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New Statesman
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Talking to strangers enriches our lives in countless ways
Photo by Lior Zilberstein/Millennium Images It's a weird start, but go with me. First encounters with strangers are, by their nature, unexpected. That's what makes them so potentially electric. I was visiting an old friend in Berlin whom I hadn't seen for many years. On my final day I wanted to do what everyone who appreciates a good dance wants to do when there: go to Berghain, the city's most beloved club. At first sight, an enormous block of imposing concrete in the old east. It was a Sunday afternoon: no queue, just sweaty sexy people drifting out through the exit to be disarmed by the sunlight. It takes me a while to warm up to my body as a subject in motion on a dancefloor, but once that's happened, almost nothing gives me greater pleasure. Except for the smoking area. I swear these are the most beautiful places in the world. Under the canopy of smoke, every single shimmering person is held in deep amorous conversation with someone else. It shouldn't be rare, but these days it is. You could blame the alcohol or the drugs, but I blame the dancing: every movement you make in answer to the hard, heavy music strips away something from your usual reserve, and gradually you feel yourself become unlocked, opened, until you're almost infant-like in your frame of mind. Every hour I would head back out into the smoking area to encounter strangers. I met an army veteran from Belgium who said techno helps more than anything else with his PTSD, and a Russian facing arrest back in her country for speaking out against Putin's regime. It felt like none of the conversations I had that night were disingenuous or superficial. I felt I could do this forever – back and forth between these two states: dancing, then talking to strangers; breathing in, then breathing out – but I had a flight early the next morning to catch. We need contact. That's not my line; I pinched it from the sci-fi writer Samuel R Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), a non-fiction book comprising two extended essays that first detail the author's experience of spending time in gay pornography theatres in Times Square between the 1970s and early 1990s. His argument is that public spaces in urban environments are vital sites for interclass contact, especially those designed specifically with desire in mind. For desire and knowledge, body and mind, are often imbricated, he writes, functioning as 'mutually constitutive aspects of political and social life'. Delany defines contact as a particular kind of social practice. It is the discussion that begins with a stranger at the bar, or the one that emerges unexpectedly in the supermarket queue, or the bus stop or the nightclub – sudden sparks out of the dull impersonal drudgery of daily life. Contact can save our lives in small ways, by reminding us in an instant that almost all the time there are good people within touching distance, or in more significant ways: say there's a fire in your building, Delany suggests, 'it may be the people who have been exchanging pleasantries with you for years who take you into their home'. Unlike networking, to which Delany relates it, contact is spontaneous, non-competitive, non-capitalistic. Contact is how we retain the souls of our cities from annihilation by the corporatisation of all public space. Delany's book is really a eulogy because by the time of writing, almost all the porn theatres had been demolished: replaced by vacant malls and offices, 'a glass and aluminium graveyard'. From 1985 onwards, New York began closing down institutions that were deemed to promote 'high-risk sexual activity', especially those used by gay men, such as bathhouses and the porn theatres of Times Square. Ostensibly, this was all done in the name of 'safety', a response to Aids, but really it was a cynical weaponisation of that term. 'Contemporary material and economic forces' work 'to suppress contact', Delany writes. Such forces promote the idea of the Other (gay or immigrant or working class) as an object of fear. I read it immediately after the UK Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman refers only to biological women. I feel that there are obvious parallels between Delany's argument and that ruling. In the Times Square porn theatres, Delany passed whole days, talking and fucking and hanging out, all lit by the soft glow of the cinema screen. What happened to Times Square left him 'lonely and isolated'. The freedom to be gay, he explains, is no freedom if the institutions where you might embody and enact your sexuality are shut down. The freedom to be trans is no freedom if the public spaces you can attend are gradually eroded. Freedom is something which is interdependent; none of us is truly free until everyone is. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Public spaces are for making contact. Contact is how we survive this world together – more than survive: experience life as genuinely pleasurable and meaningful. It is the antidote to xenophobia, to all kinds of othering. That's why I'm calling this column 'Contact'. I want to treat my life more like a nightclub smoking area, if you like – to go looking for contact, because I have a feeling that it is everywhere, so long as you render yourself open to it. So, hello, stranger. Nice to meet you. [See also: We are all Mrs Dalloway now] Related
