As he explained it to me, the central premise of The Spirit Level is that ‘more unequal societies – with bigger differences between rich and poor – have a greater incidence of a whole range of health and social problems, from violence to obesity to mental illness.

‘The more unequal a society becomes, the more common these problems become. Crucially, even the better off do less well in a more unequal society, as they are unable to insulate themselves from the wider consequences. Colleagues at Harvard described inequality as a social “pollutant”, because its damaging effects spread to almost everyone, right across the social hierarchy. The biggest effects are at the bottom of the social ladder, but even at the top people do better in more equal societies.’

It is not the first time that Professor Wilkinson has argued such views from the epidemiological evidence. In The Impact of Inequality and a number of other books in previous decades, he has made the case that relative inequality has a vital and often overlooked influence on overall societal health and wellbeing. The impact of the recession, however, and the desire for explanation and solutions, has led to this latest work becoming much more popular than his previous attempts.

Inequality, Wilkinson explains, increases status competition. ‘Many societal problems, including severe ones such as violent crime, are caused by a sense of being disrespected and looked down on. It shouldn’t really come as a surprise that societies in which wealth and status are seen as the priorities, rather than public service and community, should have far greater problems across a whole range of areas.’

A new framework

The Spirit Level has attracted so much interest largely because it is an accessible summary that fits many hundreds of academic studies into a new framework, showing the effect of inequality on wider society. Rather than relying on anecdote or assertion, it marshals hard data from decades of research.

Much of this is the authors’ own, but they also draw on many other people’s work, including books such as Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam’s book on the US’s declining ‘social capital’. Wilkinson points out that the rise and fall of ‘social capital’ follows first the narrowing and then the widening of income differences within developed societies. ‘Put simply,’ he says, ‘inequality has psycho-social effects. In a more unequal society people are more violent, less public spirited, less likely to trust each other or to be involved in community life.’

As well as studying the incidences of health and social problems in countries with different levels of income equality, The Spirit Level also compares the data for all 50 US states. Here, too, the correlation between equality and social breakdown is compelling. It appears that, even within an unequal country such as the US, states with greater equality experience fewer social problems than those with more economic inequality.

Wilkinson does add a caveat to this, commenting that ‘deprived neighbourhoods do not have bad health because of the inequality within them, but because they are deprived in relation to the wider society, so income inequality has to be measured across large areas.’ Nonetheless, policy measures taken to increase equality across an area the size of a city, for example, will have a positive effect on social problems – as Wilkinson and Pickett will argue in a forthcoming report for the London Sustainable Development Commission.

While the large majority of social issues studied by the two authors became more prevalent as inequality increased, this was not the case for every problem. The statistics show that suicide, for example, actually occurs at a higher rate in more equal societies.

‘Very often, where suicide rates are high, violence is low, and vice versa,’ explains Wilkinson. ‘I think that there is probably some truth to the cliché that violence either goes in, against yourself, or out, against other people.’

‘In a well known paper on health in Harlem,’ he continues, ‘it was found that death rates for most ages were higher than in Bangladesh. The only cause of death that was not more common in Harlem than the rest of the US was suicide. It’s a matter of whether you blame your problems on yourself, or on other people – and in societies with more community responsibility, it tends to be the former.’

Many ways of increasing equality

Wilkinson is forthright about the fact that the rise of inequality in the UK was driven by politics and that it is possible to narrow income differences again. ‘Clearly, although Thatcher was happy to see inequality increase, she did not intend to increase rates of obesity, teenage birth rates, drug problems, mental illness or violent crime – but these are all the unintended consequences of the inequality she created,’ he explains.

‘Fortunately, there are many ways of increasing equality. Although Japan and Sweden are among the most equal countries, they get their equality in very different ways. Japan is more equal because their earnings differences are smaller even before taxes and benefits, so they do rather little redistribution. Sweden, in contrast, starts off with big earnings differences and then redistributes.’ There are, therefore, small government routes and big government routes to greater equality.

The solution for the UK, Wilkinson argues, is both redistribution and greater ‘economic democracy’ – the ability of ordinary people and their communities to have greater control over the institutions in which they work. ‘To reduce earnings differences at source, we need more cooperatives, mutuals, friendly societies and employee ownership,’ he says. ‘As well as bringing pay differences directly or indirectly under more democratic control, employee ownership redistributes wealth and can change a company from a piece of property into a community.’

As an epidemiologist, Wilkinson is unwilling to give a definite opinion on the question of whether there are limits beyond which greater equality is desirable. ‘I’m not absolutely sure, and as academics, we are constrained by our data. We can see that equality is important all the way to the most equal of the developed countries – whether going on beyond that would be beneficial, we don’t know. We’ve seen no sign that it wouldn’t be. And it is interesting that Cuba’s health statistics are almost as good as the US, despite much smaller health expenditure.’

As you might expect, the phenomenon of a rigorously researched book pointing to the disaster of inequality has not gone uncriticised. Recently, in a discussion of inequality on Radio 4′s Moral Maze, Michael Portillo said that even if we accept that inequality has the damaging social consequences described in The Spirit Level, he thought that economic progress required the innovation and creativity that he believed depended on financial rewards and incentives.

Thinking about this afterwards, Wilkinson and Pickett realised that the number of patents granted per head of population would be a good measure of innovation and creativity. But rather than finding that more unequal societies had greater innovative success, they found the opposite: more equal societies have a greater number of patents per head. ‘It’s quite simple – more unequal societies waste the talents of their populations by making millions of people feel second rate and failures,’ he explains.

