The New Poverty

75 years after the Beveridge Report: The shocking extent of hardship in the UK

Right now in the UK, 13 million people live in poverty; one in five children subsist below the poverty line. Figures such as these suggest devastating repercussions for health, education and life expectancy. The new poor, however, is an even larger group than these official statistics suggest, and its conditions are something new to our era. More often than not, these people are the working poor, living precariously and betrayed by austerity.

In The New Poverty, Stephen Armstrong tells the stories of the most vulnerable in British society. He explores an unreported country, abandoned by politicians and stranded as the welfare state has shrunk. Furthermore, as benefit cuts continue into 2018 and beyond, Armstrong asks what will be the long-term impact of Brexit and—on the anniversary of the Beveridge Report—what we can do to keep the giants of indigence at bay.

“Armstrong has gone to Wigan to expose a situation with depressing echoes of Orwell’s day: huge inequalities of wealth, comfort and life chances unaddressed by a government composed of distant, unsympathetic plutocrats and public schoolboys … The reasons for this apparent social shift, this new, ugly, public face of a lumpen proletariat Orwell rarely encountered, are many and complex. Most of them are surveyed in this forceful book. It is powerful stuff.”
—Stuart Maconie, Guardian

“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.”
—London Review of Books

“The private sector has failed. The state has withered. Stephen Armstrong explains why we have reached the tipping point now. So much could very soon be changed for the better, or become much worse.”
—Danny Dorling, author of Inequality and the 1%

“A hard-hitting exposé of the problems and suffering of people who are at the lower end of the pay scale … very much in the mould of George Orwell’s The Road To Wigan Pier and makes for uneasy, but essential reading.”
—Richard Blair, Patron of the Orwell Society

“Back in 1936, Orwell asked why people should live in poverty and despair in one of the richest countries in the world? Now, as this book shows, the cold hand of poverty is back. It is time to ask this government the same question: Why?”
—Mirror

“Defines the state of the nation.”
—Big Issue

“Mixes hard facts with heartbreaking interviews, deploying the latter to give weight to the former and to make their abstractions more devastatingly real … Read this and you’ll realise that now is our time to act.”
—Mark Rappalt, Art Review

“With singleness of purpose, Armstrong constructs a story of the new poverty around impeccable data, attention to lived experience, and heartening examples of resilience.”
—Carol-Anne Hudson, Alternate RoutesStephen Armstrong is a journalist and author. He writes extensively for the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. He also appears occasionally on Radio 4 and Radio 2. His books include War PLC, The Super-Rich Shall Inherit the Earth and The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited.