Stu Hennigan

Stu Hennigan is a writer, poet and musician from the north of England, currently living and working in Leeds. His non-fiction book Ghost Signs: Poverty and the Pandemic, based on his experiences delivering essential food parcels and medicine to some of the city’s most vulnerable communities during lockdown in 2020, is published by Bluemoose and has been selected as one of Blackwells Best Books of 2022. Ghost Signs was shortlisted in the category Best Non-fiction at the 2022 Booksellers Association Books Are My Bag Awards, and shortlisted in the category Best Political Book By A Non-parliamentarian at the 2023 Parliamentary Book Awards." His writing has been published in the anthology The Middle of a Sentence, and also in Lune Journal and Visual Verse. He is currently finishing the first draft of a new novel, as well as working on several shorter projects. He also works as the Senior Librarian for Stock and Reader Development at Leeds Libraries.

Follow Stu on Twitter at @StuHennigan

Stu Hennigan talks to Project Twist-It about Ghost Signs and his views on poverty & stigma. Interview by Mary O’Hara

Tell us a bit about yourself

I’m a writer, poet, musician, and senior librarian currently living and working in Leeds. My short fiction, essays and poetry have been published in print and online by 3:AM,  Lune: the journal of literary misrule, Massive Overheads, Lunate, Visual Verse and Expat Lit. Ghost Signs, published in June 2022 by Bluemoose, is my first published full-length work.

What was the impetus for your book, Ghost Signs: poverty and the pandemic?

I work for the library service in Leeds and have done for nearly fifteen years. When the first Covid lockdown hit, one of the first things the council here did was set up a food distribution centre in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. The idea was that if anyone was self-isolating and had no access to food, they could call a helpline and get a food parcel delivered to their house. I volunteered to be a delivery driver. I was being paid regardless so I thought I might as well make myself useful.

Once the FDC was up and running, word got out fairly quickly that the council were giving away food, and within a pretty short space of time, it went from being a Covid support service to something entirely different – people on low incomes from all over the city started calling up for help. 

Can you tell us a bit about the book?

“I spent nearly six months on the job, during which I drove something like three and a half thousand miles around the city, with the work taking me into the heart of some of the most disadvantaged estates and onto the doorsteps of some of the city’s most vulnerable people. Many of the scenes I saw were horrifying, and in some parts of the city I was confronted by levels of deprivation that are unbelievable in the twenty-first century.

I saw first-hand the effects of austerity, and how the savage cuts that started during the Cameron years have left local authorities floundering, financially unable to cope and lacking vital services when a disaster of this scale hit their communities. I met adults who were literally starving; I saw parents struggling to provide basic necessities for young families; I encountered children who looked at everyday food items like they were extravagant birthday gifts; I saw people with severe mental health problems abandoned by the state to fend for themselves. And I thought that something needed to be done to document all this.” Edited extract: Ghost Signs: Poverty and the pandemic

The notes taken and stories collected are what form the bulk of the day-to-day accounts contained in the book. There’s also a series of journalistic, quasi-news reports that give week-on-week accounts of how many people have died and show what was happening in terms of the pandemic on a national level – what the government said it was doing, and what was really happening on the ground.

You’ve said you hoped readers would get angry reading it – can you elaborate?

It’s a strange thing to want from your readership in a sense, but yeah, that’s exactly the intention. There’s more than enough money in the country to take care of everyone, it’s just that the majority of it is in the hands of the wrong people. I’ve said this from the outset – if you’re not enraged by what’s going on, you’re part of the problem, and nothing is going to change my thinking on that.

What are the biggest misconceptions about poverty in Britain today in your view?

There are a lot of these, and most of them aren’t new, but here are some of the main ones:

1.     Everyone living in poverty is on benefits; this is simply not true – latest stats show that 68% of households below the poverty line have at least one working adult.

It’s another insidious way that Capitalism keeps people in check; the precarious work market has conditioned people to accept working in a state of permanent instability; short-term contracts, periods of work followed by periods of unemployment, which makes any kind of future planning impossible. It’s like someone telling you to dig your own grave and forcing you to smile while you’re doing it.

