Ken Loach

In 2016, a United Nations report found the UK government culpable for 'grave and systematic violations' of disabled people's rights. Since then, driven by the Tory government's obsessive drive to slash public spending whilst scapegoating the most disadvantaged in society, the situation for disabled people in Britain has continued to deteriorate. Punitive welfare regimes, the removal of essential support and services, and an ideological regime that seeks to deny disability has resulted in a situation described by the UN as a 'human catastrophe'. In this searing account, Ellen Clifford – an activist who has been at the heart of resistance against the war on disabled people – reveals precisely how and why this state of affairs has come about. From spineless political opposition to self-interested disability charities, rightwing ideological myopia to the media demonization of benefits claimants, a shocking picture emerges of how the government of the fifth-richest country in the world has been able to marginalize disabled people with near-impunity. Even so, and despite austerity biting ever deeper, the fightback has begun, with a vibrant movement of disabled activists and their supporters determined to hold the government to account – the slogan 'Nothing About Us Without Us' has never been so apt. As this book so powerfully demonstrates, if Britain is to stand any chance of being a just and equitable society, their battle is one we should all be fighting.

“Savage, wise, and witty . . . It is hard to think of a more timely, powerful, or necessary book.”--J. K. Rowling International Bestseller! For readers of Hillbilly Elegy and Evicted, the Orwell Prize–winner that helps us all understand Brexit, Donald Trump, and the connection between poverty and the rise of tribalism in the United Kingdom, in the US, and around the world. Darren McGarvey has experienced poverty and its devastations firsthand. He grew up in a community where violence was a form of currency and has lived through addiction, abuse, and homelessness. He knows why people from deprived communities feel angry and unheard. And he wants to explain . . . So he invites you to come along on a safari of sorts. But not the kind where the wildlife is surveyed from a safe distance. His vivid, visceral, and cogently argued book—part memoir and part polemic—takes us inside the experience of extreme poverty and its stresses to show how the pressures really feel and how hard their legacy is to overcome. Arguing that both the political left and right misunderstand poverty as it is actually lived, McGarvey sets forth what everybody—including himself—could do to change things. Razor-sharp, fearless, and brutally honest, Poverty Safari offers unforgettable insight into conditions in modern Britain, including what led to Brexit—and, beyond that, into issues of inequality, tribalism, cultural anxiety, identity politics, the poverty industry, and the resentment, anger, and feelings of exclusion and being left behind that have fueled right-wing populism and the rise of ethno-nationalism.