Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I The Inconvenient Truth: Poverty is Real
- PART II Turning the screw on poor people: shame, stigma and cementing of a toxic poverty narrative
- PART III Flipping the Script: Challenging the Narrative war on the Poor
- Notes
- Selected Further Reading
- Index
1 - Who are these ‘Poor’ People Anyway? Being on the Breadline in Britain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I The Inconvenient Truth: Poverty is Real
- PART II Turning the screw on poor people: shame, stigma and cementing of a toxic poverty narrative
- PART III Flipping the Script: Challenging the Narrative war on the Poor
- Notes
- Selected Further Reading
- Index
Summary
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
Desmond Tutu“When I look at the world today, the first thing that enters my head is that I’ve seen all this before. There is no safety for any of us unless we form a society whereby we respect each other. A government should be for the majority of the people, not for the already endowed.”
Harry Leslie Smith, author and anti-poverty advocate, talking to Project Twist-ItThe poverty trap: struggling to get by in contemporary Britain
It's November 2018. Perhaps the most important mid-term elections in a generation have just taken place in the US in one of the most divisive periods in recent history. In the UK, there is chaos as the deadline for a deal to exit the European Union nears, with that country also riven by profound socio-political fissures. But, in the UK, there is one political story that is somehow managing to break through the thicket of wall-to-wall Brexit coverage to muster some significant headlines. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Philip Alston, has just submitted a scathing preliminary report on the disastrous impact of almost a decade of austerity in the UK on the poorest and most vulnerable.
Following a two-week fact-finding tour of the UK – where he listened carefully to the stories and experiences of people living in financial hardship and who had borne the brunt of the austerity regime introduced by the Coalition government and the gutting of the country's safety net – law professor Alston, with a track record for holding power to account from Saudi Arabia to the UN itself, delivered an unequivocal rebuke of the politicians and policies responsible:
“The experience of the United Kingdom, especially since 2010, underscores the conclusion that poverty is a political choice.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Shame GameOverturning the Toxic Poverty Narrative, pp. 21 - 51Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020