2.     People in poverty could change their circumstances if they wanted to. The idea that poor people need to work harder to better their position in life is fucking offensive. No one works harder, for less reward, than poor people; here’s a hospital cleaner working twelve hour shifts, five days a week, of back-breaking labour for shit pay. There’s even a medical condition that’s been named for it – Shit Life Syndrome (“a level of long-standing poverty, family breakdown, lack of stability, unemployment and potential risk factors common to many of the predominately young, working class patients”) – to describe the physical and psychological effects the socio-economic condition of poverty has on individuals. It sounds like parody but it’s not.

3.     People in poverty need to learn to budget. No one knows how to budget better than those who have nothing. It’s amazing how politicians can blithely toss out soundbites about money-saving tips when they’re on 80k a year and claiming triple that in expenses. The media plays a huge role in this because they reinforce these toxic narratives and enable that kind of thinking. There’s blood on the hands of so many editors and journalists, but none of them will ever cop for it. Or the other old chestnut – they all seem to have enough money to buy cigarettes and alcohol. It’s up to them what they spend their money on, and it’s not for me, or anyone else to judge. Aren’t the working class allowed to enjoy themselves? Or indulge in any kind of escapism? When I was living on benefits because of my mental health, I was wrecked half the time as well, cos I had nothing else to do, and I was fucking miserable. 

4.     They need to have less children. This neo-Malthusian bullshit is so stupid I shouldn’t even dignify it by talking about it, but it still persists so I’ll have to. If everyone living in poverty stopped having children, they would still be working shit jobs for shit money, living in substandard housing and being exploited, brutalised, degraded and dehumanised in exactly the same way that they are now.

What has been the reception to the book? Why do you think that is?

I think it’s struck a chord because in a way it’s the story of our times. The strapline is poverty and the pandemic, but to me it’s a book about what a fucking catastrophe the last twelve years of Tory government has been, and those two things are only a part of the narrative. There’s so much anger in the country right now, and rightly so. Since Cameron we’ve had austerity, Brexit, and now the current cost-of-living crisis, and you can lay it all on the doorstep of the government, no matter how much they protest to the contrary. I think increasing numbers of people are waking up to the fact that the UK is riddled with endemic, systemic, socio-political and economic structural inequalities that favour few but the very, very rich.

My intention when writing Ghost Signs was to put a human face on the stats. Anyone can do a Google search and find out that 14.5 million people in the UK live in poverty, but without relating this to real lives it’s just a numbers game, so I think that’s had a big impact too, the human element. There are certain incidents that I get asked about at literally every single event I do, and that shows the power of personalising the data.

Ghost Signs hasn’t had a huge amount of coverage in the press, but the places that have featured it have given it an audience it would have been much slower to reach otherwise. I have a lot of contact from academics and political/social thinkers, and I’ve been invited to do events with think tanks, MPs and things like that as a result. It’s also being taught on some university courses already because it’s seen as a social document, and a historical one too. I saw a piece in which a reviewer said they’d recommend it to any student developing ethnographic research about current British society so that shows the kind of academic audience it’s reaching and at the moment it seems like this is where it’s gaining the most traction.

Do you have any personal experience of poverty? If so, how did it affect you?

I come from a small-town, northern working class family and we didn’t have much money when I was growing up. My dad’s from a council estate and my grandparents lived on it for most of their lives. I don’t think people always realise that there are different gradations to poverty – not everyone who grows up poor experiences abuse, or drugs, or literal starvation.

I didn’t grow up in the kind of extreme poverty I wrote about in the book; my family were a couple of steps removed from that, but my parents had a hard time when I was growing up. They lived wage to wage – by Wednesday the cash would be thin on the ground and my mam and godmother would go into town and have to split a loaf of bread and a stone of spuds cos neither of them could afford to buy them on their own. People laugh when I tell them now and a lot don’t believe me, but I didn’t even know what pasta was until I was about fourteen.

