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Book Review: All Together Now? by Mike Carter

From Liverpool to London, Mike Carter provides a devastating account of what's going on in austerity Britain

All Together Now?
by Mike Carter
(Guardian Faber, £14.99)

MIKE CARTER is the son of Pete Carter, former militant building worker and Communist Party industrial organiser, who was responsible for the 1981 People’s March for Jobs from Liverpool to London.

Carter had been alienated from his father and refused to join the march, despite the latter’s pleading, and to find closure in his troubled relationship but also as a means to explore what has happened to England in the meantime he decided to complete the march route himself.

In lucid prose, he describes what he discovers on his solo journey — the people he meets and the history of the places he passes through. It’s one of the best books I’ve read about how our country has changed since Thatcher, what devastation has been caused to traditional communities and industries.

He contrasts the scenes of derelict housing estates in Liverpool and the boarded-up shops in city centres, replaced by betting and payday loan shops, with the magnificent old gothic town halls of many northern towns, magnificent galleons amid the wreckage.

Through his engendering of a country that has undergone seismic change he discovers how young people’s sense of belonging, of life’s meaning, of solidarity and purpose has been eroded.

In a local grocery store, people are holding up the queue to buy lottery tickets, their dream of escape. Buy-to-let investors, many from the south, are scooping up cheap properties and locking out the locals. People feel let down and abandoned by politicians.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. He meets people who reveal a stoicism, resilience and determination to make the best of it. In Soke city centre, there’s an unexpected memorial to the Czech town of Lidice, razed by the nazis, alongside a statue of famous footballer and local lad Stanley Matthews — a reminder of when football was a working-class sport, rooted in the community.

Carter gives us snatches of conversations that provide more insight into the state of the nation than any number of column inches by the pundits in the so-called quality press. And there are illuminating moments of philosophising and self-reflection as he attempts to comprehend the enormity of what has happed.

He is aware of the irony of a Guardian journalist, now living in the south, observing and commenting on the poor and downtrodden and his reflections, based on his strong sense of history, struggle and nationhood, are insightful.

He demonstrates how poverty and unemployment take their toll in terms of mental and physical health, community breakdown, increased violence and drug addiction and that they are all inter-related.

“Devotees of the lightly regulated free market often use the Darwinian language of evolution to explain its global spread,” he writes. “It was just nature working efficiently, the survival of the fittest, a system that best reflected man’s innate drives of self interest and ruthlessness.

“This is what the end of history looked like: impoverished high streets full of organisms that had grown to feed off the misery, right next to each other, painted with the same sort of bright colours that tropical flowers might use to attract a hummingbird.”

Such words demonstrate why this book should be on every school’s reading list.

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