New Statesman
21-05-2025
- Health
- New Statesman
Britain's ghost children
Photo by Sandy Johanson/Millennium Images In the headteacher's office of a school in a deprived area of Barrow, Cumbria, Mrs Walker recounted the morning she'd climbed through the window of a vulnerable pupil's house. Inside, she found their parent, who had addiction issues, passed out. The head got them both up, out of the house and through the school gates, the kid headed to their classroom, the parent to her office to sober up. That day, they got to record that pupil as attending school. It was summer 2022 when I sat and listened, agog at Mrs Walker's relentless commitment and chutzpah. We were two years on from the UK's first Covid-19 lockdown, and just one since Robert Halfon MP sounded the alarm on the country's other invisible epidemic: our 'ghost children'. The 93,000 pupils 'severely absent' from classrooms – missing at least half of school – after they re-opened. Mrs Walker's school was a detail of that data made real: our poorest kids were, and are, significantly more likely to be absent. Its high free-school-meal eligibility (at 60 per cent, three times the then national average of 20 per cent) was matched only by its history of high absence. And yet, the head had taken the school's attendance rate from 91 per cent to 97 per cent. Her story spoke to what teachers could achieve – but also to the extreme, above-and-beyond measures some were forced to take. Today, four years on from the alarm that few heard (or cared to hear), 173,00 students are missing at least 50 per cent of their schooling, with a further 1.6 million out at least 10 per cent of the time. Those receiving free school meals are nearly four times more likely to be absent – a statistic widely accepted as an underestimate given 900,000 kids living in poverty aren't poor enough to receive free school meals. While few stories I've heard while speaking to teachers and visiting schools – both for the podcast series Terri White: Finding Britain's Ghost Children and my outreach work in deprived areas since – have been quite as wild as Mrs Walker's, they all offer the same reality check. There's the school that sends a minibus through the community to pick up every vulnerable child; the free breakfasts not just for pupils but for their parents; the sleeping bags for kids who've never had a duvet; hours spent helping parents struggling with job applications or the benefits system. In total 1.8 million kids – one in four of all UK children, one in two at GCSE level – are caught up in our absence crisis. A large proportion of them live in deprived areas. (Or, to look at it another way, there are more than three times as many students absent in state schools as there are total kids in private education.) Food banks in schools now outnumber those in the community. A recent survey of teachers revealed that 87 per cent have seen poverty-driven exhaustion in their pupils. Record numbers of our poorest kids are missing school, and when they do go in they're starving, drained in mind and body. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe And it's clear what comes next, when education is lost. Not only are pupils from low-income families almost six times more likely to be permanently excluded, but 90 per cent of those who are excluded don't pass GCSE English or maths. Three quarters of young people in prison have been suspended at least once. But I know that it doesn't have to be that way. I grew up in poverty, and I looked to school to keep me fed – one school holiday, reports were made to social services after I was seen eating out of a bin behind the fish and chip shop – and to offer me opportunity. Not, as I viewed it at the time, the opportunity to escape my community, but the opportunity to escape a specific material reality that brutalised and dehumanised me. And school delivered. I passed my GCSEs then, the first person in my family to study post-16, took A-levels and went to university. I moved to London, and later New York, where I worked as a journalist. Education didn't gift me a whole new life, it gave me the right to decide what my life would be. To break the cycle so that my own son wouldn't be ankle-deep in fish bits. Where is that same right for the 4.5 million children living in poverty today? When school is increasingly looked to for the very basics of living, for survival; when they're not just feeding kids during school hours but, as teachers have reported, providing cookers, microwaves and beds. This is a crisis that can only accelerate, with child poverty expected to reach 4.8 million by the end of Labour's first term. A crisis I fear will lead to opportunity being eradicated entirely for those in our most deprived areas. Because child poverty isn't just about kids in classrooms with bellies empty of food but full of pain. It's about the loss of learning, of qualifications, of a career, of earning potential. It's the loss of a life that every child should be entitled to have a crack at grafting for. It's a life stolen from our kids every single day while child poverty spreads unchecked, wrapping itself around every shoot of ambition, of self-belief, of hope, of desire. There's only one teacher whose words have stuck with me longer than those of Mrs Walker: my own primary school teacher, Mrs Webley. 'You seemed to know that the only way out of poverty for a woman was education,' she once told me. And I did. But today, the doors and windows have been locked. The message to our poorest kids is that there's no possibility of escape. That they're worth less, if anything at all. And that is a scandal that should shame us all. Terri White is a journalist and author. Her book 'Coming Undone' is published by Canongate [See also: Can you ever forgive Nick Clegg?] Related This article appears in the 21 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain's Child Poverty Epidemic
