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WINNER OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY PETER TOWNSEND PRIZE 2017 Welcome to Foodbank Britain, where emergency food provision is an increasingly visible and controversial feature of ongoing austerity. We know the statistics, but what does it feel like to be forced to turn to foodbanks for help? What does it take to get emergency food, and what's in the food parcel? Kayleigh Garthwaite conducted hundreds of hours of interviews while working in a Trussell Trust foodbank. She spoke to people like Anna and her 11 year old daughter Daisy who were eating out of date food since Anna left her job due to mental health problems. Glen explained the shame he felt using the foodbank having taken on a zero hours contract. Pregnant Jessica walked two miles to the foodbank because she couldn't afford public transport. This provocative book provides a much needed voice for foodbank users and volunteers in the UK, and a powerful insight into the realities of foodbank use from the inside.
Telling the stories of low-income families, this book exposes the ways that pre-existing inequalities, insecurities and hardships were amplified during the pandemic in the UK and offers key policy recommendations for change.
This book synthesises the challenges of researching everyday life for families on low incomes during the COVID-19 pandemic to improve future policy and practice.
Poverty and Insecurity is the first book to examine the relationship between social exclusion, poverty, and the labor market. It challenges long-standing and dominant myths about the unemployed and the poor by exploring their lived realities. Work may be the best route out of poverty, but for many people employment does not solve recurrent poverty, with many individuals trapped in a low-pay, no-pay cycle between lowwage jobs and unemployment. Based on unique qualitative and longitudinal research, the book shows how poverty and insecurity have now become the defining features of working life for many.
Mo Stewart is a former healthcare professional, a disabled female veteran and an independent researcher. This book is the culmination of six years of self-funded research and the evidence exposes the influence of corporate America, since 1992, with the future welfare reforms of the UK. The impact of the enforced austerity measures of the UK government is identified, as they negatively affect the welfare and the survival of the chronically sick and disabled population in receipt of welfare benefits when unfit to work. The research has informed welfare reform debates in the House of Lords and the House of Commons since 2011 and contributed to the evidence used by the United Nations to investigate the UK government for breaches of the Human Rights of sick and disabled people. Endorsed by the disabled community and by academics, the research has identified the adoption of lethal social policies, copied from American social security policies, and linked to the death of thousands of the most vulnerable of all, as the UK welfare state is systematically demolished as all planned over thirty years ago by a previous Conservative government.
Scoundrels and Shirkers examines the deep relationship between capitalism and poverty in England since the 12th century. It exposes the dynamics of capitalism, from its origins in the long transition from feudalism to its current crisis under neoliberal capitalism, in producing poverty. The book, unique in the historical breadth of its focus, shows conclusively that poverty is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. In the search for profits and control of society’s economic surplus, capitalism expands, adapts and innovates, producing not only commodities and wealth but also, and necessarily, poverty. With the partial but important exception of the 1945–51 period, and to a lesser extent the time between 1906 and 1914, there has never been a serious attempt to solve poverty. Efforts have always been to manage and control the poor to prevent them from starving or rebelling; to punish and blame them for being poor; and to force them into poverty-level jobs. Any real solution would require the logic of capitalism to be deeply disrupted. While possible in theory, such a change will require massive social movements.
How food pantries stigmatize their clients through a discourse that emphasizes hard work, self help, and economic productivity rather than food justice and equity. The United States has one of the highest rates of hunger and food insecurity in the industrialized world, with poor households, single parents, and communities of color disproportionately affected. Food pantries—run by charitable and faith-based organizations—rather than legal entitlements have become a cornerstone of the government's efforts to end hunger. In Feeding the Other, Rebecca de Souza argues that food pantries stigmatize their clients through a discourse that emphasizes hard work, self help, and economic productivit...
In Defence of Welfare 2 brings together nearly fifty short pieces from a diverse range of social policy academics and commentators, policy makers and journalists that focus on developments in ‘welfare’ over the last five years of Coalition Government. Following on from the successful publication In Defence of Welfare, (Social Policy Association 2011) published in response to the government's first Major Spending Review), this second volume reflects on the impact of recent welfare reforms and explores how inequalities in income, wealth and well-being have become firmly entrenched in society. It considers how welfare can and should develop going forward in order to promote a more equal society.
The ‘Bedroom Tax’ has been one of the most contentious aspects of the UK government’s austerity politics. In this book Kelly Bogue provides an authoritative assessment of its social impacts. Harnessing personal stories from one estate, The Divisive State of Social Policy traces the links between Housing Benefit reforms and inequality. It explores issues related to the Bedroom Tax including housing insecurity, poverty and damage to social networks. This is a vivid picture of the sharp end of austerity politics and welfare reform, and gets to the heart of the meanings of home and community in the UK today.
Since 2010 the UK has enacted radical welfare reforms that have led to greater poverty, homelessness, indebtedness, and foodbank use. It has diverged from other European countries experiencing similar economic and social trends, who have not enacted such dramatic cuts and reforms. Until recently, however, the changes proved very popular with the public, who increasingly hated the welfare system and viewed its users as lazy, undeserving, and likely to be cheating. In this book, Tom O'Grady focuses on policies that provide relief from unemployment, poverty, and disability to uncover why Britain's welfare system has been reformed so radically and why, until recently, the public enthusiastically...