Even before the energy crunch, statistical warning lights were signalling a return to levels of penury we once thought had been consigned to history: in the 2010s, diagnoses of malnutrition in hospital and the official count of rough sleepers both doubled, while the number of food banks skyrocketed.
According to Matthew Desmond – the American sociologist who moved to a Milwaukee trailer park to witness privation close up – “poverty isn’t a line” but “a tight knot of social maladies”, “a relentless piling on” of difficulties. This comes through vividly in the stories uncovered across the UK by reporters I have been working with to illuminate the causes of the poverty crisis and possible remedies. Stories like that of Sandra, a disabled Buckinghamshire woman whose lack of a decent bed aggravated her asthma to the point where her heart briefly stopped; or of Lindsay – 600 miles north in the Orkneys – who lies under sheets damp with condensation feeling not only cold, but also “mad”; or of Sophie in Manchester, Lowri in Blackpool and Yvonne in Tottenham, north London, whose reluctance to tell family and friends about the hunger they face distances them from the very people who could offer support through hard times. Or indeed, tales of the empty days of Francis in Glasgow, which led him to seek comfort in drink, which in turn left him with too little money for the right food, too little iron in his body, and therefore too few healthy red blood cells.
