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Project Twist-It Interview
I did an interview recently with Mary O'Hara for Project Twist-It, a great organisation that does a huge amount of work trying to change the discourse around poverty. Mary had some excellent questions to ask and I gave extensive answers, so extensive that the piece had to be cut by about 80% in order to fit it all on the webpage. She did a great job on the edit but said it was a shame to leave the rest unpublished, so here’s the full text giving some analysis of the book and some more detailed thoughts about the role of the media in pushing toxic narratives around the issue of 21st century poverty. Massive thanks to Mary for asking me to contribute.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I’m a writer, poet, musician, and Senior Librarian currently living and working in Leeds. My short fiction, essays and poetry have been published in print and online by 3:AM, Lune: the journal of literary misrule, Massive Overheads, Lunate, Visual Verse and Expat Lit. Ghost Signs, published in June 2022 by Bluemoose, is my first published full-length work.
What is your book, Ghost Signs: poverty and the pandemic, about?
I work for the library service in Leeds and have done for nearly fifteen years. When the first Covid lockdown hit, one of the first things the council here did was set up a food distribution centre in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. The idea was that if anyone was self-isolating and had no access to food, they could call a helpline and get a food parcel delivered to their house. All the libraries were closed, like everywhere else, so I volunteered to be a delivery driver because it was a better option that climbing the walls at home, and I was being paid regardless so I thought I might as well make myself useful. Once the FDC was up and running, word got out fairly quickly that the council were giving away food, and within a pretty short space of time, it went from being a Covid support service to something entirely different – people on low incomes from all over the city started calling up for help, and that’s where most of the deliveries ended up going. I’m going to quote a bit from the introduction to the book here:
“I spent nearly six months on the job, during which I drove something like three and a half thousand miles around the city, with the work taking me into the heart of some of the most disadvantaged estates and onto the doorsteps of some of the city’s most vulnerable people. Many of the scenes I saw were horrifying, and in some parts of the city I was confronted by levels of deprivation that are unbelievable in the twenty-first century.
I witnessed how years of Tory government has widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots to levels that are shocking to behold at a time when there’s more wealth in the country than ever before; the stark contrast between immense privilege and dire poverty that splits the city – and by extension the country – almost in half. I saw first-hand the effects of austerity, and how the savage cuts that started during the Cameron years have left local authorities floundering, financially unable to cope and lacking vital services when a disaster of this scale hit their communities. I visited people living in slum houses that should have been demolished decades ago, denied decent housing by the eternal diktat of private profit that allows landlords to become rich while people on low incomes live below the poverty line. I saw communities torn apart by drugs and crime, generations of families living on benefits because they were born in places where aspiration is low and social mobility is practically non-existent. I met adults who were literally starving; I saw parents struggling to provide basic necessities for young families; I encountered children who looked at everyday food items like they were extravagant birthday gifts; I saw people with severe mental health problems abandoned by the state to fend for themselves. And I thought that something needed to be done to document all this.”
So essentially, that’s what I did. The notes taken and stories collected are what form the bulk of the day-to-day accounts contained in the book; there’s also a series of journalistic, quasi-news reports that give week-on-week accounts of how many people have died and show what was happening in terms of the pandemic on a national level – what the government said it was doing, and what was really happening on the ground. All those bits are collated from press releases/newspaper reports/interviews/TV briefings etc and there are quotes from people across the political spectrum so it’s a genuine first-hand, contemporary record of those crazy early days – a real primary source for posterity.
You’ve said you hoped readers would get angry reading it – can you elaborate?
It’s a strange thing to want from your readership in a sense, but yeah, that’s exactly the intention, although for most readers I assume it’s a given. You would have to be a fucking psychopath, devoid of any human warmth, empathy or feeling if you could read it without feeling shocked, angry, furious, that millions of people are being forced to live in these conditions when we’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century, never mind that the UK traditionally has one of the richest economies in the world. Some of the things I saw would make a snake weep. There’s more than enough money in the country to take care of everyone, it’s just that the majority of it is in the hands of the wrong people. I’ve said this from the outset – if you’re not enraged by what’s going on, you’re part of the problem, and nothing is going to change my thinking on that.
