I am writing this blog in the run up to Christmas 2021. My thoughts turn to Charles Dickens and child poverty at this time of the year. There is a famous line from A Christmas Carol (1843) which reads: “For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas”. This is a heart-warming idea, but cold comfort to the quarter of a million children in London who will go hungry this Christmas[1]. For my title, I have gone to Dickens again. These words from Oliver Twist were meant to shock – but nothing has changed since the 1830s. The UK today has 4.5 million ‘Olivers’ with 500,000 more to come in 2022.
Dickens will be rolling in his grave. His writing and campaigning as a social reformer was mainly centred on London. But his fieldwork for Hard Times (1854) took him to Preston, where industrialists, landowners and headteachers were impervious to the inhuman nature of mechanised factory work and the industrial revolution. In the 1930s George Orwell also travelled north and discovered the ‘north-south divide’ while researching working class living conditions in Lancashire and Yorkshire. These great authors were the first champions of levelling up.
By The Good Economy - Mark Hepworth