In The Future of Capitalism, published in 2018, Paul Collier offered fascinating personal insight into why, since the Brexit referendum, he has written repeatedly about what he calls the left-behind places of Britain, most particularly South Yorkshire, where he grew up in a working-class family. He was educated at the local grammar school in Sheffield and at Oxford, and then had a successful career as an author and development economist at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford.
His cousin Sue was not so fortunate. She was a teenage single mother and her life was troubled. Many decades later Collier and his wife adopted Sue’s grandchildren, who had been taken into care. The adoption process was tortuous: the Colliers were forced
