Skint Estate: A memoir of poverty, motherhood and survival

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Jamila Squire breaks down four Marxist concepts that can help in developing a common materialist understanding of today’s crises Daisy May Cooper (This Country) is to star in the show, which is provisionally titled Cash Carraway.

The only only reason I gave it four stars was because the structure of the book was at times, just really confusing. The timeline jumps around quite a lot and it gets confusing at what stage in her life Cash is. And she is very, very angry about the well-paid newspaper columnists whose intemperate outbursts against the underclass are mirrored here by Carraway’s invective. “We should be banned from all supermarkets except Aldi and Lidl and force-fed a diet of UHT milk and corned beef”, she writes, ‘grub for fallen women… Why didn’t I just shut up and know my place?” Visst kan man diskutera lämpligheten i att bo kvar i en stad London eller skaffa barn när man lever på marginalerna, men det är att flytta fokus från problemet. Visceral and powerful ... The writing is stark, jagged and at times unexpectedly hilarious. Brett AndersonI am a working class single mother myself - one of the reasons I was drawn to this book. But Cash’s life is not mine. Although, saying all that, the author has an incredible gift with words. She’s very talented but maybe instead of streaming words together that make no sense, maybe she could right in a way that does. I did find myself laughing at some parts; Cash has great humour and I did sympathise with her and her daughter. Her past that syncs into her present is an extraordinary story to tell, I’m not denying that. She’s fought against a system that seems to despise the poor and the disabled and for that I can only praise her for. She can be an inspiration to many people.

Remembering Africa’s historic ties with and support for Palestine is vital as relations with Israel are normalised across the continent, write Salim Vally and Roshan Dadoo Cash is an absolutely exceptional writer and shares the rawest moments of her life in this memoir of life below the poverty line. A women’s refuge that literally crumbles around the women and their children in the weeks after Grenfell. Visits to food banks. Sex work. Whatever work will help pay the bills. The absolute disregard to an entire class of people by those at the top, who are elected time and time again by people who claim to care. Det här är Ingenbarnsland av Hetekivi Olsson, i Storbritannien, ur en ensamstående kvinnas perspektiv. Alone, pregnant and living in a women's refuge, Cash Carraway couldn't vote in the 2010 general election that ushered austerity into Britain. Her voice had been silenced. Years later, she watched Grenfell burn from a women's refuge around the corner. What had changed? The vulnerable were still at the bottom of the heap, unheard. Without a stable home, without a steady income, without family support - how do you survive? Similarly, Rain Dogs (already on HBO in the US) refuses to play out an anguished, one-dimensional treatise on class and poverty for audiences to sigh and weep over. After Costello and her daughter, Iris (a nuanced performance from newcomer Fleur Tashjian), are evicted from their flat, the aspiring writer and alcoholic (barely three months sober) scrabbles for work at a peep show, wrangles a room from a stranger by modelling a “nightie” (he says she has a “food bank body… lots of carbs”), breaks into a car, and more. And that’s just in the opener.

Most are given jobs on the minimum wage which offers no add on top ups, rent goes up, utility bills increase and the public spendature is cut. The reason I can’t rate this higher is really down to the structure of the writing, which gets a bit messy towards the end of the book. A few chapters seem to loose steam, or have a strange writing style to them, and the chronology goes a bit haywire. Sometimes I also found the writing a bit too ‘out there’. I didn’t mind the swearing (although after a while it felt a bit gratuitous) but I’d have preferred some context with the strange porn style scene I got near the end - which goes made me feel uncomfortable and felt entirely out of place. It lessened her important message. Daisy May Cooper plays a young working class single mum living with her ten year old daughter in the brutal lonely landscape of austerity Britain.

Despite being beaten down from all angles, Cash clings to the important things - love for her daughter, community and friendships - and has woven together a highly charged, hilarious and guttural cry for change. Climate movements must think beyond extraction and exploitation to start building a just future, say Sebastian Ordoñez Muñoz and Hamza Hamouchene At times, these two first-time memoirists seem almost too self-consciously eloquent about their struggles to be thought of as representative. But their books nonetheless give powerful voice to the often silent story that explains so much of Britain’s current fracturing: the fact that half a generation can afford no settled place from which they can start to build a life. We're a reader-owned co-operative, which means you can become part of the paper too by buying shares in the People’s Press Printing Society. Thank you very much to Netgalley and Penguin Random House for allowing me to read an eARC copy of Skint Estate.This takes you from women’s refuges and police cells to peep shows and strip clubs. Where bankruptcy, temporary accommodation, food banks and period poverty are regular occurrences. This book shows you how our current benefit system is not working. How the government is cleansing London if it’s working class and people are turning a blind eye.

Endlessly resourceful, Carraway works as a stripper in an upmarket West End club. When she falls pregnant, she switches to a job as a peep-show model — as one of her better-paid jobs, it allows her to save up three months’ rental deposit on a flat. Owned by Our Readers We're a reader-owned co-operative, which means you can become part of the paper too by buying shares in the People’s Press Printing Society. Working class single mothers are vilified in the media. Benefit scum, lazy, Jeremy Kyle fodder. The women who really anger the Daily Mail types. The type of women that the white middle aged men on faceless social media platforms like to say things like ‘they shouldn’t have kids if they can’t afford them’ and ‘they should be sterilised for wasting my tax payers money’ you know exactly who I’m talking about. They are the people that should read this book. This was a very readable memoir about the authors life. She delves into the reasons behind her poverty and explains very matter of factly what she has had to deal with from a young age. The language is harsh in places, but this helps to make full impact. This will make you question if you (weren't already) the benefits system, the 0 hours system and affordable housing situation. I really urge everybody read this. And sit with your discomfort. Listen, learn, and stop falling for the poverty porn lies pedalled by our media, our government, and those who have more money than the people they hate could ever dream of.She sees almost too clearly to bear how circumscribed her life is, just as her father’s was before her. She says his first question to the doctor, after being diagnosed with cancer, was: “How long will I be able to work?” “I don’t think that’s a question you should have to ask,” says Tara, furiously, opening up the world of generational poverty with a line of dialogue. She is also very funny. “Lots of things about living in a woman’s refuge make me laugh,” she says, which is not the most common response. She isn’t above selling stories about her wretched daily grind of budgeting to a trashy supermarket magazine. Even they found her piece about period poverty to be too strong to print, though at least they paid her for it. I’m just finishing reading J. Bowyer Bell’s The Secret Army, a history of the IRA 1916 – 1979. What is staggering is how factionalised, incompetent or corrupt, in the “shadow of the gangster gunman” or with the “taint of Communism”, it has been for much of its existence.