In order to make the book’s findings better known, the authors set up the Equality Trust, which has since moved into campaigning for policy changes in the UK. It is planning a campaign for greater equality in the lead up to the general election in 2010. Wilkinson is optimistic, despite the enormous challenges faced by such an agenda. ‘From people’s responses when they see the evidence, I’ve come to feel that the world is actually full of closet egalitarians who recognise the hollowness of consumerism and status competition. We know that in future the real quality of life will depend on our ability to shift from the pursuit of economic growth and raising material standards to using greater equality to improve the quality of the social environment.

‘By improving the quality of social relations in societies, greater equality reduces consumerism and status competition and makes it easier to achieve sustainablity. If we can present people with a different conception of the future, a future in which environmental and social problems are soluble, there could be very rapid changes in public attitudes.’

Equality Trust

The Spirit Level is published by Allen Lane

Matt Sellwood is the Green Party parliamentary candidate for Hackney North and Stoke Newington

Growing Communities is much more than the sum of those parts, however. Explicitly opposed to the current food production and distribution system, it sees itself as ‘growing the new society in the shell of the old’ and helping to model what a grass-roots, community-led, not-for-profit food production system might look like in the future. Through its 12-point ‘Manifesto for Feeding the City’ (see box, next page), the organisation lays out the principles that those involved believe are necessary for a fair and ecologically sound food system in the UK, and particularly for large urban areas such as London.

The organisation sources its food both through existing organic producers and through the development of its own patchwork of urban agriculture sites within the borough of Hackney. With around 25 producers hosting regular stalls at the farmers’ market, which has a customer base of an average 1,500 local residents each week, Growing Communities provides a much needed revenue stream for those small UK farms still competing with multinational supermarkets and agri-business. Meanwhile, its box scheme sources salad from Hackney-based ‘microsites’, as well as food from further afield. It generates nearly £10,000 from sales of Hackney-grown produce, from a total land area of only half an acre.

Constituted as a not-for-profit company, Growing Communities is run by a volunteer management committee elected from its membership. The membership is comprised of all subscribers to the box scheme, as well as those who donate to the organisation. In contrast to some other grass-roots food schemes across the country, it believes that members should have control of its operations through the management committee, as opposed to control by workers. As a result, while its structure is flatter than many commercial box schemes, it is not a workers’ cooperative but runs with a mainly traditional staff structure. It employs nearly 20 people, all of whom work on a part-time basis, as well as a number of volunteers.

Urban food strategy

Rather than simply attempt to grow as much food as locally as possible without analysis or strategy, Growing Communities has drawn on its years of experience in urban local food production to produce an achievable ideal of what food distribution might look like in the future. This ‘food zone strategy’ (see diagram, next page) informs the areas on which Growing Communities concentrates, and provides a way to measure the success of its efforts.

While the organisation currently enjoys success in sourcing food both from the urban and ‘rural hinterland’ zones, ‘peri-urban’ land remains a significant challenge. Despite the availability of urban fringe land within the M25, very little agricultural activity remains within this area of London. As a result, Growing Communities is currently looking into the possibility of kick-starting food production within the peri-urban belt, specifically for distribution within Hackney.

As well as expanding its own operations, Growing Communities is also looking into replication of the initiative across London. Having originally started as a small vegetable box scheme, the organisation is in a good position to advise other groups across the capital about the pitfalls and opportunities that await anyone attempting to repeat its success. Instead of leaving provision of local food to profit-orientated companies, Growing Communities hopes to catalyse more community-led, not-for-profit schemes in boroughs across the capital – having shown already that it can be done.

Part of the movement

Well aware of its wider connection to the environmental and social justice movements, Growing Communities attempts where possible to link its food production and distribution to a wider political agenda. Not only does its weekly box scheme newsletter often focus on critiques of the existing food system, but the organisation goes out of its way to make itself more accessible to lower-income residents of the borough. In June of this year, both the farmers’ market and the box scheme began accepting Healthy Start vouchers, the government scheme for low income families with young children.

In addition to this, the organisation seeks to create employment opportunities through its apprentice growers scheme, which teaches the skills necessary for urban agriculture and then allows hands-on experience on the Hackney based microsites. And the organisation is very activist-friendly – Climate Camp received a few boxes of Hackney-grown salad last year as a small token of Growing Communities’ awareness of its links to the wider movement.

Of course, there have been numerous challenges for Growing Communities, and many of these continue to exist. Any initiative that is seeking to challenge and subvert the power of institutions as large and as powerful as supermarkets will always encounter difficulties, particularly as it begins to grow large enough to make it onto their radar.

Even an organisation the size of Growing Communities, however, seems to have been largely overlooked by regional and national government, and has often been seen only as a concern of Hackney Council’s parks department, rather than as a wider exemplar of local economic health, environmental sustainability and social inclusion. Only many such organisations, networked and learning from each other, will be able to significantly challenge the status quo of food production in the UK.

As Kerry Rankine, who works at Growing Communities, says, ‘The most important lesson that the organisation can teach is that members of a community, working together, can achieve a real shift in people’s priorities and thinking. From a small start, the organisation now provides employment for scores of people, food for thousands, and hopefully inspiration for many more.’

Matt Sellwood is the Green Party candidate for Hackney North

Growing Communities’ 12-point manifesto

The food involved should:

Be farmed and produced ecologically

Be as local as practicable

Be seasonal

Be mainly plant-based

Be fresh or involve minimal processing

Be from small-scale operations

Support fair trade

Involve environmentally friendly and
low-carbon resource use

Promote knowledge

Foster community

Strive to be economically viable and independent

Be produced honestly, transparently and promote trust throughout the food chain