Elsie’s tragic tale cut through to the public in a way that statistics could not, despite some of the numbers pointing to a resurgence of almost-Victorian aspects of want. Rough sleeping, for example, has shot up by a quarter in a single year. There has been a “significant decrease” in the average age of death in deprived neighbourhoods. The government’s annual poverty figures have just recorded a million more sinking below the breadline and in the same data, released within 24 hours of the fastest food inflation since 1977, officials for the first time ever deemed it important to tally foodbank use.

And yet even the best-intentioned people can simply glaze over at figure-heavy headlines about Britain’s cost-of-living crisis. But if numbers are prone to being ignored, anecdotes can be unrepresentative. To paint a credible portrait of Britain’s new penury, therefore, we need to grapple with statistical tables and personal stories alike — with the quantity and the quality of poverty. I’ve dedicated the last few months to that, working with reporters who are lending an ear to the communities that many politicians would rather ignore.

They have heard tales of bitter hardship that wouldn’t be out of place in a Charles Dickens novel, or in the reporting of George Orwell and J.B. Priestley. In many ways, Britain’s new poverty is much like the old. The street urchins in Dickens’s London and the impoverished mill workers in Engels’s Manchester would be familiar with many of the experiences described by the testimony collated in Broke. The brute privation some describe — the bite of the cold, the gnawing of hunger, the terror of ending up without a roof over their head — would have been shared by many Victorian Londoners. The shock is to find such conditions resurgent in a post-industrial society incomparably richer than that chronicled by Dickens.

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By Cal Flyn

Our society may have grown too wealthy to fear mass undernourishment on a 19th-century scale, but our decade could still, like the 1840s and 1930s, earn the unhappy moniker “the hungry” Twenties. A hundred and fifty years after George Eliot likened poverty to leprosy in Middlemarch, on the basis that “it divides us from what we most care for”, a trip to a Tottenham foodbank reveals how poverty can alienate people from those dearest to them. Yvonne, a 63-year-old former social worker with a degenerative spinal condition, still refuses to let her four adult children know that she is struggling, and so cuts herself off from what should be her support network.

Such hardship gets under an individual’s skin and sometimes breaks the spirit. Staff at a GP practice in a run-down part of Glasgow which features in the book affirm how often such thoughts turn into deeds in their part of the world: overdoses and suicides routinely cut grotesquely short the lives lodged in their books.

Despite continuity with the past in the nature of poverty, a lot of the numbers concerning Britain’s current poverty crisis today are decidedly novel. From the Victorian “poor house” through to the Beveridge report, the problem of poverty in the past was — overwhelmingly — a problem of old age. No longer. Pick a pensioner at random and they are markedly less likely to be in poverty than someone plucked from the general population. In her hardship, Elsie has become the exception, not the rule.

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The flipside of ameliorating conditions for older Britons has been tanking fortunes for others. The total number of children growing up under the poverty line, which was falling around the turn of the century after Tony Blair and Gordon Brown vowed to eradicate the problem, is rocketing back to its Nineties peaks. The official tally is now just 100,000 short of the 4.3 million record, and once the rear-view-mirror data catches up with the energy crunch, it could scale shameful new heights. The link to specific cuts is getting starker, too. Take the “two-child policy”, a crude attempt to discourage cash-strapped parents from having kids, driven through soon after the Conservatives won single-party power in 2015, which ends up punishing third and fourth children by denying them support. Sure enough, according to Whitehall’s latest numbers, families with three or more children are now twice as likely to have resorted to foodbanks as their smaller counterparts.

Children aren’t the only ones affected. Disabled people, thanks to cross-party reforms from the Seventies, were rarely doomed to destitution. That is, until recently. Following a series of restrictions and freezes, a colleague and I calculated that single disabled people were roughly four times more likely than the non-disabled to be falling behind with their bills, six times more likely to be growing cold, and nine times more likely to be going hungry.

Given the drift of Britain’s demographics, the “new poverty” is inevitably somewhat more diverse than the old — but it is, perhaps, surprising to learn quite how far it skews. A lot of the political discussion, and a lot of very good reporting, has concentrated on England’s “left behind” coastal towns and ageing industrial towns, both of which tend to be white. But if we just concentrate on the hard finances, rather than a vaguer sense of malaise, all of the country’s main ethnic minority groups still suffer from consistently higher poverty rates than the white majority. For some, like British Indians, the gap is these days small; for others — like Bangladeshis and Black Caribbeans — the excess risk of poverty remains double or more. Meanwhile, for a large and growing band of migrants, the “no recourse to public funds” rule frequently spells automatic destitution.

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Another break from the past concerns work. There is a particular irony here, given the way the austerity assault on the welfare state was sold as necessary to safeguard the toiling taxpayer. But the rhetorical binaries between “grafters” and “grifters” are ever-less plausible. Over the 2010s, there was a remorseless rise in the relative weight of working poverty: setting pensioners aside, less than half of poor adults lived in a “working household” back in the mid-Nineties; that same proportion steadily rose to 68% by 2019-20.