What has been the reception to the book? Why do you think that is?
I think it’s struck a chord because in a way it’s the story of our times. The strapline is poverty and the pandemic, but to me it’s a book about what a fucking catastrophe the last twelve years of Tory government has been, and those two things are only a part of the narrative. There’s so much anger in the country right now, and rightly so; since Cameron we’ve had Austerity, Brexit, and now the current cost-of-living crisis, and you can lay it all on the doorstep of the government, no matter how much they protest to the contrary. Boris Johnson will go down as one of the worst PMs in history, but people should never forget that Cameron was responsible for the Brexit referendum, and that him and Osborne introduced Austerity and all the misery that brought too. A lot of water’s gone under the bridge since then, but it’s impossible to understate how instrumental their role was.
I think increasing numbers of people are waking up to the fact that the UK is riddled with endemic, systemic, socio-political and economic structural inequalities that favour few but the very, very rich. That’s nothing new, but it’s becoming something a lot more people are conscious of, partly because the current government is so fucking venal they don’t even bother to try to hide it. Corruption has been normalised to the point that a story about a company connected to a Tory peer trousering two hundred million quid off the back of a referral from her can just vanish from the news in a couple of days, and I think that people are incredibly pissed off by it all. It’s one thing knowing that the government is corrupt – most governments are -, but having it shoved in your face, daily, is another thing entirely. There’s something very eschatological about where we’re at now and the government embody it; it’s like the uber-rich are having one last cash-grab before it all goes to hell, as if all the money in the world is going to save them when the planet dies, but that’d be a whole other book if I got started on that…….
Ghost Signs shows in detail the effects of all the above, with some context and analysis about how we got here, and it feels like the text encapsulates so much of what people already know is wrong. The current resurgence of the trade unions is indicative of this too; I think the general feeling for years has been that unions as a force for national change were more or less neutralised by Thatcher in 1984/5, but they’re back with a vengeance now, and thank fuck for that. The fact that so many of them are coming out at the same time is massive, and it’s a sign of where we’re at that so many people back them, which means the traditional Tory divide and rule policy of trying to turn public opinion against people fighting for their rights won’t work, because thankfully the majority of people can see that the unions are right.
My intention when writing Ghost Signs was to put a human face on the stats. Anyone can do a Google search and find out that 14.5 million people in the UK live in poverty, but without relating this to real lives it’s just a numbers game, so I think that’s had a big impact too, the human element. There’s been a scandal recently about mould in homes after the death of Awaab Ishak in Rochdale; black mould is a central, recurrent motif in Ghost Signs – it’s everywhere - , and yet it’s taken the death of a toddler to put it on the national radar. That’s tragic (and fucking scandalous), but demonstrates perfectly what happens when you take it out of the abstract – if you’d printed a pictogram saying x% of rental properties contain black mould, people can read that and register on a conceptual level that it’s a bad thing, but as soon as you have an individual story to hang it on, especially when children are involved, people care a lot more because it moves away from the maths to a place where they can empathise and connect on a human level. That’s what I was trying to do with the book, and it’s succeeded in that sense. There are certain incidents that I get asked about at literally every single event I do, and that shows the power of personalising, or personifying, the data.
Ghost Signs hasn’t had a huge amount of coverage in the press, but the places that have featured it have given it an audience it would have been much slower to reach otherwise. Prospect magazine published some extracts of it the same month it came out, and it was also reviewed in Tribune and New Statesman. Off the back of that I have a lot of contact from academics and political/social thinkers, and I’ve been invited to do events with think tanks, MPs and things like that as a result. It’s also being taught on some university courses already because it’s seen as a social document, and a historical one too. I saw a piece in which a reviewer said they’d recommend it to any student developing ethnographic research about current British society so that shows the kind of academic audience it’s reaching and at the moment it seems like this is where it’s gaining the most traction.
