Cut Out: Living Without Welfare

✍ Scribed by Jeremy Seabrook

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 257
• Series: Left Book Club
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Cut Out speaks to people whose support from the state – for whatever reason – is now being withdrawn, rendering their lives unsustainable.

From the ale-house drunks of the Victorian era to the obese benefit scroungers of today, civilization has consistently pinned blame and shame for any societal issues on the poorer classes. In reality, the recent dismantling of crucial welfare state sections by both the U.K. s Labour and Conservative governments has resulted in the emergence of a new, harshly disadvantaged layer of British society. Growing numbers of unemployed citizens have been deserted, their voices obscured. In Cut Out, journalist Jeremy Seabrook talks to these silenced communities in order to expose the cruel realities of the situation the British government has created for some of its most vulnerable citizens. Seabrook uncovers the many routes to poverty caused by welfare reforms and explores the brutally honest stories of Britain s most devastated lives.

Britain's welfare state, one of the greatest achievements of our post-war reconstruction, was regarded as the cornerstone of modern society. Today, that cornerstone is wilfully being dismantled by a succession of governments, with horrifying consequences. The establishment paints pictures of so-called 'benefit scroungers', the disabled, the sickly and the old.

In Cut Out: Living Without Welfare, Jeremy Seabrook speaks to people whose support from the state - for whatever reason - is now being withdrawn, rendering their lives unsustainable. In turns disturbing, eye-opening, and ultimately humanistic, these accounts reveal the reality behind the headlines, and the true nature of British politics today.

Published in partnership with the Left Book Club.

Jeremy Seabrook is a journalist and writer. He has written for the New Statesman, Guardian, Times and Independent. He writes plays for stage and TV and is the author of numerous books including Pauperland (Hurst, 2013), The Song of the Shirt (Hurst, 2015) and Cut Out (Pluto, 2016).

'For half a century, in one delicately textured study after another, Seabrook has established himself as perhaps Britain's finest anatomist of class, deindustrialisation, migration and the spiritual consequences of neoliberalism' - Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian

'Giving a voice to the many people who have become increasingly isolated and unsupported in their struggle to survive, this is a useful resource for activists campaigning for social justice and against the government's cuts' - Peace News

✦ Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Welfare Cuts: the wider context
3. Being there; a sense of place
   4 The fall of industrial male labour
4. Benefit Fraud
5. A Fate Foretold
6. Sheltered accommodation
7. Zubeida
8. Azma
9. Kareema
10. Born at the wrong time
11. Abigail
12. Adele and Clifford
13. Zero Hours: Graham Chinnery
14. Andrea
15. Carl Hendricks
16. Arif Hossein
17. The idea of Reform
18. People with Disability
19. Amanda
20. Survival: Belfort
21. In the Benefits Labyrinth; Lorraine
22. Jayne Durham
23. Paula
24. Violence against Women
25. Faraji
26. ‘Doing the Right Thing’
27. Grace and Richard
28. ‘It Can Happen to Anyone’
29. Andrew
30. Lazy Categories
31. The secret world of ‘welfare’
32. Self-Employment as a Refuge
33. Joshua Ademola
34. The right thing and the wrong result: Dayanne
35. The roots of alienation
36. Imran Noorzai
37. Farida; the duty of young women
38. Welfare and Mental Health
39. Alison: the loneliness of being on benefit
40. Kenneth
41. Marie Fullerton
42. Gus: A Picaresque Life
43. Stolen Identities: epitaph for a working class
44. Conclusion

✦ Subjects

Social Science; Poverty; Homelessness