Can the poverty tide be reversed? We could learn from past success. Pulling the elderly out of poverty did not happen by accident: the change was the result of both successful social policy choices (including controversial means-tested support) and supportive private institutions (notably workplace pensions). There are questions about how sustainable the settlement is, and indeed pensioner poverty is just starting to creep back up. It’s also true that special political factors — a large and growing electorate of pensioners who reliably turn out to vote — helped unlock higher public spending in this field after the Turner Commission reported in 2005.

But these caveats should not distract us from remains an almighty, historic triumph. We should pore over the progress on pensioner poverty, and figure out how to replicate it. Many activists exhibit a weakness: the “despondency problem” sharply defined by the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond as being “fluent in the language of grievance and bumbling in the language of repair”. To shrug off the ancient belief that poverty is inevitable, and build faith in change, we must shout about success where we can point to it.

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At the same time, the average voter needs to care about poverty. This isn’t always a given. The uncomfortable truth, as Desmond heavily underlines, is that it flows from a system which in some respects serves the majority’s self-interests: the flipside of gnawing insecurity for gig economy workers is, for example, convenience for the consumers.

But one feature of 21st-century hardship may help the cause: namely, a disturbing sense of the boundary between the supporters and the supplicants of life getting blurred as the big squeeze goes up the income ladder.

UnHerd’s own polling underlines this point, with 62% of Brits now agreeing with the statement: “I worry about affording the necessities, such as food and energy.” When those findings are projected across the political map, every constituency across the land registers at least a modest majority in this position. This is the backdrop to the stories of two women we uncovered in Manchester: Phoebe, an increasingly indebted debt advice worker, who admits she’s too scared to commit her own finances to paper; and Sophie, a foodbank volunteer, who one day found she had no choice but to become a foodbank user.

Such tales are palpably disturbing. But they could also provide a chance to reset the debate. The missing ingredient in Britain’s conversation about poverty has been empathy — the poor are talked of as a different species, away on Benefits Street. As ever-more voters feel the pinch, the mood could change. Newly exposed, the majority might be persuaded to repair the holes that austerity has cut in the safety net. Then perhaps we might make progress towards fixing what is currently broke.

There are radiators. They work, and she puts them on. But the house doesn’t seem to get any warmer. This winter, she says, the temperature inside her house hovered between 10 and 12°C — well below the recommended domestic temperature range of 18 to 21°C. Every minute, as those heaters exude their vanishing warmth, the bills are ticking up, up, up. Currently, she says, it costs her between £10 and £15 a day to heat the little house — or to not heat it, which is what it really feels like she’s doing.

Lindsay suffers from chronic pain, one symptom of the fibromyalgia that impacts her ability to work, and the cold exacerbates her condition. Recently, she told me, it’s all become too much. She’s in crisis. Watching her money run out as she sleeps under a duvet that seems wet to the touch — it feels like more than anyone should have to cope with. She’s not sure that she can anymore.

When money is tight, all winters are bad winters. But at the turn of 2022-23, after energy costs soared, more Britons than ever have been facing hard choices and cold beds as they struggle to get by while wages stagnate and prices soar. From October 2021 to October 2022, domestic gas prices increased by 129% and electricity by 66%, according to data from the UK government; the average annual energy bill has increased almost 96% over the same period, to £2,500.

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Scotland's poor are left to die

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With some fanfare, Liz Truss’s short-lived regime offered a “guarantee” that the energy price cap would not rise any further for households for at least another two years. Rishi Sunak’s administration soon rowed back on that — although the Budget earlier this month did extend the energy price cap for three more months, until June. As for the new SNP leader Humza Yousaf, who is now staring at a £1.5 billion black hole in the national budget according to the Scottish Fiscal Commission, fuel poverty in Scotland’s coldest rural regions presents a significant financial challenge. All this uncertainty has left Lindsay, and those who have suffered similarly difficult winters, with little idea about what help they will or won’t be entitled to in the future.

Those living in rural Scotland are under singularly intense pressure. Because the price cap and associated guarantees apply to unit cost, not the total bill, bills will often end up more than £2,500 in households requiring higher consumption to maintain a decent temperature. And for any homes where the main energy source is anything other mains gas or electricity, nothing is capped or guaranteed. Nearly 90% of homes in Na h-Eileanan Siar (also known as the Outer Hebrides) and 100% of homes in Orkney and Shetland are not connected to the mains gas grid, forcing residents to use more expensive and uncapped options such as bottled gas or domestic heating oil.

In Autumn 2022, Energy Action Scotland published an analysis that showed residents of some Scottish council areas — Na h-Eileanan Siar, Shetland, and Argyll and Bute — have seen bills rise to more than £4,000 a year. A huge outgoing when you consider that the median Scottish household income is £27,716. Partly these higher bills are a function of the harsher climate — those raging gales that blow in off the sea, battering the rooftops and bringing a bitter windchill for days at a time. But partly, too, it is linked to a poorer standard of housing; rural houses are less likely to be well insulated.

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Lindsay’s experience underlines what the statistics tell us: cold homes are associated with both mental and physical illness. Long-term exposure to the cold increases the risk of respiratory and circulatory illnesses, as well as exacerbating the symptoms of chronic conditions such as arthritis, diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Issues of damp and mould, common in poorly insulated and cold homes, are associated with asthma and respiratory infections, especially in children. The death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak due to breathing difficulties in a mouldy Rochdale flat, which inspired much soul-searching in England after the 2022 coroner’s inquest, occurred on the winter solstice in 2020.

“Physiologically,” Dr Raquel Nunes, an assistant professor of public health at Warwick University, told me, “the body will try to compensate for the cold. What happens is that the blood becomes thicker, and that can cause clots.” The clots can then cause heart attacks or strokes. “Cold also affects the ability of the body to fight infection. That increases the probability of common colds, flu, and other diseases.”

Unheated houses also have insidious effects on mental health. The fear of being unable to keep your family warm is a major source of anxiety. Those in fuel poverty often limit socialising — either because they stop inviting people to their homes, or simply go to bed early to keep warm under the blankets.

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This rings true to Miranda, a woman in her early thirties who lives with a dog and a cat in a row of old farm workers cottages near the Dornoch Firth, in the northeast Highlands. She lives with complex health problems and as a result has been “medically retired” for some time and must rely on disability benefits. This has left her in dire financial straits. Hers is an old stone cottage, “only a small two-bedroom”, but though well-built it’s not good for retaining warmth. “It costs £15 a day to heat. I can’t afford that.” The cold, and the aches and anxiety that come with it, is “definitely having an effect on my head,” she says. Her depression, she says, is “horrific”. She just cannot see how she’s going to get through the next year.

As winter set in last year, new research confirmed that when people’s homes become cold, the danger of severe mental distress significantly increases. Data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study reveals that the risk doubles among those who have not previously suffered mental health problems; it triples for those who have previously suffered even minor symptoms. Those with underlying psychiatric disorders are also more likely to die or be admitted to hospital during periods of extreme cold.

Miranda’s problems are, unfortunately, increasingly common. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that nearly a third of low-income households — more than 3 million of them — were already unable to adequately heat their homes in early 2022, before the impact of the energy price crisis were fully felt.

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If the problems are distinctly intense in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, its people are also turning to one distinctive solution. Recent reports point to residents in the Western Isles, Caithness and Orkney reverting to traditional methods, cutting and drying more peat to use as fuel over winter; neat stacks of drying peat bricks line up along the road-sides all through Lewis and Harris. In January 2023, Press and Journal, the newspaper of the Highlands, carried an interview with Uist crofter Anne MacLellan, who had “got peat on the fire just now” as she talked, despite having “never heated her home with peat” in the past. She felt a “massive conflict” in light of the grim environmental consequences of disturbing and burning this carbon sink. But the quarter of Anne’s wage that was disappearing in energy bills each month was simply too much to bear.

Those in urban areas have different tactics — spending more time on public transport and other public spaces where they are not on the hook for keeping warm. All over the country, churches and community centres have opted to open their doors to those in need of a warm place to go. The Warm Welcome campaign maintains online listings of “warm banks” across the UK. There are more than 4,000 such hubs now open to the public — including synagogues, Salvation Army halls, pubs, and arts centres — their proliferation attesting not only to a remarkable generosity of spirit across civil society, but also to the extent of the crisis we now face.

Even those in full-time work are not exempt. Liam is a joiner and part-time gamekeeper who lives with his partner Rochelle and her teenage daughter in Dingwall, a market town around 30 minutes’ drive from Inverness. After finally managing to get together a deposit after years of saving, they bought a house — which when we spoke they were on the cusp of moving into — just as the cost-of-living crisis came to bite.

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He gets a good wage, he says. And Rochelle works too, in an outdoors shop, albeit on a zero-hours contract. But even so — he runs the figures in his head as we talk — almost a quarter of his salary goes on energy, which works out at around £350 a month. Until recently, in their rented house, they were able to avoid turning the heating by burning offcuts he brought home from work in a wood-burning stove. In the new house they won’t have that option: “We’ll grudge pushing that button.”

They feel fortunate, relatively speaking. But the couple are not immune from the pressures. It’s visible all around them, etched into the faces of their Highland neighbours. “There’s no spirit,” Liam says, “everything has gone. It’s bleak. Very bleak. No one wants to enjoy themselves — there’s no going down the pub for a couple of pints, or having drinks with the girls. People think: that’s three days’ heating.”

He and Rochelle are made of stoic stuff. They’ve been through hell and back, he says — both are previously divorced, and lost family members in upsetting circumstances. Money worries are nothing new. They talk about it, figure out a plan. Such is the picture in homes across the UK: couples sitting down to crisis talks; single parents checking their balance, turning down the heat. The black dog at the door. For many people, it is all too much to bear. 