New Statesman
21-05-2025
- Health
- New Statesman
A cold childhood
Photo by Jamie Smith / Millennium Images, UK My fiercely political teacher in junior school used to horrify us with stories of the bad old days, as he called them, before the NHS and labour laws, when children went up chimneys and down mines. He told us about diphtheria and polio, and laced his remembrances with regular warnings, reminding us to enjoy fresh air and a free education, things that others had fought for. One day he described Housemaid's Knee, a painful condition acquired from repetitive crouching. 'Always stretch your legs out in bed,' he said. 'Lie straight or else!' But lying straight brought different agonies for me in my freezing cold bedroom in a narrow, terraced house in south Birmingham. There were three beds for four of us, mine wedged under a draughty window. Sometimes the sheets were so cold they felt wet. I would lift the blankets gingerly and lie down in the smallest space I could, gripping my knees to my chest, not daring to move into a bit of the bed not yet warmed by my underweight body. The night after my teacher's warning, I forced my legs down into the icy tundra and stayed there, miserable and half-awake until the morning, when my father started his shift as a bus driver and my mother as a dinner lady. The unhappiness of being cold is not something you would know unless you've been there. It isn't the temporary discomfort of getting a bit chilly on a walk, or visiting a relative who doesn't put the heating on. It isn't temporary. It goes on and on. It gets into your bones and affects everything you do. I was cold every morning until I got to school. I was cold as soon as I walked back into the house; cold in the morning again when I got dressed in damp clothes that had lain on the bed for extra warmth. In the winter I was cold for entire weekends. We had little food to fire my natural defences and very few warm clothes. We didn't get central heating until I was in my teens and then only prehistoric, cut-price night storage radiators, steel grey monoliths that seemed to pump out all the good stuff while we were at school and then fade to nothing when we needed it most. The cold I endured in my childhood made me profoundly sad and depressed. It made me tired and unable to pay attention at school despite the glorious stuffiness and overheating the other pupils complained about. I never played outdoors between October and May and I never, ever asked my friends back to my house. When I visited theirs, I took jealous note of the raging fires and eiderdowns. People who speak about the olden days with fondness often joke about the ice on the inside of the windows, net curtains stuck to the glass making pretty patterns in the light. But sleeping under a single-pane window in thin bedding and waking barely any warmer is not and never will be funny, and is something which has not yet been consigned to history. More than six million households live in fuel poverty, spending more than 10 per cent of their income on cooking and keeping warm. Whether living in poverty or not, heating is one of the first economies people make when money is scarce, often heating only one room and limiting hot food to one meal a day. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe I was fortunate to be able to go to my local library to keep warm. I'd choose any book at random and sit with it unopened on my lap, resting my back or feet against the volcanic heat of the cast iron radiators. I got chilblains, scorched clothes and a sweaty forehead, but the heat seeped through to the marrow and finally helped me relax and made me feel better. But today, with libraries closing by the hundreds and the ones that stay open cutting opening hours to a few days a week, there are far fewer opportunities for children like me to get some respite from a miserable house. But misery is only one effect of the cold. Keeping a house warm can alleviate damp, mould and poor ventilation – the scourge of substandard houses, and problems that can lead to significant health risks and, in extreme cases, death. In 2020, a toddler, Awaab Ishak, died from severe breathing problems caused by mould in his Rochdale home. The case led to a new law that requires social landlords to address dangerous hazards within 14 days – no help to the tenants who are too vulnerable to take on their landlord for fear of eviction. Misery itself is often a euphemism for serious mental health conditions. Studies show a link between damp and mould exposure and an increased risk of depression. But they can also cause social isolation, frustration and emotional expense trying to get the problem sorted out, plus the worry of spending more and more money trying to fix the unfixable, or at least trying to mitigate the effect on your and your children's health. The health effects of poor housing are estimated to cost the NHS around £100m per year in London alone. Good quality, affordable and plentiful social housing is the answer to cold, mould and damp, overcrowding and dangerous structural issues. Better housing leads to better outcomes across health, education, economic growth and employment, as well as giving children like me a better start in life. I wasn't the poorest in my community. I once slept, three in bed, at a friend's house on a mattress with no sheet, covered with winter coats and towels instead of blankets. I went home glad for my damp sheets and pushed my legs dead straight and shivering, right to the bottom of the bed I had all to myself. 