Tag: UK

Increasing Billionaire wealth in Britain, and increasing inequality in society 


The wealth of billionaires in Britain has increased by 1100% in the 32 years between 1990 and 2022. 

  • In 1990 there were 15 billionaires who controlled £53.9 billion in wealth.  
  • By 2022 there were 177 billionaires who controlled £653.1 in wealth. 

These increases reflect a wider increase in inequality in the UK more generally. However the increase in wealth at the very top, such as billionaires, has been the most extreme. 

bar chart showing increase in billionaires in the UK from 1990 to 2022.

Most of the increase has been driven by an increase in the number of billionaires, but there has also been a concentration at the very top. The top two billionaire households in 2022 controlled as much wealth as the bottom half of billionaire households in 1990. 

Billionaire wealth has increased due to the structure of the UK economy. It has continued to increase post-Covid despite the wider population facing economic crises. 

Billionaires are not uniquely hard working, or intelligent, or creative. Instead, billionaires are better seen as the primary beneficiaries of an economic system which produces huge levels of poverty and inequality, and has left the UK particularly vulnerable to the multiple, overlapping crises we have faced over the past few years.

This blog post is a summary of ‘Billionaire Britain’, a report from the Equality Trust.

Measuring Billionaire Wealth 

There is no quality data source on wealth in the UK at the national level. This is because there is no systematic recording of wealth when it is taxed. The Wealth and Assets survey suffers under-reporting from the very wealthiest households. 
The Times Richlist is the most comprehensive source, but this could miss out on various assets and under-report wealth. 

Billionaire Britain uses data from the Times Rich List. 

From a research methods perspective this is an interesting example of how power shapes data collection. The very richest are the most powerful and the UK government doesn’t systematically track data on their wealth. In fact, tracking is poor that Billionaire Britain estimates at least £4.4 billion of property investment in the UK has been bought by corrupt individuals. 

Why are there more billionaires in Britain?

Two underlying structural changes have enabled massive accumulation by those at the top: 

  • Firstly, the financialisation of the UK means that those with wealth now have greater returns on their investments. This is due to corporations focusing on profits over wages and the inflation of asset prices. 
  • Secondly, deregulation has resulted in less restrictions and fewer taxes on wealth. This has attracted more wealth to the UK. 

Of the 177 on the 2022 billionaire rich list 42 gained their wealth through investing and 39 through real estate. 

Financialisation is where the financial industry becomes more important to the economy as a whole. 

The finance sector consists of a range of different industries from investment companies (including real estate investments), stocks and shares funds, hedge funds, and insurance and pensions. 

In a primarily finance based economy, the production of tangible products is less important, and many of the financial services seek to make returns trading financial instruments without creating anything of any value. 

One consequence of a financialized economy is asset price inflation. Financial companies invest in assets such as houses and land for a return (rather than seeking to develop land or improve houses themselves) which pushes the prices up. 

A second and related consequence is more households taking on debt. This is increasingly required to buy more expensive assets, such as housing. 

A third consequence is more companies seeking profit over wages and quality services. They become more concerned with providing dividends to shareholders over paying decent wages. 

In terms of service provision, energy and water companies have extracted billions in profits over the last years. Shareholders have got richer as a result. However the infrastructure is now crumbling in many cases, as evidenced with things such as leaky water pipes. 

All of the above has resulted in a more unequal society as a few benefit from financialisation. Meanwhile at the bottom end people have relatively less money AND worse services. 

What are the solutions to increased wealth and the inequality this causes? 

The Equality Trust suggests five courses of action…

  1. Introduce a progressive wealth tax. That means the wealthier you are the more tax you pay! 
  2. Make corporate ownership more democratic, so more people have a say in what happens to profits. 
  3. Regulate the financial sector more. 
  4. Return essential services to public ownership. 
  5. Improve tax transparency and end tax havens. 
  6. Create more community wealth funds to invest in areas that need it most.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This material is an important update for anyone interested in wealth and income inequalities in the UK.

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Ethnicity in the 2021 UK National Census

The government added 2 additional options for ethnicity in the 2021 Census: ‘Roma’ and ‘Black British Other’. However, they rejected 53 out of 55 requests for more categories!