Even before it was published it was compared to The Road To Wigan Pier, and while I’m in no way equating myself to Orwell, it’s easy to see the parallels. If you want a snapshot of exactly what life was like for the first two and a half months of the pandemic, it’s pretty much all there, first hand, as it was documented at the time, and I think that people are seeing that already. Someone on Twitter described it as an “anti-gaslighting” device, in that it’s a primary source of information people can refer to if the government’s long-promised Covid enquiry ever happens and the inevitable revisionism starts, which it already has with the Hancock diary. It would be brilliant if someone could read the books side by side and compare the narratives, but no one’s done it as yet. I’ll definitely be pitching it when Johnson’s account comes out though.
Do you have any personal experience of poverty? If so, how did it affect you?
I come from a small-town, northern working class family and we didn’t have much money when I was growing up. My dad’s from a council estate and my grandparents lived on it for most of their lives. I don’t think people always realise that there are different gradations to poverty – not everyone who grows up poor experiences abuse, or drugs, or literal starvation – there are so many different degrees. People speak of ‘the working class’ as if it’s a homogenised mass (the great unwashed!) but it’s not the case – everyone’s circumstances are different.
I didn’t grow up in the kind of extreme poverty I wrote about in the book; my family were a couple of steps removed from that, but my parents had a hard time when I was growing up. I remember kids at school wearing designer sportswear ripping the piss out of me schlepping round in third-generation hand me downs and clothes that didn’t fit from my cousin who was four years older than me; or like when everyone was wearing shell suits which were way too expensive for us, so my folks bought a load of hooky ones from Clitheroe Market one Sunday and they were so obviously fake (and fell apart in a few weeks) I got slaughtered at school for that too. Wearing shoes that were miles too big for “growing room” cos my folks couldn’t afford to keep buying new ones, all that sort of stuff. They lived wage to wage – by Wednesday the cash would be thin on the ground and my mam and godmother would go into town and have to split a loaf of bread and a stone of spuds cos neither of them could afford to buy them on their own. People laugh when I tell them now and a lot don’t believe me, but I didn’t even know what pasta was until I was about fourteen. We never went without anything but when I was young I struggled to understand why I couldn’t have a lot of things the other kids took for granted, and because there’s so much pressure for children to conform, the other kids couldn’t understand why I didn’t have all those things so I was made to feel different because of it, and that stays with you, I think. There’s a shame (and guilt) attached to it, and fear too, the fear of having nothing. It teaches you to be frugal, but it never ever goes away.
A lot of my friends grew up far worse – one of my best mates lived over the road from my gran on the estate and they were the ones robbing their own gas meter, fighting in the street with the coppers, alcoholic, abusive mam and all that, and the eldest – who ended up becoming my best mate and singer in my band years later – died as a result of chronic mental health problems related to so much childhood trauma. I remember seeing one of my friend’s mum’s hit him over the head with a glass bottle before school once; There was never violence in my house, but culturally that kind of thing has always been around me. Another good mate of mine when I was at high school was addicted to heroin at the age of fourteen and tried to stab his dad and that’s the same – drugs and alcohol are part of the fabric of everyday life.