***

This piece was from a longer essay in Broke: Fixing Britain’s poverty crisis (Biteback Publishing), edited by Tom Clark. Additional reporting by Laura Beveridge.

“It has been shown that if those extra 100,000 people had lived to a ripe old age, they would’ve cost us even more in pensions and social security than they did in medical treatment. So financially speaking, it’s unquestionably better that they continue to die at about the present rate!”

Anyone who’s worked in the National Health Service for more than a few months would, depressingly, recognise this kind of equation.

Those episodes were first broadcast in 1986, when the tobacco tax generated £4 billion in revenue for the government and smoking-related diseases did indeed cost the NHS £165 million a year. Last year, the tobacco tax raised £8.7 billion for the government — but smoking-related illnesses cost the UK healthcare system £2.5 billion per annum. Nevertheless, a smoking ban has never been seriously considered. Behind the gallows humour at the heart of Yes, Prime Minister lies a bleak fact: the state is happy to kill off the weak to balance the books, or even make a profit.

This cavalier attitude to death rather defined the Government’s attitude to the pandemic, as it spread through hospitals and was encouraged into care homes, pushing the NHS to breaking point. In hospitals, we’re battling it still. When Omicron started spreading at the end of last year, we were told it wasn’t as dangerous as previous variants — but that might just have been because patients and the public were more vigilant. Now, vigilance has waned. With most Covid mitigation measures nothing but a memory, hospitalisations could spiral out of control again. And it’s now predicted that, because of a lack of exposure during lockdown, flu deaths will be very high this year. This winter, according to The Lancet the return of influenza as a major public health issue appears “inevitable”.

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Don't go to A&E

By Emma Jones

Then factor in the cost of living crisis. People are not going to be able to heat their homes. People are not going to be able to put food on their tables. People are not going to be able to put fuel in their vehicles to go to work to earn money. People are not able to afford prescriptions. People are going to have to choose whether to feed themselves or their children. Isolated, vulnerable people are going to be more isolated and more vulnerable. Abused people are going to be more abused. 

Emergency departments throughout the country are starting to seem Dickensian. I routinely see patients admitted with combinations of multiple problems: severe respiratory illness, loss of sphincteric function, terrible hygiene and general self-neglect. Paramedics are having to wear specialist kit to cope with lice, scabies and faecal matter — and incinerate patient property in keeping with protocols.

All of this will put immense pressure on the NHS — which is in a terrible position to deal with any of it. After a recent bout of Covid (yes, even doctors get it) left me utterly drained, I dragged myself into my department because — like the rest of the NHS — it is suffering from unprecedented staff shortages. A staggering 40,000 nurses have quit in the past year, many due to stress and poor pay. (Those remaining are deciding whether to strike.) Resignation rates far outstrip recruitment. Sick leave, meanwhile, is running at an all-time high, with some 60,000 healthcare and social care staff suffering from Long Covid. Working conditions for those working are verging on untenable.

The A&E department where I work is representative, in that it is falling apart. Ambulances get stuck outside for hours. There is no patient flow, and therefore no capacity; there are not enough GP appointments, so problems aren’t treated early and people show up on our doorstep far more seriously ill; and there is a dearth of community services. In the past two years — since before the second lockdown — I have seen more severe cases than in the rest of my career. Recently, I had a patient who had telephoned his GP complaining of a sore arm, which was thought to be a muscular or skeletal problem. In fact, the man had been suffering from angina, and the sore arm was referred pain. The situation soon escalated: he had a massive heart attack. We worked on him in A&E, but to no avail. Had the patient had a face-to-face consultation with his GP, things may well have been different.

This summer, we experienced “excess” non-Covid deaths in the region of 1,000 a week in England and Wales — in other words, far more deaths than would usually be expected for the period. Many of them, it seems, were related to lung, heart and circulatory diseases. Research by The Kings Fund healthcare charity revealed that the pandemic era has seen life expectancy in the UK fall by a magnitude that “has not been seen since World War II”. Second only to the US, the UK’s pre-pandemic life expectancy was lower than in many comparative countries for males, lowest for females. In the first 12 months of the pandemic, it fell by over a year for the former, and just under a year for the latter.

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If deaths this summer were way beyond the average, the prognosis for this winter is bleak, given this lethal cocktail of health and socio-economic issues. According to the Government’s own research, for yet another week, “statistically significant excess all-cause mortality by week of death was observed overall in England” — and autumn has only just begun. The nation is about to be plunged into a winter during which people can’t protect themselves, comfort themselves, warm themselves or feed themselves.

Our hopes rest on a new Health and Social Care Minister, Thérèse Coffey. She is, it’s said, in “listening mode”. She has already made remarks that sound great. Everyone is going to be able to see a GP within two weeks, she says, without explaining exactly how she’ll achieve this. (Currently, some people are unable to see a GP at all.) Coffey has also said that nurses won’t get a pay rise. In fact, she’s advocated working for no money at all, unabashedly calling for a “national endeavour” to support the NHS, which “includes encouraging more volunteering across the health service”.

