People living in poverty are less likely to have the things that money can’t buy like friendship, trust and involvement in the community, according to new research.
And although the country is officially out of recession, the government’s austerity policy – set to be reinforced in this week’s Comprehensive Spending Review – puts civic engagement and social trust within poorer neighbourhoods at risk.

The findings are published in a new book, Hard Times, written by The Guardian journalist Tom Clark and the University of Manchester’s Professor of Sociology Anthony Heath, who use hard numbers to expose a society defined by division in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The authors will be speaking at the 20th anniversary celebration of quantitative social research at The University of Manchester on Wednesday, the same day as the government’s Spending Review.

Clark explains: “The book gauges the effects of the recession using the Prime Minister’s own metrics: rates of volunteering, a measure of his ’Big Society‘, and general well-being – the GWB he once suggested mattered more than the GDP.

“Poorer parts of the country were more savaged by the recession and it was there, too, that we found that Cameron’s Big Society shrivelled most dramatically.”

Research for Hard Times found that people who lost their jobs during the recession were less engaged in civic activity than contemporaries who kept their jobs during the recession – and they look set to remain more isolated for many years to come.
Clark added: “It is the opposite of what you’d hope and expect, with many of us assuming that communities would pull together when times get tough. But, in fact, people became less trusting of others, less likely to share and more isolated.”
Hard Times: Inequality, Recession, Aftermath is published by Yale University press in paperback.

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