Following the 2011 Census the government engaged in a consultation in 2015 with several organisations and individuals over whether they needed to increase the number of ethnic categories. Based on feedback from 46 organisations and 86 individuals, most of them found the existing categories acceptable, but they received 55 requests for more categories. 

Some of the examples of requests for new categories included Somali, Jewish and Kashmiri. 

Of these 55 requests, only two changes were judged to be worth including in the 2021 Census:

  • Including a separate ‘ROMA’ tick box under the ‘White’ category, rather than putting this together with GYPSY. 
  • Including an ‘other’ BLACK category besides AFRICAN and CARIBBEAN, and allowing respondents to write in details.  

The board of Census experts made their decisions to accept the above two changes for new ethnic categories. They used a standard evaluation procedure in which each category was scored the basis of:

  • User need: was there a need to gather more specific information (easily) on the specific new categories of ethnic group?
  • Lack of alternative information: was there no where else information could be found out about the suggested new group? (This was the case with the Roma category).
  • Clarity of data collection: some categories were rejected because of too much overlap. For example, offering a ‘Kashmiri’ option would probably reduce the number of people ticking ‘Indian’ or ‘Pakistan’. Some of the people who ticked ‘Kashmiri’ would identify as BOTH Pakistani and Kashmiri, or both Indian and Kashmiri. 
  • Consistency with the 2011 Census: taking reliability and comparison with previous data into account. 

In many cases the Census team decided ethnicity information was already covered already in the ‘religion’ section or by simply allowing respondents to write in their responses would yield sufficient information compared to a fresh tick box.  

Current list of ethnicity options in the 2021 UK Census…

list of ethnicity options in the 2021 UK census

Analysis of changes to ethnicity options: disrespecting Diversity?


It feels a little like The Census paid lip service to this process rather than seriously considering increasing the number of available categories.

They sampled less than 100 individuals outside of formal organisations. Of these, 40% of respondents requested a change, which is significant, and then rejected most of these. 

I imagine the reason for this was practical: once you start increasing the number of ethnicity options the form rapidly becomes impractically long. For example, if you included ‘Somali’, it seems a bit unfair to not include every African subcategory, which would mean dozens more boxes, and so on for every other suggestion. 

Having an ethnicity section with possibly 200 options would simply be off putting. Allowing respondents to write in their responses means they’ve already covered the ‘inclusion’ aspect. 

In terms of data analysis, when the Census is online, it’s easy enough to filter by written-in responses.

Having said that it is worth noting that the Census probably tells us very little about identity. It doesn’t tell us what ethnicity means to the respondents.

Signposting and sources

This material is mainly relevant to the Culture and Identity option, usually taught in the first year of A-level sociology.

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Hold Your Nerve – More Individualised Solutions to Structural Problems!

Millions of UK homeowners face huge increases to their mortgage repayments as interest rates continue to increase (1)

According to the Office for National Statistics, the average monthly repayment for a mortgage on a semi-detached house in the UK rose 61% to year ending December 2022.

This increase will be even greater now… the news over the last week has focused on how another 2 million people are coming off lower fixed rate mortgage deals between now and 2024, meaning their interest rates are going to increase from around 2% to 6%.

I’m one of these people, my current 2% rate ends in September this year, and I’ll have to switch onto a higher rate, which with my current provider is 6% or 5% on a two year fixed deal. I might of course switch, but that gives me a bench mark, I don’t imagine I’ll get much better than that.

Thankfully my current mortgage is so low that it’s not a big deal for me to manage the increase in repayments In fact if I just extend the mortgage by a few months I can keep my repayments level, which for me means pushing it back from 5 years of repayments to around 5 years and 3 months.

However, obviously I’d rather pay less than more over the next five years or so and it’s difficult to make a judgement as to whether I’m better of fixing now at say 5% for three years, or slightly higher at 5.5% for the full five years, or just going onto the 6% variable rate.

Obviously fixing for a longer period is the strategy IF interest rates are going to go up, while going on the variable rate is best IF interests rates are going to come down.

The problem is I don’t know what’s going to happen to interest rates, but it’s 100% on me to make a decision and 100% on me to bear the consequences of paying more in mortgage interest if I make the wrong the decision.

What’s causing inflation?

The bank of England keeps putting interest rates up because of high inflation, inflation being the rising cost of living.

The government put this down to a squeeze of food and energy because of the legacy of covid and the war in Ukraine putting a squeeze on supply chains, and all of this hasn’t been helped be Brexit making it more difficult to trade with the EU.