Coffey has proposed tweaks to the NHS pension rules to “allow” retired staff (who are probably well shot of the health service) to return to work if they want to (why would they?). But why the focus on clinicians at the end of their careers? The General Medical Council (GMC) is reporting that two-thirds of junior doctors are “worn out” at the end of a working day and morale among trainee nurses is at an all-time low. Coffey’s plan should throw them a lifeline; instead, it doesn’t mention them. Our healthcare system is dreadful and dilapidated because of this government’s failure to invest — not only financially but also in terms of the time and brainpower needed to sort out the situation — and the same Government is still failing to do anything meaningful about it.

The cherry on top is the fact that Coffey seems poised to bin its plan to tackle smoking. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that she herself smokes. We live in a world in which “optics” matter — particularly in the socio-political sphere — and Coffey, like Jim Hacker’s chain-smoking, tobacco-lobbying health minister, aren’t good. She’s obese. She drinks. She’s known to be cosy with the tobacco industry. And she’s anti-abortion.

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Still, there are signs that somebody, somewhere in Coffey’s department, understands the most pressing challenge facing departments like mine: one of the priorities in what has been titled “Our plan for patients” is the Adult Social Care Discharge Fund, the aim of which is essentially to free up beds. In my region, we can’t seem to get any patients out the hospital and into social care — because there is no social care. If Mrs Smith on ward seven has her pneumonia treated quickly, and she turns the corner beautifully, and she’s off supplemental oxygen and on oral antibiotics, and all the paperwork has been filled out by the junior doctors for the social care assessment — all that happens is she gets into the queue for social care quicker. The queue gets ever-longer. Mrs Smith remains in hospital.

It is hard for hospital managers and clinicians to remain motivated in the face of this absurdity. Making things more efficient within the hospital doesn’t actually speed up the process of getting patients out of hospital. It just gets them onto these waiting lists quicker.

Even the best British satirists might struggle to lampoon it, so dark is our current situation. The other night, while I was on call, the sister in charge let slip that only one or two beds in the emergency department would free up that evening. This is a continual problem where I work: the number of beds available in any given 24-hour period is always far outnumbered by the number of patients requiring clinical admission. Allocation is a simple mathematical equation. On this occasion, the sister followed up her update with another: “We’re expecting a couple of deaths…”

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In other words, the only way we can get new patients into our emergency department — and the only way we can get existing patients into the community — is if people die. This health “target” unsurprisingly doesn’t get openly discussed. But it’s there, nonetheless, in the back of management’s collective mind, reminiscent of Sir Humphrey declaring, “it’s unquestionably better that they continue to die!”

If this is the NHS’s new normal, and the Secretary for Health and Social Care is happy to accept it, then that’s a sad indictment of her stewardship. But her party sets the tone. We’ve been here before with this government: in April 2021, Boris Johnson said he would rather see “bodies pile high” than take the UK into a third lockdown. The UK currently has a body count of 205,000 Covid-19 deaths, and the Tories seem all too comfortable with this — which doesn’t bode well for the coming winter.

Without adequate support from the Government, the NHS will be forced to keep relying on a shameful, unofficial “beds for death” policy. Staff shortages will snowball. The new generation of clinicians is already battling with severe financial and mental health issues. And they’re not stupid: they know exactly what their employers are depending on, to free up beds. That these young people are trained, pressurised, and ultimately programmed to operate within an NHS that relies on human misery to create capacity is yet another sign of a healthcare system at breaking point. To make a dent in these systemic problems, the service urgently needs money and personnel — not a spate of excess deaths.

What I didn’t expect was a local food bank, which last year gave out more than 5,000 emergency supplies to hungry people. Statistically, Richmond has some of the lowest rates of poverty of any London borough. If there is a food bank here, the Tories are toast.

Last Sunday was our Harvest Festival. We brought hoop spaghetti, toothpaste, and health care products to the altar. At lunchtime, 60 of us sat down in the church hall for shepherd’s pie and trifle, raising several hundred pounds for the food bank. Every spud peeled, every carrot scraped was another reminder of the failure of trickle-down economics. If people are going hungry in an area as posh as this, I don’t give the Tories a sniff of winning the next election.

Not that the food was that appealing at the Tory Party Conference in Birmingham, judging by the looks of those who laboured through their tasteless Starbucks sandwiches. The tone was funereal. They have lost their appetite, not just for bread and cheese, but for government too apparently.

Pacing about those gloomy halls, it was good to see the friendly face of Danny Kruger, MP for Devizes, and, not unrelated to the purpose of my trip, the son of restaurateur and food critic Prue Leith. I told him I was at conference to argue for restoring Britain’s 0.7% aid target: once an international standard of generosity for rich countries. He smiled at me, sympathetically: “Good luck with that.” The Tories had other things on their minds. Much more pressing issues, apparently.

But what could be more pressing than this? “Do we care, do we act, and do we lead? The promise of 0.7% meant that we — Global Britain — answered ‘yes’ to all three,” said David Cameron in 2020. But the current Tory party seems to have forgotten all this precisely at a time when it is most important.