It's interesting at events when people ask along the lines of, wasn’t it very traumatic for you doing that work for so long? Well yes, it was, in the sense that standing in front of someone who breaks down at the sight of food and tells you they haven’t eaten for days, or seeing a child dance with joy because you’ve brought them a packet of biscuits, is incredibly upsetting and something you’ll never, ever forget; but if you’re asking after my welfare having read the stories in the book, you’re worrying about the wrong person; however upsetting it may have been, I was witnessing and reporting on what millions of people endure every single day and that’s the problem, not whether or not it was hard work for me and the other drivers. The other thing is the question almost always comes with an insinuation of, how terrible for you having to work with all those rough people, and that really bugs me, firstly because it shows that even people who think they’re liberal and are there to hear me speak about these issues can subconsciously buy into the lazy, destructive stereotypes perpetuated by the media about people who live in poverty; and secondly because the questioners, who are always white and middle-class, don’t realise that in terms of background, upbringing and cultural reference points, I am way, way closer to the people in the book that I am to them. There’s this subtext of, it’s not like that for people like us; but there is no ‘people like us’ in this case – again, it’s making assumptions about my background based on what they see in front of them. No one in my family had ever stayed at school post-16, never mind gone to university – I was the first, and only one, so far. My old man left school at thirteen to go to work, and he’s only read one book in his life – mine – but because I do a fairly senior job in libraries, have published a book and can speak articulately in public people automatically think I come from the educated middle class.
What were the main things you learned about poverty in today’s UK – and the people living it – from your work delivering food parcels during the pandemic?
The main takeaway for me was realising the vast scale of the problem, and how totally disenfranchised people are. I’ve worked with vulnerable communities for a long time, so it’s not like I wasn’t aware that this is happening; but terms of scale, you have to bear in mind that I was one of a team of maybe thirty or forty drivers, and that the book only covers nine weeks of deliveries, when I actually did the job for nearly six months. We’re not talking about the odd isolated incident of extreme poverty – it was multiple times a day, for months on end; there were scores of people I delivered to in the nine-week period the book covers alone that didn’t even make it into the final version. I’ve said this a lot, but every driver who worked on the project could have written their own version of the book, filled with completely different stories, so if you think how many deliveries the team made collectively over that summer, the numbers soon start stacking up.
And it’s not something that’s specific to Leeds, or even just the north, as some would have you believe – it’s happening in Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow – you name it. All the major cities, and a lot of the towns too, not to mention the issue of rural poverty, which very few people ever talk about because in many ways it’s hidden from view, but it’s no less bleak, and there are even fewer support services there to help. The extent of it is mind-blowing when you think about it like that, but it’s a prerequisite of Capitalism; the system depends on the poor at the bottom propping up the rich at the top. That’s how it’s always been, but the wealth gap is wider now than it ever has been before and the numbers are snowballing. I’ve even been contacted by people in other countries – especially the US – who’ve read the book and said they see the same things happening over there, albeit in a different milieu. Urban poverty looks different here to rural poverty, and poverty in the US looks different again, but the basic fact is that too many people worldwide don’t have the money to take care of themselves while a miniscule amount of people have more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes. That’s global Capitalism, and that’s what’s destroying society, and the planet too.
One thing I wasn’t prepared for was the way some people reacted to us when we turned up. The majority of people were very, very grateful for the service and told us so, but even within that people were often wary at first; there were occasions when it looked like it was going to get violent, and I was properly threatened more than once. Not nice, but understandable when you think how marginalised these communities have become and that’s what I mean about them being disenfranchised. They’re stashed away in 21st century ghettoes and as a result the communities are totally insular, almost hermetically sealed in a social sense; anyone or anything that is not of them is a kind of Big Other, to be feared and hated and that’s where the aggression comes from. When they see someone in a council van turn up, they’re thinking, what does this gadge want? Last time they came round they evicted the guy over the road, or they came to look at the broken windows next door and said they wouldn’t fix them until they could prove that the damage was accidental, or whatever. They can’t imagine you’d be there to help. It’s fight or flight, and they’ve got nowhere to run to so they might as well come out swinging. Anyone who represents any kind of ‘authority’ is not to be trusted, and I can’t blame them for that at all; but the way a lot of people’s first reaction to me knocking on the door was to be hostile, suspicious, aggressive – that took me by surprise at first and I don’t mind admitting it.
What are the biggest misconceptions about poverty in Britain today in your view?
