Skint Estate: A memoir of poverty, motherhood and survival

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Cash is an absolutely exceptional writer and shares the rawest moments of her life in this memoir of life below the poverty line. A women’s refuge that literally crumbles around the women and their children in the weeks after Grenfell. Visits to food banks. Sex work. Whatever work will help pay the bills. The absolute disregard to an entire class of people by those at the top, who are elected time and time again by people who claim to care. Det är en högst politisk text: hur dyrt det är att vara fattig, att ses som en belastning för samhället, hur det konservativa partiet (tory) drar in på sociala skyddsnät för ensamstående mammor (”de får skylla sig själva”, ”skaffa inte barn om du inte har råd”), när skyddshemmet för utsatta kvinnor kollapsar (taket ramlar in) och det tar 8 timmar för någon slags personal att komma, problemet när hyresrätter (som uppfördes för socialt utsatta personer) privatiseras och får marknadshyror. Hur omöjligt det är att hosta upp 6 månaders förskottshyra i deposition, att jobba för 1 pund i timmen, att bara kunna jobba när barnet är i skolan (eftersom barnomsorg är så dyrt att bara medelklassen har råd) och vilka slags jobb som finns kvar. Hur nästan omöjligt det är att ta sig ur situationen. Hur kvinnor alltid är offren. Working class single mothers are vilified in the media. Benefit scum, lazy, Jeremy Kyle fodder. The women who really anger the Daily Mail types. The type of women that the white middle aged men on faceless social media platforms like to say things like ‘they shouldn’t have kids if they can’t afford them’ and ‘they should be sterilised for wasting my tax payers money’ you know exactly who I’m talking about. They are the people that should read this book.

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. Give[s] powerful voice to the often silent story that explains so much of Britain's current fracturing' OBSERVER 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.We shouldn’t just need to be on the brink of something to just survive. We should be enjoying life.

This book should be compulsive reading for all Daily Mail journalists and readers, who think that somehow people living on benefits in the UK all live in palaces with more income than "decent, honest working folk" etc etc ad nauseum. Carraway shine a bright unflinching light on modern-day poverty in the UK - zero working hour contracts, social housing, benefits eligibility, food banks - all of it a far cry from the images regularly portrayed in the media.Rain Dogs, the BBC’s new comedy drama from Skint Estate author Cash Carraway is many things: dark, hilarious, crushing, filthy, engrossing, powerful. But it is not, categorically, poverty porn. It would be an easy trap for the series, which follows Costello and Iris from house to house as they try to make each a home, to fall into. But Carraway’s own experience of living on the breadline, and a steadfast avoidance of romanticising the actualities of homelessness, keep the series firmly in reality.