What if someone convinced you that we have a government that has consciously abandoned around one fifth of our population to a miserable life and an early death? Doesn’t it make you angry? Doesn’t it make you want to leap over all the bullshit and fix this hellishly dysfunctional country?

In the course of education and childcare training, teachers and other school staff are told all about ACEs – Adverse Childhood Experiences – things like violence, neglect, being rendered homeless – things that unless swiftly and effectively dealt with, clock up a horrendous set of barriers against a successful, healthy adulthood. Obviously, our aim should be to stop such things happening to kids in the first place but, equally obviously, allowing community neglect, bad housing and poverty to become the norm, successive governments have baked ACEs into the system.

According to the received wisdom would-be teachers and carers learn, four ACEs are enough to permanently blight a child’s future. If I remember rightly, in the course of her turbulent early years, Kerry Hudson clocked up eight of them.

That’s why she wrote Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns, a portrait of our country most of us will recognise some of, and around a fifth of us will recognise as the tale of their own struggles. Hudson writes, in her concluding pages:

If we admit this obvious imbalance, those who have not experienced those disadvantages would have to accept the relative privilege they have enjoyed, and act to change things.

She writes about the ‘hostile government’ that has presided over the years of austerity. She reminds the reader that at the time of her writing (2018) local governments had lost 49% of their funding. 500 children’s centres and 340 libraries had been closed, with the loss of 8000 jobs. That’s just a sampler. The losses in housing, health provision and education in recent decades are equally jaw-dropping when you set them out in front of you and of course, as Hudson says, all the consequences are felt by children and their parents, and passed down the generations, whilst they are somehow fed the idea that all their problems are somehow their own fault.

And in all that time, successive governments managed to pass more and more tax breaks and more and more favours to the already-over paid. And they know they’re doing it.

If you need a wake-up call, or if you’ve abandoned politics, and need to re-energise, or if you’re still in there fighting and aren’t sure which way to turn, read Kerry Hudon’s Lowborn, get angry, then let’s sweep aside the bullshit, and start looking for the way to fix it all.

I suggest we ignore the famous names, ignore the warring parties, drop the ‘identity politics’, and start looking to each other, our local communities, for answers.

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