Personally I also think there’s a longer term trend of the rise in middle class consumers in countries such as India and China, which will increase demand for all goods and services

neoliberalism is also a problem – as increasing inequality means more wealth sits in tax havens not being used for innovation and more money gets sucked upwards, increasing inequality meaning a higher proportion of our resources go on meat and yachts for rich, which also pushes up prices.

Finally, the UK government has been printing money for years in response to various crises, which reduces the value of the pound. It’s printed almost £1 trillion since 2009 in Quantitative Easing Measures.

In short, there is no obvious immediate end to this inflation crisis because all of the causes are outside of the Government’s control, and many of its responses to global forces over the last decade have made matters worse.

Individualised solutions to Structural Problems (Again)

As to the solutions to the current mortgage crises, all that the current super-rich PrimeMinister Rishi Sunak has is to suggest people should ‘hold their nerve on interest rates‘.

In short, ‘just suck it up’, you’re on your own, deal with it, folks.

Signposting and Sources

This post is really just a general reminder of how damaging neoliberal economic policies are to ordinary people in the long run.

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(1) https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jun/17/uk-homeowners-face-huge-rise-in-payments-when-fixed-rate-mortgages-expire

How Motherhood and Fatherhood affect paid and domestic work

mothers are more likely to take time off work and do 10 hours more housework and childcare than fathers.

One of way of measuring the relative effects of motherhood and fatherhood on paid and domestic labour is to compare the following two subsets:

  • Mothers in relation to women without dependent children compared to
  • Fathers in relation to men without dependent children.

Comparing these two subsets would be a useful contribution to evaluating Liberal and Radical Feminist theories about how family life affects women. Broadly speaking:

  • Liberal Feminists claim that family life (compared to women remaining childless) has little or no negative impact on women.
  • Radical Feminists claim that family life has a negative impact on women, as women are more likely to quit their jobs when children are born, and they end up doing more childcare than men, and continue to do more housework too, suffering from the triple shift.

Generally speaking if mothers are doing less paid work and more domestic work than women without dependent children, while fathers are doing more paid work and less domestic work than men without dependent children, it’s reasonable to say this suggests more support for radical compared to liberal feminism.

HOWEVER, we’d still need to do further research to test this out: statistics don’t give us in-depth data and allow us to conclusively prove or dismiss either of these broad theoretical positions, they just point in one direction or the other.

This post looks at the following data taken from the ONS’ (1)

  • The percentages of mothers, fathers and men and women without dependent children in employment
  • The percentage of mothers in full time work by age of child
  • The percentages of 24-35 year old mothers and fathers in work.
  • How much housework mothers and fathers do.

You can view all of the stats below on my Tableau page.

Motherhood and fatherhood encourage traditional gender roles

The graphic below shows the percentages of mothers, fathers and men/ women without dependent children in paid employment 2002-21, U.K.

In 2021 72% of men without dependent children were in work compared to 92% of fathers. 69% of women were in work compared to 76% of mothers.

So… both men and women with children are more likely to be in work compared to those without children (but this data also includes retired people, so no surprise, maybe!)

What’s interesting is the relative difference between men and women without children and mothers and fathers:

Mothers are much less likely to be work than fathers, the figures for men and women without children in work are much closer together.

This suggests having children is more likely to result in women leaving paid employment to take on a caring role while having children encourages men into the breadwinner role.

Only 30% of women with new born children work full-time

Bar chart showing percentage of mothers in full time work by age of child.

It’s probably unsurprising, but only 30% of women with very young children aged one, and the percentage increases gradually until 49% of women with 18 year olds are in paid employment.

This is a clear trend of women taken a period of employment and then gradually returning in greater numbers as their children get older.

The figures for men hardly change at all with children being born (not shown on graphic).

Young women are affected most

This statistic is the strongest evidence of how motherhood has a detrimental affect on women’s careers compared to fatherhood.

bar chart comparing number of young mothers and fathers in work, UK 2022.

For 24-35 year olds, MORE women without dependent children are in paid work than men.

However, only 69% of 24-35 year old mothers are in employment compared to a massive 92% of fathers in the same age category.

Women do more housework and childcare

In 2022 women did 30 minutes more unpaid housework per day than men and they did one hour extra of childcare.