“Growth, growth, growth” intoned the Prime Minister at her conference speech, obviously pleased with herself at presenting so succinctly the holy trinity of Trussian economics. With harvest hymns still ringing in my ears — “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land” — I wondered how her philosophy of growth related to the growth of real living things — being rooted, being fed and watered, being tended. For her, growth seems to be the thing that happens when the gardener, aka the state, stops interfering. But the state of my garden tells me that when you do this, the weeds will always win. It is not insignificant that the people most upset by the bright idea of “economic development zones”, which means tax breaks and planning liberalisation, are those who point out the environmental impact. There is good growth and bad growth.

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To be fair, the Tories can’t be blamed entirely for the current crisis of food insecurity. Putin’s wicked invasion of Ukraine has devastated the breadbasket of Europe. Russians have been deliberately shelling agricultural lands with incendiary shells, burning down crops, using food and hunger as a weapon of war. Because of this — and yes, for other reasons too — 40 million people in the horn of Africa are on the edge of starvation. In many places, fertiliser has become too expensive for the poor to buy, leading to low crop yields. Farmers in Somalia are surrounded by the white bones of their dead cattle. Many have abandoned their fields looking for more fertile lands. But despite their arduous travels, they find the famine wherever they go.

I sat on a panel with Vicky Ford, the new Development Minister and Emma Revie, the CEO of the Trussell Trust, which runs the Richmond Foodbank along with 1,300 others in the UK. A handful of people attended our event. Outside the meeting, groups of young men in the ubiquitous Tory uniform of blue suits and open-neck white shirts walked past at West Wing pace, obviously going somewhere terribly important. But they weren’t coming in here.

I do believe Vicky Ford gets it. She was off to Ethiopia on Tuesday. But there were few answers to the challenges that now face the poorest people in the world. New technology could be leveraged to help, she explained. And the Qatari’s are being very generous too. The Tories have promised that they will return to the 0.7% target once the economy is back on track. “Good luck with that,” I said, perhaps a little too sharply. “Be nice,” replied the Minister. But I am not in the mood for being nice about this. We should be far angrier.

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In 2015, the United Nations launched the Sustainable Development Goals, which aimed to eliminate hunger by 2030. But we are nowhere near hitting that goal: in fact, global hunger levels have risen since 2015. Today, nearly 9% of the world’s population are hungry.

The Harvest Festival looks very different in church these days. Instead of giant leeks and corn dollies, we pile up baked beans in front of the altar. And when we pray “give us this day our daily bread”, we think of combine harvesters in Ukraine dodging enemy tank fire and desperate families trekking across the Sudan, with a child in one hand and a packet of seeds in another.

But we also think of families in Britain struggling to afford their weekly food shop. Hunger has never just been an issue for the developing world, and now that it’s found its way to the door of places like Richmond, the tin-eared Conservative party will finally have to take note. It may be politically convenient to ignore starving children in Sudan, but it’s foolhardy for politicians to turn their backs on a hungry electorate. If the party has any hope of winning the next election, it will have to find itself a moral compass.

I was lying on a sun lounger when a call came through to ask if I would like to take part in The Reunion, a Radio 4 programme bringing together those involved with Occupy to reminisce about the significance of that movement. I wearily declined. Being over 2,000 miles away from the steps of St Paul’s made this an easy decision. But I may have declined anyway. My protesting days are over.

“I have sung Joan Baez’s We Shall Overcome for years, but nothing has changed” was how an old friend of mine expressed the same weariness — not so much a cynical acceptance of the status quo, more a feeling of being beaten down by political reality. Many of the friends I made during the Occupy protest had various sorts of breakdown after the camp was cleared. Some made for the woods to find themselves again, some were burnt out and plunged into depression, others found the emotional wherewithal to reboot their protesting energy, and I admire them for this. We Shall Overcome began life as a Methodist hymn, words taken from the letter of Paul to the Galatians: “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

Protesting, even to the point of civil disobedience, has a great deal of religious energy about it — one might even say Christian energy. It is not insignificant that protester and Protestant share an obvious etymology. In the letter to the Galatians, Paul was exhorting his fellow Christians to place faith above the religious law. His major concern was a distant dispute about circumcision, but the philosophical way he addressed this issue — setting faith and law against each other — has provided a kind of justification for protesters ever since. It makes no difference that this may be a misreading of Paul, whether the target is the government or the Pope, the disruptive energy of Galatians has reshaped the world. So why am I rooted to my sun lounger? Am I not convicted by this inaction, especially as I am slapping on the sunscreen whilst directly facing the Sea of Galilee, a few miles from where all this disruptive energy was first expressed, at least in my tradition?

Yes, there are things about the “spirituality” of the protestor that have come to bother me, not least an overconfidence in what they think of as “doing good” — an overconfidence that can spill over into self-righteousness, that abiding condition of many on the progressive Left. Is it really OK to block the path of ambulances on their way to hospital or people trying to go about their legitimate business? If the cause is weighty enough, the means can be justified. This can provide a dangerous licence to behave badly, the virtue of the cause obscuring an obligation to common human decency. But there again, if the cause is something like the Civil Rights movement and yes, even the Climate Catastrophe, then emergency measures can feel necessary. I wish I knew how to square this circle.

