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? Some people may think that living in Britain has a safety net for ones that find themselves at a disadvantage to others. Though their voices are very different, in some ways each woman’s journey to writing her book – their hoped-for route out of the situations they describe – is comparable. Both had challenging teenage years; both went to university; both took too many drugs and had disastrous relationships; both imagined they lived in a country with adequate safety nets for those prepared to work, and discovered in the decade of austerity and the benefits cap that they did not. One crucial fact, in the context of each, is precisely the same, however. In the 20-odd years since they came of age, average house prices in Britain have risen seven times faster than average wages. Along with millions of others, they are the casualties of that economic fact. Davies creates a life in which she “still feels skint but no longer poor”

After the birth of her daughter, she has a landline fitted so that “in lieu of maternity leave” she can work as a telephone clairvoyant. She also earns extra income as, in turn, a mystery shopper, a low-level drug dealer, a cleaner and by selling her human-interest stories to the Daily Mail. “Poor women can’t afford morals,” she comments. 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.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.

We seek to be a space for debate on the left, a resource for movements for social justice, and a home for open-minded anti-capitalists. TW: domestic abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, explicit language and discussions of sexual contentCash Carraway is a single mum living in temporary accommodation. She’s been moved around the system since she left home at sixteen. She’s also been called a stain on society. And she’s caught in a poverty trap. 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?”

This is the memoir of a woman who is not a stain on society. She’s not a shameful secret, stealing money from the government. She’s not lazy, or greedy. She’s a single mother, raising a child in a city she loves, with no support network and a history of domestic abuse. Cash Carraway is just one voice in millions that we never hear. Forgotten and ignored. This is her story, her life - but unfortunately it’s far from unique. While some episodes are better than others, it is a uniformly strong lineup: never dull, always vivid and never descending into mere agitprop. They all feel like real glimpses into real lives, providing windows on to realities that are too infrequently (and inaccurately) depicted in drama. The underprivileged and disfranchised appear often in documentaries, of course, but rarely escape a framing as zoological specimens. I am a working class single mother myself - one of the reasons I was drawn to this book. But Cash’s life is not mine. Gabriel Gbadamosi’s Regeneration takes a more lyrical approach to the scars left by early horrors, dipping in and out of poetry, patois, prose and different periods of time, to no less powerful effect. Gary Beadle plays Gary, simmering with impotent rage, piecing together the fragments of memory and hoping that the one piece of advice his mother left him will be enough to protect him from the uncaring, indifferent powers that be this time round. We shouldn’t just need to be on the brink of something to just survive. We should be enjoying life.I finished this in one day. Cash has a brash, sometimes aggressive writing style that is both compelling and jarring to read. She can certainly get her point across, and it’s an important one at that. She talks of a violent childhood, leading to a violent adulthood and pregnancy. Alone, scared - but excited to finally have somebody to love, and be loved in return. She talks about being ignored and stigmatised throughout her time as a single mother - people just don’t listen to women like her. I knew going in this would be dark at times, bleak and depressing, but I wasn’t expecting it to raise so much anger in me. Anger at these women being overlooked, abandoned when they are at their most vulnerable by a government that doesn’t care. The shame and despair, relying on zero hour jobs and food banks to survive. Living below the poverty line, stealing sanitary towels because you can’t afford them, and thinking of suicide as your only escape from this life. At times it was devastatingly heartbreaking. Skint Estate is a carefully crafted memoir with each section satisfactorily wrapped up, for the ending to reflect the beginning of each chapter. It is ranged around themes or locations rather than being chronological, and her college and senior school years are absent. Cash lämnar mannen och ägnar sin graviditet att jobba ihop 10 000 pund på en peepshow, summan som behövs för att skaffa bostad och vara hemma med barnet. Men när dottern äntligen kommer blir Cash deprimerad och ensam och funderar på att ta sitt liv. Tyvärr blir det inte lättare, det blir värre. She doesn’t even have empathy with her own daughter Biddy. Not until Cash is actually dying via carefully planned suicide does she suddenly realise Biddy will find her body. We’re expected to believe she left this bit out of her plan - even though she made sure that she and Biddy partied beforehand (in one of the chain restaurants she derides and yet, despite being a proud Londoner with a plethora of options, ALWAYS chooses). Interesting.