'The Best of Everything' by Kit de Waal is published by Headline [See also: Why George Osborne still runs Britain] Related
New Statesman
21-05-2025
- General
- New Statesman
The children denied a childhood
Photo by Bjanka Kadic/Millennium Images After a year of maternity leave, my mind is now a map of the best routes to walk around London's East End. Like the Knowledge, but for prams. My favourite follows the thicketed paths around Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park – the poorest and most overlooked of Victorian London's 'Magnificent Seven' private cemeteries. And not just because the gravel pathways rippling with roots are ideal terrain for jiggling a baby to sleep. Amid knotted fingers of sycamores and the drumming of woodpeckers lie 30 acres of stories about a place once synonymous with poverty – from the paupers' graves of Spanish flu victims to the dove of peace that memorialises Dr Barnardo's children. Set back from the main path is a mottled white gravestone in the shape of an open book. It commemorates 'The Farthing Bundle Lady Clara E Grant', who died at the age of 82 in 1949. The headmistress of a local school, Grant set up an organisation in 1907 to feed and clothe the poor children of the East End, and sent nurses to visit the local families of newborns. But where Grant stood out from fellow social reformers was in her recognition that poverty goes beyond a lack of hot breakfasts and intact shoes. What the children she encountered really needed was to play. The 'Bundle Woman of Bow' earned her nickname by putting together parcels of toys wrapped in newspaper and distributing them to poor children for a farthing each. Inside would be a recycled and donated miscellany of fun: buttons, marbles, shells, toy soldiers, old greetings cards and comics, worn stockings, used cotton reels, broaches, whistles, scraps of silk and patches of wool, 'doll-less heads or headless dolls'. Every Sunday at ten in the morning, children gathered at her premises to receive their bundles; this was so popular that a queue of hundreds would form by 6am. The tradition lasted from 1907 into the Eighties. As one recipient, quoted in the East End Women's Museum, recalled: 'It was something to look forward to as there wasn't many special treats.' More than a century since the bundles of Bow began, too many of Britain's children still face a poverty of treats. Buttle UK, a charity for children in crisis that published a State of Child Poverty report earlier this year, revealed that 75,000 families could not afford toys in 2024. Ahead of Christmas in 2023, nearly half of parents surveyed by the community network Nextdoor said they were planning on spending less on their children's gifts that year. While reporting on the height of the cost-of-living crisis, I interviewed many parents struggling to budget as their bills went up and food prices soared. What stayed with me from these conversations was the worry not just about paying for heating or school uniform, but the fear of failing to give their children treats. Joanne, a single mother in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, who had to claim Universal Credit after her relationship broke down and she lost her cleaning job, told me the hardest conversation with her son about their financial situation was when she had to explain to him – a 12-year-old boy with special educational needs – that she could no longer afford their weekly ritual of a takeaway sandwich from Subway. 'I had to say, 'Maybe we can make it at home instead,'' she told me. 'But I'm running out of ideas, because you can only make it sound so fun for so long.' Even his favourite at-home treat of 'pretend ramen' (Pot Noodle with an egg and some chicken added) had spiralled out of her price range. He wanted to go with friends to Laser Quest for his 13th birthday; she couldn't say yes. All these joys were now impossible luxuries. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Kim, a mother of four in Wales who cannot work because of her early-onset osteoarthritis and whose husband lost his job in construction, had to stop buying her children's favourite fruit and biscuits. 'It's heartbreaking when you look at your children's faces and say, 'There are no snacks in,'' she told me. 'Mentally, it's an absolute drain. You go to bed worried about the kids' birthdays, Christmas coming up, and there's nothing left; they're not going to happen this year, we just can't afford it.' Food banks regularly appeal for toy donations, particularly ahead of Christmas, and for food donations beyond the basics. 'I always love it when we get some Charlie Bigham ready meals in,' a volunteer at one of Britain's busiest food banks, in Newcastle, told me. 