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Between the first two decades of the 21st century, the gentrification of the academic subject of Geography within Britain rose to a new peak. By the mid-2010s, undergraduate geographers had become the least likely group, of all British university students, to have qualified for free school meals while at school. This article reveals that they are now also the most likely group to have grown up in the most affluent parts of Britain and suggests that this rising segregation of origins is the cumulation of a long running process which can be indexed to the growth in social divides in Britain over the last four decades. As Britain changed from being one of the most equal nation states to become the most economically unequal large state in Europe, British Geography departments became the least likely place to find students from disadvantaged or even average income backgrounds. This article also demonstrates that an unusually high number of academic geographers working in Britain grew up in Britain and attended a British University. The article explores what else is now known, and is unusual, about the changing demographic characteristics of academics employed in the Geography departments of British Universities. It then speculates as to how these changes over time may have influenced the lived experiences of British Geography students and academics, the subsequent contributions that British geographers now make, and then how the gentrification of British Geography may influence the subject and politics in particular ways and directions globally. The article ends with a plea: if we can better know ourselves, we may choose to not continue supporting the current self-referential siloes in geographical thought and may better understand how and why they came about.

Professor Danny Dorling argues the government is using and has used fear and secrecy to prevent social unrest

The crises which have engulfed this government should not blind us to the fact that the Conservatives are supremely successful at what they are best at, argues Danny Dorling

Let's face it, those of us who work in the academic discipline of Geography, largely work on the subject of failure. The failure of political leaders worldwide to avert disastrous climate change. The need to prevent the continuation of the fastest species extinction the world has ever known. The social and personal repercussions of enormous global income, wealth and power inequalities. We describe all this, usually, as if it were just an interesting set of observations. Then we tell students to write an essay about it. If they cogently analyse our collective failure, we give them a high mark. Many of them can then take their university degrees and head out to banking, advertising and management and make the world an even worse place, armed with the knowledge of what they might be critiqued for by those who taught them, but never convinced them. Perhaps if we were kinder to our students when they were at university, were kinder and clearer in what we wrote and taught, more of them would use what they have learnt for good, rather than seeing their degrees as stepping-stones to their allotted place in the social hierarchy.

The aim of this book is to inspire a better politics: one that will enable future generations to be happier.

Public health officials and politicians often use statistical complexity as an excuse to do nothing, says Danny Dorling.

Income inequality may soon start to fall, but this isn't a cause for great optimism. Inequality is at far higher levels in Britain than other large European countries, with hugely damaging effects for society and quality of life, as well as for politics: high inequality tends to go along with political disengagement and high levels of far-right voting.

We need to focus policy and political attention on the very recent changes to the patterns of ownership and wealth in housing in Britain which have occurred since the 2008 financial collapse. A small group of private landlords, less than 2% of the population, have taken advantage of the new circumstances to rapidly enrich themselves and return Britain to a time when a very large number of families with children relied on private renting to provide them with a home, now 1 in 4 of all English families with children. The possible implications for health, politics and policy are profound.

"…the practical thing for a nation which has stumbled upon one of the turning points of history is not to behave as though nothing very important were involved… When the broken ends of its industry, its politics, its social organisation, have to be pieced together after a catastrophe, it must make a decision… It must, in short, have recourse to principles." (Tawney, 1961 [1921], 10) We now know that Richard Tawney was writing at 'one of the turning points of history'. But Tawney himself had no way of being so sure. Just seven years before he published the words above, in The Acquisitive Society, younger members of the upper echelons of the English upper-classes were photographed cheering at a famous 1914 cricket match with unfettered confidence. In that photograph, shown below, men of the generation of their fathers appear quietly confident of their place, sporting varying head gear that signified their precise status. Women sat demurely, knowing their place too, sometimes sporting a bit of bird in their hats, or a lot of bird, but only as appropriate.

The UK government says it wants a kinder, more inclusive politics but also plans to cut public spending to record lows. Danny Dorling argues that the only way to a new politics is through public investment, taxation and changes in our voting system.

The aim of this book is to inspire a better politics: one that will enable future generations to be happier. While its publication coincides with the 500th anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia, its proposals are not a utopian wish-list. They are, crucially, a set of policy suggestions that are already in place (or are being tested) elsewhere in Europe; proposals that address the issues that appear to matter most to people in the UK.

This chapter concerns very recent history and a time when the UK government was an all UK government and had enough funds to support academic work in the social sciences. Part of the GIS research reported here was funded by (what was then called) the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and conducted by the Social and Spatial Inequalities group, University of Sheffield (of which we were both members). Another part of the work discussed here was a project on poverty and wealth funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation during those same New Labour years and we are grateful to our colleagues Jan Rigby, Ben Wheeler, Bethan Thomas, Eldin Fahmy, Dave Gordon and Ruth Lupton who worked on the Rowntree report. This chapter also considers the early use of GIS in research on world inequalities and draws on work with colleagues in the United States (Mark Newman) and Anna Barford (now at Cambridge). An archive of this work can be found at www.worldmapper,org a project that was initially funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Background: A very large number of studies have reported a stalling of health improvements in the UK since 2010. Sources of data: Almost all relevant data are produced by the Office for National Statistics and other national statistical agencies. Areas of agreement: There has been a dramatic slowdown in life expectancy and rise in infant mortality in the UK as a whole and England and Wales respectively. Areas of controversy: Many commentators are loath to describe the falls in life expectancy as actual falls or to ascribe blame to the political situation in the UK. Growing points: The UK may have become a sentinel state within Europe which illustrates the adverse effects of political disorganisation and disarray. Areas timely for developing research: The excuses politicians used as they tried to avoid responsibility for the multiple crises and their effects need to be better understood. Did politicians mislead or did they simply not understand?

Many of us think of European countries as discreet entities—their own languages, cultures, food, and economies squarely contained within their national boundaries. But in fact Europe is at once a unified place and a sophisticatedly fragmented one, and national boundaries rarely reflect its social and economic realities. The social atlas of Europe is the first atlas to map Europe according to these realities, from the perspective of human geography rather than simply a political one. Using innovative full-color visualization methods, it reconsiders European identity through its many different facets: economy, culture, history, and human and physical geography, visualizing Europe and its people in a more fluid way, in some cases using maps without artificial national boundaries. It utilizes the latest available demographic, social, and economic data through state-of-the-art geographical information systems and new cartography techniques. Through these new visualizations, this highly illustrated book offers fresh perspectives on a range of topics, including social values, culture, education, employment, environmental footprints, health and well-being, and social inequalities and cohesion. It is a bold rethinking of Europe as we know it and will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the continent in its truest form.

In March, we raised concerns in The BMJ that more than 10 000 extra deaths had occurred in the first seven weeks of 2018, compared with the average of the past five years.