There are a lot of these, and most of them aren’t new, but here are some of the main ones:
1. Everyone living in poverty is on benefits; this is simply not true – latest stats show that 68% of households below the poverty line have at least one working adult. This figure will rise exponentially over the next year and probably beyond; it’s unlikely that the narrative will change though, because of the toxic role of the mainstream media, but I’ll talk about that later. You also have to consider how the labour market has been shifted in a direction that makes work ever more precarious, how the resultant lack of job security is used as another stick to beat workers and tell them they should be grateful for their jobs. In The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressel wrote about a group of painters and decorators who never know from day to day who’s going to work. Every morning, they turn up, hoping it’s their lucky day. Those that are chosen to go on a job get paid, and so their families eat; the rest go home with empty hands, empty pockets and empty bellies. That book was written over a hundred years ago and those conditions persist – it’s just that now we’d say those workers were on zero hours contracts and should be grateful to be ‘employed’, even though they don’t know when their next shift is coming from. It’s another insidious way that Capitalism keeps people in check; the precarious work market has conditioned people to accept working in a state of permanent instability; short-term contracts, periods of work followed by periods of unemployment, just like it was for Tressel’s characters, which makes any kind of future planning impossible, and there’s no way to save when wages are low, prices are high and job security as a concept has vanished. We’ve been trained to be slaves to ever-decreasing wages, but cowed by fear of losing even those. It’s like someone telling you to dig your own grave and forcing you to smile while you’re doing it.
2. People in poverty could change their circumstances if they wanted to. The idea that poor people need to work harder to better their position in life is fucking offensive. No one works harder, for less reward, than poor people; here’s a hospital cleaner working twelve hour shifts, five days a week, of back-breaking labour for shit pay. The idea that they aren’t working hard enough is crazy. Take a second job? How, when they’re doing sixty hours a week and they’ve a family at home? Get a better paid one? When do they have the time to look, or the energy to fill in an application? Poverty is a trauma that never ends, and it passes down through families. On one estate I’ve worked on, you’re into four generations of the same family living on benefits as their sole means of subsistence; I met a 32 year old grandmother at an event there, once. When poverty spans decades like that and whole communities are in the same boat, they don’t see there’s any alternative for them. There’s no aspiration – why would there be? Mark Fisher called it ‘reflexive impotence’; he was writing about the lack of political engagement in some young people, but the point is the same – it’s looking at what you’re up against, shrugging your shoulders and thinking, what’s the point in trying when everything around you says that nothing will help. There’s even a medical condition that’s been named for it – Shit Life Syndrome (“a level of long-standing poverty, family breakdown, lack of stability, unemployment and potential risk factors common to many of the predominately young, working class patients”) – to describe the physical and psychological effects the socio-economic condition of poverty has on individuals. It sounds like parody but it’s not.
3. People in poverty need to learn to budget. No one knows how to budget better than those who have nothing. It’s amazing how politicians can blithely toss out soundbites about money-saving tips when they’re on 80k a year and claiming triple that in expenses. I see things on social media where someone says, you can buy a bag of porridge for a quid a feed a family of four for a week. Those kind of statements show what a dire state we’re in – as soon as you dehumanise people to the extent that someone can suggest they feed themselves with concentration camp rations as if that’s a perfectly acceptable thing to say, you know we’re in big fucking trouble. It’s the endgame of never looking past the numbers, as I said before. You can’t reduce quality of life to a few budgetary calculations indicating the minimum people can live on, it’s crazy – you’re essentially saying you can put a value on a human life, and setting that value at the lowest possible figure that you’ve arbitrarily decided is enough for someone to, not live, but exist on. And for whoever it is saying you can feed a family like that, I’d like to see them look their nursery age kids in the eye and do it for a single fucking day, never mind indefinitely, or see how they’d feel if you stuck them in a mould-ridden, freezing cold flat with a six month baby and no heating, and told them to stop moaning and put another blanket on the cot. The media plays a huge role in this because they reinforce these toxic narratives and enable that kind of thinking. There’s blood on the hands of so many editors and journalists, but none of them will ever cop for it. Or the other old chestnut – they all seem to have enough money to buy cigarettes and alcohol. It’s up to them what they spend their money on, and it’s not for me, or anyone else to judge. Aren’t the working class allowed to enjoy themselves? Or indulge in any kind of escapism? When I was living on benefits because of my mental health, I was wrecked half the time as well, cos I had nothing else to do, and I was fucking miserable. No one who’s not been there is in a position to judge, and those making the judgements are always those least qualified to speak. That old line from Wilde about teaching the poor to be thrifty is like telling a starving man to eat less – applies across the board here.
