The Levellers Day Debate: Danny Dorling, Sarah Wooley, Mark Chapman, Sam Gurney

Inequality in the UK is worse today than in the Victorian era. It has the worst record in the world for rising child poverty. Can it really be true, as politicians tell us, that nothing can be done?

Audio recording of a discussion held as part of Levellers Day: Confronting Poverty and Injustice, in Burford, Oxfordshire on 17 May 2025. Note: audio levels in this recording vary.

The speakers were: Sarah Woolley, general secretary of the Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union, Professor Danny Dorling of the University of Oxford, and Reverend Canon Professor Mark Chapman. Sam Gurney, TUC LESE regional secretary, chaired the discussion.

During the discussion, Professor Dorling said: “The country which has the worst record in the world for rising child poverty is the United Kingdom. We are the absolute extreme. So when people tell you that there are many kinds of inequalities and lots of things we've got to consider, they are right. But one kind matters above all else, and it is money. And you will know this if you’ve not had money for a significant period of your life, the importance of the freedom of having money.

“We have to explain again and again that this matters. We can debate later what it is about Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer that means they cannot see this. You hope it is because they cannot see this. The situation here is bad. The situation in Burford is bad, the situation in Oxfordshire is bad. But the situation is getting better in Scotland, and it is getting much better in many parts of Europe right now, because people campaign to make things better than they are.

“We don’t talk about the successes. But if you are not aware that it is possible right now to make things better, it is much harder to campaign for it. And once you are aware that this is being done, including within the United Kingdom, it is much easier to say it is absolutely intolerable that our elected Members of Parliament are not acting – because they cannot tell us that they could not act.”

Read about Levellers Day, and about the 17th-century Levellers whose ideas of justice and equality this annual event commemorates and celebrates.
https://levellersday.wordpress.com/

Download the e-book The Levellers Movement
https://levellersday.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/the-levellers-movement.pdf

Visit Danny Dorling’s website
https://www.dannydorling.org/