Over the course of a week, this means women with dependent children are doing 10 hours more childcare and housework combined than men.

This seems to be strong evidence of mothers suffering from the triple shift.

Conclusions: support for radical feminism?

The above statistical evidence seems to offer some support for the radical feminist view that families are harmful to women, in that having children results in women being more likely to take time off paid-work compared to men and mothers doing 10 hours more domestic labour and childcare per week than men.

Sources and Signposting

This material is most relevant to the families and households module, usually taught as part of the first year A-level sociology course.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

(1) Office for National Statistics: Families and the Labour Market UK, 2021.

Screenshots of Tableau embeds:

women and men in paid work
bar chart showing hours per day childcare and domestic labour done by mothers and fathers, UK 2022.

Net migration to the UK increasing!

Net migration to the UK reached 600 000 in December 2022, up more than 50% since December 2018.

graph showing net migration to the UK 2018. to2022

Since Brexit net migration from the EU has been declining, with around 50 000 more EU Citizens leaving the UK than entering; and the increase in net migration is driven entirely from non-EU countries, especially Nigeria, Bangladesh and India.

Reasons for Migration to the UK

The main reason for the recent increase in migration is more people coming to study in the UK, and much of that is driven by the dependent partners and children of students coming to join them.

After that, work is the main reason, with people coming in the take up jobs in sectors of our labour market where there are vacancies, such as health and social care and seasonal agricultural work.

bar chart showing reasons for migration to the UK 2018 to 2022

2022 also saw more humanitarian sources of migration with more than 100 000 refugees come to the UK from the Ukraine and more from Hong Kong.

Analysis

Immigration is a sensitive political issue, with 60% of the UK population thinking it is too high according to YouGov tracking (2).

However it is also clear that we need immigration to fill gaps in the job market and a lot of the increase from 2021 to 2022 was about doing just that.

Also, very few people believe we took in too few refugees from Ukraine so people are not outright opposed to migration.

Finally, the figures are somewhat skewed by students coming the UK to study for three years, and bringing their dependents…. most of these will return home after study, and while they are here they are paying huge fees to British universities which should benefit the UK economy: they are basically paying to be here!

From a policy perspective, however, such levels of net migration to the UK are the highest on record, which suggests a profound failure of government policy given that every PM since 2010 has been elected on the promise of bringing net migration down, which simply hasn’t happened.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This material is primarily relevant to the demography topic, which is part of the families and households module.

Sources

Census UK (accessed May 2023) Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2022

(2) YouGov: attitudes to immigration tracker.

Should Britons just accept they are poorer?

Consumer price inflation has been floating at around just under 10% for a year now, since May 2022, and this means that people in Britain are, on average, worse off financially than they were a year ago.

A survey by the Office for National Statistics recently found that seven in ten adults are spending less on non essential items and a recent IPSOS poll found that half of us are worried about our finances.

The Bank of England’s chief economist has called on workers to stop asking for wage increases and for companies to stop passing on their increasing costs to consumers by raising prices.

In short he thinks that Britons to accept the fact that they are getting poorer and are just worse off and that this will lower inflation.

An individualised solution to a structural problem?

This strikes me as possibly the ultimate example of what Bauman would call an individualised solution to a structural problem: one of the global elite asking individuals to solve inflation.

Whereas in reality the cause of the current inflation is structural: it is 40 years of neoliberal economic policy which has sucked hundreds of billions, probably trillions of dollars out of the UK economy over those 40 years and into tax havens, benefitting the global elite (and many non-British people).

Of course the elite themselves blame our current ‘cost of living crisis’ on Covid and the Ukraine War, but Britain’s economic decline predates both of these events.

In a neoliberal system it becomes easier for investors to extract profit from state enterprise because of deregulation, and so what we’ve seen now for 40 years is lack of investment in infrastructure and education and health and social care and huge profits getting sucked out the country.

We could have, over the past 40 years, invested more in green energy, more in local food production, more in creating a highly skilled, high wage workforce, but the neoliberal Tories (and New Labour) chose not to, and hence we have inflation and the ordinary people suffering.

Sources

The Guardian April 2023 Britons need to accept they’re poorer

Gov.uk accessed May 2023: Consumer Price Inflation, March 2023.

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Ageing in the UK…

By 2066 5 million people in the UK will be aged over 85 and over, or 7% of the population.