4. They need to have less children. This neo-Malthusian bullshit is so stupid I shouldn’t even dignify it by talking about it, but it still persists so I’ll have to. If everyone living in poverty stopped having children, they would still be working shit jobs for shit money, living in substandard housing and being exploited, brutalised, degraded and dehumanised in exactly the same way that they are now. One mouth more or less to feed when you’re already flat broke makes no difference whatsoever, and this line of argument about the feckless working class fucking their way into poverty is as ridiculous now as it was when it was first pitched a couple of centuries ago.
How big a role does stigmatization of the poorest in society play in perpetuating poverty?
Gargantuan. It’s fundamental to the whole thing. The mass media is allowed to push falsehoods like the ones above with impunity, because they control the narrative and the press is more or less completely unregulated, or it isn’t regulated in a way that makes a difference, anyway. Papers can present stories as news, opinions as fact, and in some cases print outright lies as long as they know it won’t land them a lawsuit. Even if they’re caught out and forced to retract, a tiny apology at the bottom of a column doesn’t make any difference. Once a claim is in print, it’s fact, regardless of whether it’s true or not, and the damage is done. Supposedly espectable outlets consistently platforming racists and demagogues in the interests of “balance” doesn’t help either. The entire British media landscape has transformed in the last decade – I call it the Trump Effect. There are lots of facets of American society that make their way over here eventually, but the way the whole fake news/alternative facts bullshit was imported so quickly is terrifying.
The media helps politicians to shift the burden of responsibility onto individuals and away from the State, which suits right-wing moguls (who dominate the British media landscape) and the government perfectly, because it preserves a status quo in which they’re all happily coining it in and a good chunk of the electorate doesn’t care about the people who suffer as a result, because they’ve been conditioned to believe that the poor deserve it, or choose to live that way. It’s at least a decade old now, but Owen Jones wrote a book called Chavs, about the demonisation of the working class, and everything he says in there is spot on. Standard divide and rule tactics that Tories have been using forever.
How can we challenge stigma and the demonization of people in poverty?
Honest answer, and this is incredibly depressing, is I don’t think we can in a way that will affect meaningful change. People in poverty have always been stigmatised. You go back to the poor laws in the 19th century, the workhouse, all that – that legislation criminalised poverty and it’s the same now. The workhouse was mean to scare people into leading better lives, but of course it didn’t, because the structure of the society they lived in didn’t allow them to. Just as now, the blame is all on the individual and their personal circumstances, not the completely skewed socio-economic structural issues that lead to people living in those conditions. That attitude hasn’t changed, and until there’s better regulation of the press, and something put in place to sever, or at least drastically weaken, the links between media conglomerates and political parties, the narratives won’t change and the stigma will stay. They’ve got us right where they want us in that sense, and that’s scary, especially with the way the government seem keen to curtail whatever bits of freedom the mainstream press have. Citizen journalism like the Byelines network is really important in this sense, and books like mine are trying to change the narrative, but it’s like trying to hear a mouse screaming in a hurricane.
It was speculated that the shared trauma of the pandemic would make the wider population more understanding of poverty – and of the harm that stigma inflicts. What do you think of that as 2023 begins?
It was just that – speculation, and we’re still on square one; I don’t think there’s a whole lot more understanding of it now than there was before to be honest. I’ll qualify that by saying I think there’s more mediacoverage of the issue, but it falls foul of the short-termism and reductive nature of contemporary reporting, so that doesn’t help to foster any real understanding that may change wider perception.
