The Richer, The Poorer

How Britain Enriched the Few and Failed the Poor
A 200 year history

Bristol University Press

Charts the roller coaster history of both rich and poor in Britain, and the mechanisms that link wealth and impoverishment. Shows how Britain’s model of extractive capitalism – one that benefits a powerful elite at the expense of the common good – has created a 200 year long ‘high inequality, high poverty’ cycle, one broken for only a brief period after the Second World War. Despite talk of a new post-Covid society, it is a cycle that shows no sign of abating.

Reviews

Scrupulous, impressive and irrefutable. A damning historical portrait and utterly necessary book, David Kynaston, historian.  

A remarkably informed and readable history with a powerful message: skyrocketing inequality is not just an economic drain; it is a moral stain,  Jacob S. Hacker, Yale University.

Lansley is a master of the telling anecdote; a wonderfully readable and insightful history of how the rich have impoverished the poor, Jonathan Bradshaw, University of York.