Clark Broke

Fixing Britain's poverty crisis
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78590-804-0
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

Over a dozen years into austerity, statistical warning lights are flashing to suggest a return to types of deprivation we once imagined we had consigned to history. In the decade up to the pandemic, the official count of rough sleepers and recorded malnutrition in hospital patients both doubled, while recourse to food banks rocketed by an order of magnitude. And yet it has never been statistics but rather individual human stories - from the fictionalised accounts of Dickens to the faithful reporting of Orwell and Priestley - that have seared the reality of hard times into the public imagination. In Broke, Tom Clark assembles today's masters of social reportage to go deep into the communities so often ignored by politicians, introducing us to those at the hardest end of the poverty crisis. Contributions from Jem Bartholomew, Cal Flyn, Dani Garavelli, Frances Ryan, Samira Shackle, Daniel Trilling and Jennifer Williams and a foreword by Kerry Hudson unflinchingly reveal the contemporary experience of cold, hunger, homelessness, disease, debt, disability, punishing work and an immigration system that makes people destitute by design. With Joel Goodman's photography bringing the characters to life, and some of the writers having had first-hand experience of the issues raised, Broke blends powerful human stories with analysis of the policies that have led us to this point - and the reforms we urgently need. All royalties will be donated to Leeds Asylum Seekers' Support Network

Tom Clark is an award-winning journalist and a contributing editor at Prospect, the magazine he edited for five years. He previously worked at The Guardian, in Whitehall and at various think tanks, including the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, where he was a fellow from 2021 to 2023. His 2014 book Hard Times: Inequality, Recession, Aftermath was hailed as a must-read by everyone from Thomas Piketty to Gordon Brown.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Clark, Tom

Leseproben

Introduction

Face to face with Britain’s new penury

Tom Clark

I was mulling pulling together a volume of reportage on Britain’s unfolding poverty crisis in spring 2022 when 77-year-old Elsie unwittingly convinced me that it really had to be done.

We were a dozen years into austerity, and the cost of living was starting to soar. Various statistical warning lights were flashing to suggest a return to types of deprivation that we once fondly imagined we had consigned to the history books. NHS Digital numbers were recording that diagnoses of malnutrition in hospital patients had more than doubled since 2010.1 The official count of rough sleepers had also doubled during the decade before lockdown,2 while dependence on food banks had swelled by an order of magnitude.3 All this was despite long years of strong jobs growth, but now – post-pandemic – the economic forecasts from the likes of the Bank of England were altogether dicier, pointing to another big squeeze on incomes, which would surely make everything worse.

And yet as the swallows flew in that spring, Downing Street lockdown parties were looming larger than anything else in the UK news. So the question remained: how to wake the country up to the rapidly worsening hardship?

This is where Elsie came in, revealing the power of individual testimony in the conversation. The widow asked ITV’s Good Morning Britain to solicit any advice that the Prime Minister might have about dealing with her plight. It was duly explained to Boris Johnson that Elsie only ate one meal a day, and passed her hours going round and round on the local bus, so as to avoid having to turn on the heating at home. Squirming, the PM commented that it was only thanks to government decisions that she enjoyed a freedom pass for bus travel – and jaws dropped nationwide.4

Six months later, an inquest verdict on a single lost life abruptly forced Britain’s politicians and journalists to face up to a slow-building problem which it’s fair to say is usually an awfully long way from the top of the agenda in SW1. Namely, untreated mould in social homes. An experienced social affairs reporter once told me that her first news editor had urged her to investigate something other than rampant damp in local flats on the basis that mould ‘doesn’t photograph’. True enough, but the smiley and gorgeous toddler Awaab Ishak certainly did. And so when senior coroner Joanne Kearsley ruled that the respiratory crisis that killed the two-year-old from Rochdale was ‘due to prolonged exposure to mould’ and action ‘not taken’ to fix it, parliamentarians, hardened hacks on newspaper desks and voters a long way away from rundown estates at least briefly found themselves worrying about all those communities where under-investment is breeding squalor.5

We should not be surprised that an individual trauma cuts through in a way that no amount of frightening numbers ever could. After all, as Stalin is supposed to have said, where the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic. Over two centuries of the methodical collection of data on social conditions, it has never been any official number but rather the individual human stories – from the fictionalised accounts of Dickens to the faithful factual reporting of Orwell and Priestley – that have seared the reality of hard times into the public imagination.

