Level because of its inarguable battery of evidence, and because its conclusion is simple: we do better when we’re equal.