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Back in the late Sixties, the two famous Czech writers, Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, began an ongoing spat about the value and dangers of the protesting mindset with respect to the so-called Prague Spring of 1968. Following a period of liberalisation and democratisation — “socialism with a human face” they called it — the Soviet Union sent half a million soldiers into Czechoslovakia to reverse the changes. Eight months of protest followed: some sabotaged street signs, some set themselves ablaze. Havel admitted that there was no hope, but nonetheless proposed “risky” protest. In a fierce essay called Radicalism and Exhibitionism (1969), Kundra went for the jugular.

“Havel states that no hopes endured, but unlike most people this does not arouse in him resignation or defeatism, but on the contrary a strengthened longing for action. But to what end action, when no hopes endured? … Such action has only a twofold aim: (1) to unmask the world in all its irreparable amorality, and (2) to display its author in all his pure morality.

“In this way what was originally a purely moral attitude (the rejection of the unjust world) has turned into pure moral exhibitionism. The effort to publicly demonstrate the beauty of one’s own morality outweighs the effort to change things for the better…”

I do not want to take a deep dive into Czech politics, but it should be said — contra Kundera — it was protesters and the memory of those who had given their lives during the Prague Spring that kept the energy going and helped topple the Soviet regime in 1989. And, of course, Havel became President. This is the moral dilemma: Kundera has, to my mind, a compelling point about the moral exhibitionism of protest, but Havel seemed to be on the right side of history.

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This same energy of protest is now being focused, not just against those who deny the gravity of the current environmental crisis, but also against the Tories whose indifference to the cost-of-living crisis seems evident to many of us. Around 1,500 people packed Manchester Cathedral on Tuesday evening to protest that “Enough is Enough”, and call for a national day of action on 1 October. Another movement called Don’t Pay UK is co-ordinating a mass non-payment of energy bills and blockades of petrol stations. As a church we are thinking about establishing ourselves as a “warm bank” for local people who may have to choose between food and heating, even in a relatively prosperous place like Kew.

But we want affordable energy and we want environmentally friendly energy — not necessarily a straightforward combination. We want to stand with the people of Ukraine, but we flinch when the Russians turn the gas off. I can’t say I like the look of this coming Tory government and their cold-heartedness towards the poor. But it’s not all about the Tories.

Protest is often a legitimate cry against the detrimental impact of human action towards the world and especially the most vulnerable, but it is not always the best means of providing solutions, especially ones with full democratic legitimacy. “We shall overcome” is not a programme of action.

So am I still the protesters’ friend? I may be tired and still a little burnt out, but I know what I have to say: of course. Because in the end, despite all my Kundera-like pessimism of human nature, I am equally Eeyore-ish about change ever taking place without grassroots political pressure. So perhaps I should lift myself off my metaphorical sun lounger and get back involved. I still feel a little emotionally burned from my experience during Occupy. I too felt the darkness after it ended. And I do still fear the way in which protest can become morally high on its own supply of virtue. But I must get over this debilitating melancholy. Sometimes we have little choice.

When Nathan Finch opened his first pawnbrokers in 2004, he named it after Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers to counter an image that, he insists, no longer haunts his industry. His branch in Dartford, Kent, is on the high street, not in the back alleys. Its red-curtained windows boast a pair of Louboutin stilettos and a Mulberry ostrich-leather handbag. The company – like every other in this industry – is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. And, says Finch, many customers are so grateful for its service in helping to “smooth their cashflow” that they come back with flowers and chocolates for the staff.

But, just as in the 18th century, economic calamity spells boom time for pawnbrokers. Shares in the UK’s largest, H&T, have risen 58% this year. And as inflation hits a 40-year high, the company has reported that “pledge lending” – loans secured against valuables, most commonly jewellery – has reached record levels.

Deidre first visited a pawnbroker four years ago, as all three generations of her family were struggling to make ends meet. She was forced into retirement after breaking her shoulder. Her daughter is a single mother; her son and grandson are both out of work. The 74-year-old bitterly regrets that she had already sold off a necklace — to get £80 to buy her grandson a suit for a job interview — before thinking of pawn. Every piece of jewellery bought by her husband is even more priceless to her since his death last year.

“It’s a bit of a stigma, isn’t it,” she tells me behind bulletproof glass in the Dartford shop’s “privacy booth”. “But when I come in, they really made me feel at ease. They make sure you understand how much, and I always say to them, a couple of times, ‘I want to buy it back! I want to buy it back!’” (At Pickwick, almost 90% of items are redeemed. For men who bring in their own watches, and women their own handbags, it is touching 100%.)

