“Things were getting grim,” says Gary Cavanagh, reflecting on Bradford in the early 1980s. “There was a hell of a lot of unemployment, and people were thrown on the scrap heap.”
Cavanagh was working for Bradford’s claimants union in 1981, helping the city’s poor and unemployed get benefits, when a government report stated that one in 12 dole recipients were defrauding the state. So he and some friends reclaimed this statistic – which they thought was ludicrous – as an identity. “We became the 1 in 12 Club,” he says.