If you knew nothing about it, you’d read the papers and say that the current crisis is caused by Covid and exacerbated by Putin; you might get a hint that Brexit had a hand in it, but you don’t get back much further than that. There’s no room for properly detailed analysis anymore. Organisations like the Resolution Foundation will tell you that this is a perfect storm of interlinked social, political and economic issues that have converged and been compounded by some of the factors I mentioned, but you won’t read that in the papers and you certainly won’t hear it on the news. I did a podcast over the summer for Prospect magazine with Helen Barnard from Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and she said, rightly, that where we’re at now has been in the post for a long time. It wasn’t even caused by Austerity, although that had a huge hand in furthering inequality, in that benefits were cut at the same time that the public services people on low incomes usually rely on for support started to be slashed too, not to mention the fact that the Tory approach to welfare is always punitive not holistic…….They’re trying to tear up the social contract and they’ve made a fucking good job of it so far.
You can talk about the crash of 2008 where we ended up bailing out the bankers responsible and putting ourselves in hock to them for decades while they’re free to start the process all over again – that’s the power of high finance; it drives everything and we don’t seem to be able to live without it, despite the fact that the system is clearly fucked; this was repeated recently with the UK government paying out energy companies to prop up their profits while everyone else is crippled by enormous bills. Gas prices in Europe have fallen to levels around what they were before the Ukraine invasion, but you can bet your arse you won’t see your bills being reduced any time soon.
You can talk about privatisation of essential public utility companies, the selling-off of public housing, how that’s created a buy-to-let paradise and a shady landlord’s wet dream of a market, plus the fact that the entire legal system is geared towards protecting the rights of property owners so tenants have no safeguards to defend them, or legal aid either, since that was cut; there’s the underfunding of the NHS, the deindutralisation that ripped the heart out of so many communities in the 80s which is still being felt……
You can read books and studies about all these issues and how they link together, but even then, you can chase these vectors back through time and space and you’ll never get to ground zero, in a sense – there’s always somewhere else to go. You could say that poverty in the modern sense can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution, but it existed before that too in different forms. Poverty has always been here and until the existing structure is totally overhauled, it always will be. None of this would ever make it into a mainstream news outlet though; The public want simple, neat, black-and-white, cause-and-effect stories, so that’s what they get, and the narrative stays the same. Your electricity bill is high because a madman started a war after a pandemic is a much easier line to spin.
I think the insight that Covid allowed has gone from the minds of the wider public too. During lockdown when people were clapping for key workers it felt as if the intrinsic value of all work was being recognised, that the penny had dropped that, hey, we need the people who clean the toilets, and stack the shelves and drive the trucks etc. Platitudinous bullshit for sure, but at least more people were thinking about it. Now, two years on, we’re told inflation is due to workers asking for higher wages rather than companies passing on inflated costs to consumers; postal and rail workers shouldn’t be greedy as there’s no money to give them a raise, even though shareholders have been paid out millions; and the press are even starting on nurses and other NHS staff now, who are some of the hardest-working and most shockingly under-paid workers around. For the government to say - and editors to push it - that nurses should think about their patients when voting for strike action makes me so mad I could cry. If they gave an iota of a fuck about patient welfare they’d fund the NHS properly instead of demolishing it with funding cuts then slinging mud at the staff who are working in the face of futile odds to keep the whole thing going, but they don’t because this is all part of the plan; blame the staff for breaking the system, sell it off to their mates, and pocket a few quid themselves. Ching ching.
So, despite an increase in awareness, there can be no proper understanding of poverty in the wider public consciousness until the media report on the real issues in a balanced, nuanced way, rather than spouting soundbite propaganda on behalf of whoever is bankrolling their particular outlet. The sad truth is that it’s not likely to happen any time soon though, so the Capitalist gears will keep on churning, greased with the blood of the poor.