Bankruptcy is being unable to discharge your debts, being unable to pay those to whom you owe money. It also has a further, figurative meaning of lacking in some quality, such as moral bankruptcy. The British state is far from bankrupt in the traditional financial definition of bankruptcy. It is still well able to pay its creditors. The British state is currently bankrupt in how it treats those who are more vulnerable, especially the poor, the young and the sick.

Attitudes to the extent to which Britain is bankrupt, morally, economically or in any other way, vary geographically:

Everything has a geography, including, perhaps especially, belief.

Whether you believe that what we are about to show constitutes evidence of various forms of bankrupt or broken Britain, or whether you can see signs of bullishness or optimism in the maps that follow, will depend as much on what you bring to this book as on what is in it. However, to understand what follows you need to know some things about the geography of UK statistics. We use this introduction to explain that geography and, in particular, how we have chosen to map the country. Looking at these maps, you may well appreciate for the first time the many different ways in which Britain is divided up for administrative purposes.

Often we don’t map all of the country. In this atlas we have not included Northern Ireland at any point. We have in the past drawn an atlas of the UK including that country on almost every page. What that atlas and much other work reveals is that Northern Ireland really is, demographically and in terms of economic and other trends, essentially different.