It's interesting at events when people ask along the lines of, wasn’t it very traumatic for you doing that work for so long? Well yes, it was, in the sense that standing in front of someone who breaks down at the sight of food and tells you they haven’t eaten for days, or seeing a child dance with joy because you’ve brought them a packet of biscuits, is incredibly upsetting and something you’ll never, ever forget. But if you’re asking after my welfare having read the stories in the book, you’re worrying about the wrong person.

What were the main things you learned about poverty in today’s UK – and the people living it – from your work delivering food parcels during the pandemic?

The main takeaway for me was realising the vast scale of the problem, and how totally disenfranchised people are. I’ve worked with vulnerable communities for a long time, so it’s not like I wasn’t aware that this is happening; but terms of scale, you have to bear in mind that I was one of a team of maybe thirty or forty drivers, and that the book only covers nine weeks of deliveries, when I actually did the job for nearly six months. We’re not talking about the odd isolated incident of extreme poverty – it was multiple times a day, for months on end.

And it’s not something that’s specific to Leeds, or even just the north, as some would have you believe – it’s happening in Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow – you name it. All the major cities, and a lot of the towns too, not to mention the issue of rural poverty, which very few people ever talk about because in many ways it’s hidden from view.

         One thing I wasn’t prepared for was the way some people reacted to us when we turned up. The majority of people were very, very grateful for the service and told us so, but even within that people were often wary at first. There were occasions when it looked like it was going to get violent, and I was properly threatened more than once. They’re stashed away in 21st century ghettoes and as a result the communities are totally insular, almost hermetically sealed in a social sense. They can’t imagine you’d be there to help. It’s fight or flight, and they’ve got nowhere to run to so they might as well come out swinging.

How big a role does stigmatization of the poorest in society play in perpetuating poverty?

Gargantuan. It’s fundamental to the whole thing. The mass media is allowed to push falsehoods like the ones above with impunity, because they control the narrative and the press is more or less completely unregulated, or it isn’t regulated in a way that makes a difference, anyway.

The media helps politicians to shift the burden of responsibility onto individuals and away from the State, which suits right-wing moguls (who dominate the British media landscape) and the government perfectly, because it preserves a status quo in which they’re all happily coining it in. A good chunk of the electorate doesn’t care about the people who suffer as a result, because they’ve been conditioned to believe that the poor deserve it, or choose to live that way.

How can we challenge stigma and the demonization of people in poverty?

Honest answer, and this is incredibly depressing, is I don’t think we can in a way that will affect meaningful change. People in poverty have always been stigmatised. You go back to the poor laws in the 19th century, the workhouse, all that – that legislation criminalised poverty and it’s the same now. Just as now, the blame is all on the individual and their personal circumstances. That attitude hasn’t changed, and until there’s better regulation of the press, and something put in place to sever, or at least drastically weaken, the links between media conglomerates and political parties, the narratives won’t change and the stigma will stay.

It was speculated that the shared trauma of the pandemic would make the wider population more understanding of poverty – and of the harm that stigma inflicts. What do you think of that as 2023 begins? 

It was just that – speculation, and we’re still on square one. I don’t think there’s a whole lot more understanding of it now than there was before to be honest. I’ll qualify that by saying I think there’s more mediacoverage of the issue, but it falls foul of the short-termism and reductive nature of contemporary reporting, so that doesn’t help to foster any real understanding that may change wider perception.

I think the insight that Covid allowed has gone from the minds of the wider public too. During lockdown when people were clapping for key workers it felt as if the intrinsic value of all work was being recognised, that the penny had dropped that, hey, we need the people who clean the toilets, and stack the shelves and drive the trucks etc. Platitudinous bullshit for sure, but at least more people were thinking about it.

So, despite an increase in awareness, there can be no proper understanding of poverty in the wider public consciousness until the media report on the real issues in a balanced, nuanced way, rather than spouting soundbite propaganda on behalf of whoever is bankrolling their particular outlet.

You can read/listen to more from Stu via the links below:

The Prospect Podcast with Helen Barnard

The Times Literary Supplement review of Ghost Signs by David Collard

Interview with The Bookseller about Ghost Signs