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Today, the pensioner has come in to pawn a gold heart necklace and sapphire earrings, given to her by her late husband for Christmas. She received a loan of £60, and will repay £102 if she waits the full seven months before coming to reclaim it. In an effort to attract more customers, Pickwick adds an extra month on to the minimum statutory period a shop must retain items for before selling them. On a loan of up to £500, it charges a monthly interest of 10% (a representative APR of 149.3%).

“It is quite a high rate,” she says, but she is usually back here within a matter of weeks. “On Monday, when I get my little pension, I try to pay £10 or £20 off and then it’s not so bad.” In any case, she has no alternative. “It’s not enough for a bank loan. I wouldn’t be able to get one because it’s only me, and we’ve always had a bit of bad credit.”

Lorraine is visiting with her young son. She usually only comes in for small amounts — £30 to £60 — to cover the cost of a bit of shopping or the electricity bill. (The average loan here is about £300, paid off within three months; 55% of customers are women.) She works in retail and her husband is a lorry driver, but for the past three years that hasn’t been enough. “It is just for general day-to-day living,” she says wearily. “We haven’t had a holiday for eight or nine years because we don’t have savings.”

Her jewellery, stored in one of three time-locked safes, is so much more than the value of its precious metal. “I actually have my wedding ring and engagement ring in there at the moment,” she confides. How did that feel? “Really hard. But needs must,” she says haltingly, tears forming. “I know, obviously, we will get them back. But at that time, you just need it.”

The first lesson Finch teaches the employees at his eight branches across London and Kent is how much care they must take over each item that is pawned. He holds up a gold band on his ring finger. “I was midway through my A-levels when my mother committed suicide. This ring here is my great-grandmother’s wedding ring. And before my mother took her life, she took that off and left that on the side so that it didn’t disappear in the mortuary. So I use this ring as an example to my staff about how important it is to look after other people’s property. This is very, very important to me and way beyond its monetary value. We’re not buying pawned items; the ownership stays with the customer.”

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If a possession is unclaimed, it has to be sold for its full market value. A pawner cannot be pursued if there is a deficit, while any profit must be returned. Finch describes the transaction as people “borrowing from themselves. If I borrow that same money on a credit card or a bank loan, that’s the bank’s money. I think, during the current difficult economic crisis, people are arming up with their finances. They’re keeping it all controlled so that they know what they’ve got when things get tough.”

There are almost 900 pawnbrokers in the UK, used by 350,000 people a year. One factor in their buoyancy is the demise of payday lenders, such as Wonga (which filed for administration in 2018), leaving few choices for those wanting to avoid a loan shark. Then there is the closure of high-street bank branches, which Finch claims used to start by finding a reason to refuse a loan anyway, while he does the opposite. No-one asks for your credit history or salary here, just ID. About 90% of customers live in a five-mile radius of the store. It is a local, easy-to-comprehend, on-the-day service, offered face to face — something most would struggle to say about their local Barclays or NatWest.

“I know all the staff by name,” says Barbara, who visits a couple of times a month to see her through until payday. “If you go to a bank, they just ask for too much paperwork. And I’d be so embarrassed because they’ve got a job that pays out a lot more than mine and I just assume that people that work in a bank have got money. Here, you’re not looked down on. I don’t even have to say anything. They just say, ‘Do you want your £50 or do you want your £30?’ It’s a way of life for me at the moment. I class them as my bank.”

The 52-year-old mother-of-two works on a supermarket checkout, where there is only one hot topic of conversation, the rising price of bread, milk — and everything else. She has stopped using her car because of the cost of petrol, and has little faith in politicians helping her out any time soon. “We just live every day as it comes. We don’t wait for anything to be gifted to us because it just doesn’t happen.” As for the chilling predictions of where energy prices will reach next year, Barbara says: “I just hope I still have the jewellery to pawn, so that I can still get by.”

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Peek into Pickwick’s safes, however, and it becomes clear that pawning is not only for those on the breadline. One box contains an 18-carat gold African necklace, bracelet, ring and earring set worth £10,000 (typically, a shop will lend about 70% of an item’s value). There is a Rolex deposited for £4,615 by a builder waiting to be paid for a job. A kickboxer redeems his watch only to show off at a fight, before pledging it again. Finch, who wears a bright blue-faced Rolex himself, has loaned on everything from articulated trucks and a Hovercraft to sculptures and a full set of gold false teeth.

He takes pride in going beyond the legal requirements placed on him — sending texts when the loan is due to expire and printing out pink “Early settlement schedules” that give customers a breakdown of their repayments so they can see the amount they owe for any day within the more than 200 days of the loan period. But he believes the industry is over-regulated — blocking new entrants to the market — and would like to see changes, including a more flexible or even rolling contract.

For many, however, whether these changes take place is a moot point. After all, as Britain braces itself for potentially Hogarthian levels of penury, it is clear pawnbroking is the canary in the goldmine — a symptom rather than a cause. As Lorraine told me: “In the old days, if you had to pawn your jewellery just to get money, you were looked down upon because you weren’t financially stable. Obviously, that’s not the case today — now, half the country is not financially stable.”

*Customer names have been changed to protect identities.