In my business I sell £40,000 electric cars, £20,000 sailing holidays and yet constantly hear accounts of people starving to death or living on toast here in the UK. Unfortunately the three are linked, and in this article I’ll attempt to show why.
I work in four areas of copywriting and journalism – sailing, sustainable transport, street drugs and social affairs. The first two are for the middle classes, while the second two are inextricably linked. If you’re living on toast in a freezing house of multiple occupation (HMO), of course you’ll want to get off your tits!
Ex Underclass – Now Middle Class
This line of work actually reflects in a large part my own story. With autism undiagnosed until my mid 40s, I discovered drugs and alcohol would make me happy as a kid. Underperforming academically, I had a massive breakdown in my 20s at university. I then used family money to do a postgraduate degree and fell into mental health nursing journalism soon after. From there I flexed firstly into cannabis and psychedelics then into my passion of sailing and only by chance, into sustainable transport.
Living in a home that I’ve invested in to make carbon negative, I am in a strange situation where I have underclass friends (and have been one myself) yet am very middle class now. My observations have, I’ll admit, radicalised me. Investigating a slum landlord in Bournemouth for the Sunday Express in around 2013 – hearing stories from friends and loved ones today.
Starving to Death in Middle Class Britain
Two friends’ stories really hit home in the last couple of months. The first is a friend from Bristol who never really recovered from serious mental health problems telling me his mate died of malnutrition recently.
In the early 2000s under the old welfare regime that would have been an extremely rare event. Yet now the government of today actively celebrates food banks, used by people who often work but would starve to death without using them.
Hang on – why are charities feeding people when the government or their employers could do very adequately? Before the Cameron government’s Welfare Reform I was on £192 a week + housing benefit and perfectly capable of living in dignity between 1999 and 2007.
Another story: today I have been told of a man who is literally living on toast. This guy is living in an HMO in Weymouth, and is one of thousands in the UK seaside town who is living well below the breadline on state welfare payments. Let’s take a deeper dive on Weymouth in particular now.
Forgotten Towns: Weymouth, Portland and the coastal economy
Prof Philip Marfleet and Jenny Lennon-Wood published this report in July this year. I have been close to the report’s inspiration and creation since around 2017 when the Dorset Echo reported that Weymouth and Portland had the lowest average weekly income in the UK.
The local newspaper reported, “The rate is just £282.90 a week according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics.
The average weekly pay for the area fell by a whopping 8.3 per cent last year. The average weekly wage in Weymouth and Portland is £25 below the next worst – Rother, near Sheffield.”
Phil and Jenny eventually founded the South Dorset Research Group which developed the report we’re looking at in this section. It states, “by 2002, Weymouth and Portland had the lowest mean annual income in Dorset, a full £1,000 below West Dorset, and over £4,000 below the level in East Dorset. Six of the 10 wards in Dorset with the highest percentage of families on means-tested benefits were in Weymouth & Portland. Between 2009 and 2017, employment declined by almost 17 percent; in 2019, with a jobs density of 53.9, Weymouth & Portland had the lowest level of access to local employment among all urban areas in the county. By 2019 the proportion of jobs with low-level skills in the workforce, at 60 percent, was the highest in Dorset (including Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole – BCP).51 Among 379 areas in the UK, Weymouth & Portland ranked 372 for competitiveness: the nearest urban centre, Poole, ranked 135.”
The report goes on to show, “By 2019 leisure and the retail sector dominated employment. Accommodation and food provided almost 20 percent of jobs, with a further 17 percent in retail and wholesale.”
It isn’t just a bunch of lefties highlighting such problems. The Dorset Local Enterprise Partnership showed that in 2022, almost 50 percent of all jobs in Weymouth and Portland paid less than the Living Wage, compared to 25 percent for Dorset as a whole and a national average of 20 percent. Once more, South Dorset ranks 533rd of 533 English Parliamentary constituencies for social mobility.
The authors of Forgotten Towns place the blame squarely at the door of local policy makers. They state, “In South Dorset … The decimation of local industry that had taken place in the 1990s was followed by an orientation on tourism that made the area more dependent on seasonal employment in insecure, ill-paid jobs, prompting a further spiral of decline. … development strategy in the area relied upon seaside activities sustained by seasonal interest.”
Councillors and MPs are sticking their heads in the sand. Phil and Jenny wrote, “In 2019, a special panel on economic development established by Dorset Council resolved not to establish an emergency group or planning committee for South Dorset: it also declined to initiate a Poverty Review for Weymouth & Portland”. Richard Drax MP denies there is even an issue.
Government for the People not the Rich?
Not only do local governments fail their residents, but the national government plays a big part too. The Office of National Statistics shows that for the financial year ending 2021, “Indirect taxes made income inequality rise by 3.8 percentage points; the poorest fifth of people [on £8,200 a year gross] paid 22.9% on indirect taxes such as Value Added Tax (VAT) compared with 9.1% for the richest fifth [those on £107,600 a year gross] of people in FYE 2021.”
Looking at my own line of business, the Forgotten Towns report points to the two large marinas in the region and refers to income inequality as ‘the yachts and yacht-nots’. There are tax savings to be made in getting an electric company car – the Benefit In Kind on one is just 2% as against 35% + on a fossil fuelled car. Your home care assistant helping old ladies in Weymouth will not be able to get such a car on their income grade, but is more likely to drive a polluting old banger that costs far more to run.
It’s time we started caring about those who live beneath the breadline and started to try to address income inequality. We need to recognise that a welfare state needs to offer those in receipt a dignified existence. We need to support and not punish them for their condition. Given the hard data out there, there isn’t much of that happening. This needs to change urgently. People are dying due to this state of affairs – is that acceptable?
Join us in helping to bring reality and decency back by SUBSCRIBING to our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ1Ll1ylCg8U19AhNl-NoTg and SUPPORTING US where you can: Award Winning Independent Citizen Media Needs Your Help. PLEASE SUPPORT US FOR JUST £2 A MONTH https://dorseteye.com/donate/
