Paperback
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The New Poverty
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Paperback (2017)
+ free ebook
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Ebook
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We are living in an age with unprecedented levels of poverty. Who are the new poor? And what can we do about it?
Today 13 million people are living in poverty in the UK. According to a 2017 report, 1 in 5 children live below the poverty line. The new poor, however, are an even larger group than these official figures suggest. They are more often than not in work, living precariously and betrayed by austerity policies that make affordable good quality housing, good health and secure employment increasingly unimaginable.
In The New Poverty investigative journalist Stephen Armstrong travels across Britain to tell the stories of those who are most vulnerable. It is the story of an unreported Britain, abandoned by politicians and betrayed by the retreat of the welfare state. As benefit cuts continue and in-work poverty soars, he asks what long-term impact this will have on post-Brexit Britain and - on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1942 Beveridge report - what we can do to stop the destruction of our welfare state.
Reviews
a hard hitting expose of the problems and suffering of people who are at the lower end of the pay scale and therefore at the mercy of those who wish to take advantage. This book is very much in the mould of George Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier and makes for uneasy, but essential reading.
‘A visceral experience, punching through the layers of rationalisation, ignorance and self-interest separating those who live comfortably from those who don’t. . . The outstanding feature of The New Poverty is Armstrong’s persistent effort to connect local experience and action the systematic context in which poverty is not only thriving but also taking increasingly sinister forms’
With singleness of purpose, Armstrong constructs a story of the new poverty around impeccable data, attention to lived experience, and heartening examples of resilience.