This is not just a British but a universal human phenomenon. What lodges in the American mind is not the dreadful data on Depression-era unemployment or statistics on 21st-century working poverty but rather the travails of John Steinbeck’s Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath or the exploitation revealed undercover by Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed.6 Nor is this a truth that applies only in connection with deprivation. Much more generally, it takes confrontation with the fate of an individual human being to force a reckoning with an emergency. Back in 2015, for example, the terrible photograph of two-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach, lifeless and face down in his shorts and red T-shirt, jolted the continent of Europe into finally understanding the scale of its migration crisis.7 All manner of stories, poems and films have brought home the reality of war through the prism of a single family or individual.

But there is, perhaps, a particular failure to find similar stories that can make vivid the frightening realities of contemporary want. What is sneeringly dismissed by some as ‘the poverty industry’ – the campaigners and researchers concerned with exposing deprivation – too often relies on dry and impersonal facts at the expense of personal testimony. If the grim data is leavened at all, it might be with a few quotes from focus groups or so-called qualitative research studies, hardly sufficient to humanise the hard facts about life at the bottom of the heap.

What this book does instead, with the help of Joseph Rowntree Foundation resources, is send a cast of exceptionally skilled reporters and gifted storytellers deep into our most distressed communities, to seek out those on the roughest edges of life, and commit serious listening time to the voices society so often ignores. Bespoke photography from Joel Goodman, who has toured the country to produce portraits of the people telling their stories, allows readers to look many of the characters in the eye.

The team of writers have all the National Press Award commendations, Orwell Prize nominations and Royal Society of Literature endorsements you could hope for. But what’s just as important is that, as you will read, from the housing list to the benefit office, some also have first-hand experience of the issues raised. That matters, because if there is one thing that is missing from the political discussion that has led us towards today’s privations, it is empathy. The politicians whose austerity cutbacks have corroded the foundational promises of social security – that basic rent would always be covered, that payments would keep up with living costs, that account would be taken of the number of mouths a family must feed – justified their decisions through devious wordplay that set ‘workers’ against ‘shirkers’ or ‘strivers’ against ‘skivers’.8

For a while, this worked well enough politically, but the eventual result of shredding the safety net was, inevitably, growing numbers falling through it and into destitution. That is now on a scale that can be tallied at the doors of crisis services, and at a speed that is becoming impossible to miss.9

SOMETHING OLD

There is no point in trying to summarise the chapters that follow: each is a powerful piece of writing that stands on its own and deserves to be read in full. But it is just worth highlighting a few common threads that emerge across them, suggestive of certain specific features of poverty as it is experienced in Britain today.

At one level, the new poverty that emerges is very much like the old. The street urchins in Dickens’s London and the impoverished mill workers in Engels’s Manchester would be well familiar with the sense described in 2022 by ‘Javed’, an undocumented migrant with good reason to fear a return to Pakistan would mean persecution, in relation to his homeless life in Leeds: ‘You feel dirty, you think everything around you is dirty.’ The brute effects of material privation – the bite of the cold, the gnawing of hunger, the terror of ending up without a roof over your head, all of which pulse through these pages – have not changed. What has is the regularity with which they are being felt.

A generation ago discussions about poverty in Britain would often lapse into debates about whether it is best captured by relative measures, which gauged how far poorer people were falling behind the more prosperous, or instead by absolute privations, where progress always used to be easier to show. That argument is heard less often today. The question of measurement seems beside the point when outright destitution is palpably rising.

Efforts to silo off different aspects of the poverty problem are also increasingly hard to sustain. I tasked each of our writers with examining a distinct issue – cold, hunger, shelter, ill health and so on – but honest reporters, however disciplined, could not help but notice the way all the other problems intruded onto their patch.

Take hunger, the topic for Samira Shackle, who introduces us to London teacher Emma, whose pupils sometimes let slip they have eaten nothing all day. And yet ‘I only eat one meal a day’ is a refrain that also echoes through several other chapters: we hear it from ‘Mary’ in Leeds (in Daniel Trilling’s piece on the plight of migrants); from ‘Mike’ in High Wycombe (in Frances Ryan’s chapter on disabled people); and, again in Dani Garavelli’s dispatch from the Glasgow neighbourhoods where people die earlier than anywhere else in Britain, in which David in Drumchapel adds the twist that at least once a week this one...