The New Poverty

“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 Routes