11 million people in the UK were aged 65 and over in 2022, which is 19% of the population. In 10 years time, by 2032 this will have increased to 13 million people, or 23% of the population.

Currently 1.5 million people are aged 85 and over, or around 1.5% of the UK population. This older age group is the fastest growing and is set to double to 3.2 million by 2041 and treble by 2066 to 5.1 million when it will represent 7% of the UK population.

Health and ageing

In terms of disability-free life expectancy, the state of ageing in England is getting worse. Life Expectancy has increased, but disability free life expectancy hasn’t kept pace: as people get older they are spending proportionately more time in ill-health.

In 2020, healthy life expectancy was 62.4 years for men and 60.9 years for women.

This means that on average men and women can expect to live 10 disability-free years after the age of 65, with around a further 8 with some kind of disability, on average, based on average life expectancy at birth.

Poverty and ageing

18% of Pensioners lived in relative poverty in 2020/21 a sharp rise up from 16% in 2018/19, which equates to 2 million people.

Housing and ageing

In 2018 78% of households headed by someone aged 65 or over were owned, with only 6% of those having a mortgage.

16% of households headed by someone aged 65 or over socially rent, while 6% privately rent.

If we look at figures for the over 55s we see that the number of 867 000 homes rented privately to people aged 55 and over, which is an all time hight for the decade.

Ageing and Inequality

Taken together there has been a trend towards greater inequality between older people.

The net (non-pension) wealth of the richest 20% of people aged 65 and over
group doubled between 2002 and 2018, while that of the poorest 20% fell by 30%.12, and this is largely driven by the increase in house prices.

Work and Ageing

The economic inactivity rate for 50-64 year olds increased sightly during the Pandemic, after several years of declining. In 2021 the economic inactivity rate was 24% for men and 33% for women.

Policy Suggestions for an ageing population

There are several practical policy solutions we can start putting in place now to address the challenges of an ageing population.

One OBVIOUS. and necessary starting point would be more social housing for older people of a decent standard – and if this was developed as community housing this would also solve the problem of many older people being isolated in their own homes, AND such housing could be built in areas with decent health care systems nearby.

A second area would be to tackle age discrimination in work and offer more targeted support for older people wanting to go back to work – many people want to work into their 70s, but not necessarily full-time, so anything the government can do to encourage workplaces to offer more flexible part-time working arrangements would be a help.

The ageing population: Why this Matters!

There are a lot of people aged 45-60 who are going to be retiring in the next 20 years – that large bulge just above the grey line below. And once we get below this line you’ll see a couple of significant dips in the birth rate.

So this means that over the next 20 years there are going to me MORE over 65s and especially more over 85s while at the same time fewer working age people paying tax to support growing number of retirees.

Thus if we don’t start working now to put policies and infrastructure in place to help support those older people who need it, we are going to find this even more challenging in the future as the future is going to be one of more older people and less money to support them!

Signposting

This material should be useful for anyone studying the families and households option as part of their A-level in Sociology.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

Sources

Age UK: Later Life in the United Kingdom 2019

Centre for Better Ageing: The State of Ageing 2022.

Office for National Statistics: UK interactive population pyramid

Surviving the Cost of Living Crisis: Case Studies

Qualitative case studies of how real people are managing the Cost of Living Crisis is a useful way to provide insight into the reality of poverty in the UK in 2022, adding some necessary depth to poverty statistics which can be rather inhuman.

A very useful contemporary resource which does just this is a recent documentary from Panorama which aired in April 2022 and is called simply ‘Surviving the Cost of Living Crisis‘.

The documentary follows three working families – two two parent families and one single mum. All the individuals in the documentary have decent jobs and some even bring in the median income in the UK but all are living in relative poverty and having to make difficult decisions around how to spend their money.

One family earns £2000 a month, but after the mortgage, bills and food they are left with £63 a month to spend – which would just about cover a meal out for the family. The father of this family has a 75 mile round trip to work every day and they have found rising fuel prices recently have taken up a lot of their spare cash.

Another of the case studies is a single mum who works part time as a nurse – she can’t work more than three days because she can’t afford the cost of child care – and besides being employed she is dependent on food banks and hand-outs from friends. After her mortgage she is left with £80 a week fork food and everything else for her and her three children.

