Britain Divided: the Growth of Social Exclusion in the 1980s and 1990s

Ed Alan Walker, Carol Walker: Child Poverty Action Group, £9.95, pp 308 ISBN 0 946744 91 2 Anyone who felt relieved but not elated at the election result on 3 May need only read this book to understand their emotional shortfall. The defeat of a party that had deliberately engineered mass unemployment as an economic and social lever, targeted the most vulnerable and politically expendable to redistribute money from poor to rich, and routinely denied responsibility for its actions should certainly make our hearts rise. The breadth and depth of poverty the Conservatives have left behind, and …