'I want people to have a treat to enjoy.' Similarly, baby banks often now have a section for books and toys. I am struck by the rainforest of play gyms at my local baby bank – colourful giraffes, rainbows, mirrors and stars fluttering among the greyscale piles of nappies and muslins. A few roads down from the cemetery where Clara Grant is buried is a 'toy library' called Toyhouse, crammed with rocking horses and scooters, xylophones and building blocks. It aims to improve the well-being of local families through play. One winter evening, when my daughter was about six months old, I balanced a bag of her toys on top of her pram and trundled them along to the toy library. She managed to pull a tiger face-shaped mirror from the pile back for herself. On the way, as she gurgled at her reflection, I explained that there were some babies who weren't lucky enough to have toys of their own. She didn't understand, of course. But across Britain today, too many children, too soon, do. [See also: Misogyny in the metaverse] Related
New Statesman
10-05-2025
- Health
- New Statesman
The birth trauma taboo
Photo by Genna Naccache / Millennium Images, UK Giving birth in England is not safe. Half of all maternity units are rated either inadequate or requiring improvement. Just 5 per cent – one in 20 – are outstanding. The UK is performing worse than many of our European neighbours when it comes to deaths of mothers within 42 days of the end of pregnancy. And gross inequalities remain: black women are twice as likely to die in childbirth than white women; women aged 35 or older are three time more likely to die than those in their early twenties. These numbers paint a damning picture of the care given to many women. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that women are being left traumatised from giving birth. We don't know for sure, but it is estimated that each year about 25,000 women who give birth are so distressed that they meet the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Hundreds of thousands more are traumatised, but don't meet that threshold. In Breaking the Taboo, the former Conservative MP Theo Clarke describes her own experience of trauma in heartbreaking detail, in the hope that safe maternity care will become a priority for the government. 'I felt like I was being raped,' Clarke writes of one of several vaginal examinations she received while in labour. The book is not an easy read, and certainly not for the faint-hearted. The descriptions of childbirth and its aftermath are graphic and highly distressing. Clarke describes how she was convinced she was going to die, after haemorrhaging and tearing. Having experienced a deeply traumatic birth myself, I had to pause reading several times. Like Clarke, I suffered a severe tear during birth, and, like Clarke, was rushed to surgery immediately afterwards, taken away from my daughter after a matter of seconds. Like Clarke, I was left in blood-stained sheets, and, like Clarke, I had no idea what had happened to me, or even that such an injury was possible. But this is a book that must be read: by politicians, obstetricians, anaesthetists, midwives and anyone involved with women's care or who has the power to improve it. The vivid, upsetting descriptions are the point. Clarke should be applauded for her bravery and for using her position to raise awareness and help others. The truth can be painful, but nothing can improve unless people are prepared to confront it. The treatment Clarke describes from staff at Royal Stoke hospital seems, at times, downright cruel. Having received major surgery, she was not given timely pain relief afterwards, nor anything to eat. 'They gave me lactulose to help avoid constipation,' Clarke recalls, 'but the dosage seemed too high, as excrement kept running down my legs.' Unable to move, Clarke describes not being able to lift her baby without help in order to feed her. 'After a long time calling out repeatedly, a nurse entered the room. She took one look at me lying pitifully on the bed and told me, 'Not my baby, not my problem.'' The lack of compassion shown by some NHS staff will shock even the hardest of hearts: midwives who 'resorted to manually pumping' Clarke's breasts 'to start colostrum production' or who chastised her for requesting pain relief. Thankfully, at other times, Clarke received good care from mental health experts and specialists who advised on her injury. Like so many women who tear during childbirth, Clarke found it excruciating to sit down afterwards and found breastfeeding exceptionally difficult. Her daughter, Arabella, 'did not magically crawl up my chest, as the NCT class had led me to believe'. 'I was constantly needing the loo and it was impossible to control my bowels,' she adds. 'I found passing urine excruciating and I had to pour a jug of water over the area to help with the painful stinging.' There is no shame in these admissions. They are things women are not told about, but should be. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The last third of Breaking the Taboo 'gives parents an opportunity that they were not given by the NHS', the midwife Donna Ockenden writes in the foreword to the book: 'a chance to be heard'. In many ways, it is the hardest part to read. Within these stories there are health professionals who behave like 'angels', caring deeply for these women, but each has been let down at their most vulnerable. While Clarke tells her story in painstaking detail, these unflinching narratives feel relentless: horror upon horror. We hear from Sarah, who after losing three pints of blood was left with a 'prolapsed bowel, bladder and womb'. Thirteen years on, she still bleeds profusely if she lifts anything heavy. Eilidh suffered a severe postpartum mental health breakdown. Rachael has PTSD a decade on from the traumatic birth of her twins, while Lillian's account of giving birth at 21 weeks and subsequently losing her baby is harrowing. I cannot get any of these stories from my mind. Many mistakes were made during the Covid-19 pandemic, but among the cruellest was forcing women to give birth alone or refusing to let their partners stay afterwards. In some cases, mothers were separated from their newborn babies. Even for those who had a trouble-free birth, it must have been lonely – but to be in extreme pain, unable to move, and alone, is torture. 'I asked to go with my son in the ambulance and this was refused… because of Covid rules,' Lisa recalls. 'My son wasn't even 24 hours old.' While the book's focus is on birth trauma and improving maternity services for women, it is also an indictment of parliament and what Clarke describes as its 'toxic culture'. Throughout her pregnancy, she 'spent months having mental health specialist care with the NHS' to help with chronic anxiety. Yet she told no one in Westminster. 'Weaknesses were something to be exploited by opponents,' Clarke believed. Her pregnancy coincided with one of the most turbulent spells in modern British politics. In July 2022, at 36 weeks pregnant, she resigned as Boris Johnson's trade envoy, days before Johnson himself resigned as prime minister. In the leadership contest that followed, Clarke backed Penny Mordaunt (and later Rishi Sunak), but she is scathing about Liz Truss, who 'came across as overly ambitious'. 'I thought she often oversold her brief, took credit for the work of others,' Clarke writes. The whips, whom Clarke likens to 'bullying prefects in a dysfunctional boarding school', come off worst. She is scathing about Mark Spencer, the former Tory chief whip, as well as the deputy chief whip Craig Whittaker. Clarke says she came to 'never truly' trust the Whips' Office again following a threat to be thrown out of the Conservative Party if she failed to back a crucial, chaotic vote on fracking while on maternity leave. Clarke, who believed the policy went against the Tories' manifesto, says the tone used was 'nasty and bullying'. The behaviour of some of her constituents and local party members is something they should be ashamed of, too. Within a week of Clarke giving birth, a local resident lodged a complaint that they could not have a face-to-face surgery appointment with her. 'They referenced that I had had my baby nearly 'a whole week ago' so I should be available to them as their local MP,' Clarke writes. Others criticised her for not attending a church service to commemorate the death of Queen Elizabeth II, despite the fact that Clarke was unable to sit down at the time. There are also several heroes. First and foremost, James, Clarke's office manager in Stoke, who dealt with anything important in the aftermath of her traumatic birth. Her husband, Henry, is also a rock. Clarke has good words to say about both Sunak and Kemi Badenoch, but it is striking how the only people who truly support her politically are other women. Theresa May, Mordaunt and Gillian Keegan all helped Clarke fight back against her local Conservative Association, which had deselected her four days after returning from maternity leave. She 'was not seen out and about enough locally as the MP', they argued. While giving birth has clearly changed Clarke forever, she has been left bruised and bitterly disappointed by her experience in parliament, too. 'I felt that no one looked after us as people and we were seen only as politicians to be mocked and abused,' she says. Clarke reveals she had a panic button fitted in her home because of harassment, and that during maternity leave she received 'abuse in person, on the telephone and via [her] staff'. The House of Commons, she argues, 'is not a modern workplace that is compatible with raising a young family'. In Breaking the Taboo, Clarke describes both a parliamentary and maternity system that are failing. Each and every inquiry held into poor maternity care has highlighted similar problems. But recommendations for improvements are ignored as governments come and go, and other things take priority. The Labour government has not yet committed to implementing any of the recommendations from the parliamentary inquiry into birth trauma published in May 2024, led by Clarke and Rosie Duffield. The ongoing inquiry into Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust has heard evidence from over 2,000 families who have suffered potentially avoidable harm or death over a ten-year period – 'a whole school full of missing children', as Sarah and Jack Hawkins, whose baby was stillborn in 2016 after mistakes by maternity staff, put it. This has to stop. This book is a vital tool in achieving the change that is so urgently needed. Breaking the Taboo: Why We Need to Talk About Birth Trauma Theo Clarke Biteback, 384pp, £20 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Who are the white working class?] Related