The documentary shows the dilemma of ‘heating or eating’ with some families having to stretch a few pounds on an electric or gas metre out for several days – expensive key metres don’t help here.

The adults of these families are going without food – one husband eats only one meal a day for example. And this causes stress to older children – who are aware that their parents are going without food and possibly say they are not hungry when they really are in order to make sure their parents eat more.

The documentary does a good job of showing how much stress being in poverty causes is also clearly a good deal of anxiety around future price rises and how they are going to cope.

The Video is available on YouTube here, at time of writing, but I don’t know how much longer it will stay up!

Find our More/ Related Posts

Wealth and Income Inequalities in the UK 

What is Poverty? 

The Extent of Material Deprivation in the UK 

The Effect of Poverty on Life Chances

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The End of the Department for International Development!

In September 2020 the long standing Department for International Development (DFID) merged with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO).

You can read more about the merger here.

DFID was established as a separate department in 1997 under the New Labour Government, and its aim was to focus exclusively on delivering overseas aid, and over the last 23 years its budget has been increased steadily to around $15 billion a year, meaning that the UK was one of few developed countries to meet its commitment to spend 0.7% GDP on aid, part of the old Millennium Development Goals.

The new conservative administration had been making noises about merging DFID with the FCO for some time, and it finally made the announcement in June 2020, and by September, DFID was no more. (Many DFID employees accused the government of doing this by stealth, using Covid-19 to disguise the move.)

This will probably refocus aid spending on defence and trade rather than poverty reduction

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office lists as its primary responsibilities:

‘pursuing national interests, promoting Britain as a force for good in the world, British security, as well as (since the merger) reducing poverty and meeting global challenges’. 

According to The Conversation this means the UK government has now changed its focus on how it spends aid. 

It will now be prioritising promoting Britain’s national interests – trade and security, rather than on global poverty reduction.  This was a trend that had already started to happen before the merger and shows how national political priorities can shape in very direct ways the way international aid money is spent.

Historically, DFID has tended to portion out aid money to projects that are already running, rather than setting up its own new projects, with Health care and Disaster relief being two of the larger expenditure areas, and countries such as Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Nigeria receiving the most aid.

However, now we will likely see more being spent in the areas of governance, security, and trade assistance, with security risk countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan maybe receiving more aid, as well as countries that have well established trade links with the UK and with potential to benefit UK companies abroad.

All of that is in line with using aid to promote national interests.

It’s too early to say whether or not aid money will now be spent more effectively under this new regime, but it’s certainly worth knowing about this change if you’re studying the global development option as part of A-level sociology!

Britain’s recent involvement in torture – a good example of a ‘state crime’

Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee It’s been 15 years since allegations first emerged of Britain’s involvement in the torture of those suspected of the 9/11 terror attacks, and earlier this month (July 2018) an official report has finally been released which reveals the ‘true’ extent of Britain’s compliance with the USA’s programme of torture.

uk torture

According to Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), Britain’s involvement amounted to at least 13 occasions of British agents witnessing suspects being mistreated and having been informed (but done nothing about) of mistreatment by their foreign counterparts or detainees more than 150 times.

The report found that British agents weren’t directly involved in torture themselves, but the strategy of British intelligence was to ‘outsource’ the interrogation process to those who they knew used ‘enhanced techniques such as stress positions, sleep deprivation and beatings.

The British effectively turned a blind eye to the fact that the USA was in breach of the Geneva Convention on Human Rights. They were so ‘blind’ in fact that they ignored the fact that at one detention centre detainees were kept in containers so small that they could neither stand or lie down, getting around this particular breach of human rights by simply building interrogation portacabins which were large enough to comfortably accommodate the prisoners.

So why did this happen?

Following 9/11 the security and intelligent services were under intense pressure to find and prosecute those responsible, but also to find information which might prevent future terrorist attacks. The problem with using such techniques, however, is that they might well just serve to increase recruitment to the same terrorist networks the authorities are trying to quash.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This seems to be a good example of Britain being involved in a ‘state crime’, also a good example of the extent of barriers to researching powerful actors: it’s taken 15 years for this official report to be conducted, and even this doesn’t tell us the whole story: Theresa May refused permission for four key officers to give evidence on national security grounds, so the true extent of Britain’s complicity in state crime may not surface for many years to come!

Sources:

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