[short_description]
Includes performance from Darren McGarvey’s (aka Loki) best-selling Poverty Safari
14 million people live in poverty in the UK – over one in five of the population. Incredibly, included in this are eight million working-age adults, four million children and 1.9 million pensioners. 8 million live in families where at least one person is in work. This sums up the devastating direct impact austerity is having on the lives of those most in need, and how it is impacting upon society as a whole. Poverty is becoming more visible with the rising numbers of homeless people sleeping on the streets due to further cuts in benefits coupled with rising house prices and rents, and an alarming lack of mental health provision.
Even though some aspects are visible, unlike the 1930s when millions walked the street looking for work, most poverty in the UK has become invisible, with millions living in terror of credit card bills and potential interest rate rises. Poverty too has become more complex, as have public perceptions and responses. To tackle it in modern times, is it time to look again at how we understand and talk poverty?
Join our guests, Abigail Scott Paul, Stephen Armstrong, Kerry-Anne Mendoza, with host Prof. David Whyte, all passionate campaigners, researchers and writers, for a discussion around the causes, effects and solutions to poverty:
Abigail Scott Paul, Deputy Director Communications at The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, leads on JRF’s work to ‘reframe’ poverty in order to communicate more effectively with stakeholders, help to shift negative public attitudes, and build support for the need to solve poverty in the UK.
David Whyte, is Professor of Socio-legal Studies, Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at Liverpool Universty: In The Violence of Austerity, Vickie Cooper and David Whyte bring together the voices of campaigners and academics including Danny Dorling, Mary O'Hara and Rizwaan Sabir to show that rather than stimulating economic growth, austerity policies have led to a dismantling of the social systems that operated as a buffer against economic hardship, exposing austerity to be a form of systematic violence.
Journalist and author Stephen Armstrong’s The Road To Wigan Pier Revisited looked again at Orwells’ quest to explore poverty in the UK, and to see what had changed. He writes extensively for the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph, Wired and the Guardian.
Kerry-Anne Mendoza is a writer, journalist and social commentator. She is the author of Austerity: The Demolition of the Welfare State and the Rise of the Zombie Economy. She is also Editor-IN-Chief of online newspaper The Canary.
Darren McGarvey aka Loki wrote 2017’s best-selling Poverty Safari: Understanding Anger of Britain’s Underclass. Combining memoir, journalism and polemic to make an argument that even the left – as well as Conservatives – misunderstand the complexity of poverty as it is experienced and that many traditional ideas on both the left and right are dangerously outdated.
The discussion will be followed by a performance from Darren McGarvey’s best-selling Poverty Safari. Blending elements of music, comedy and spoken word to bring to life themes of social mobility, class and identity, this performance will attempt to find a way across the ravine while still retaining your sanity.
