Campaigning for the excluded in Liverpool

Pauline: Please welcome our next speaker, from the Centre Think Tank, Director Torrin Wilkins. Oh, he is behind me.

Torrin: It is pantomime.

Thank you very much for that lovely welcome! So today, I want to do something a little bit different from when I was first asked to do this by the Excluded Unity Alliance. The conversation we had was about how we get people to understand the problem. You see, because we have had Twitter bombs, we have had videos, we have had TV appearances, and newspapers. All of it. And yet, nothing. The Government has not done a thing; it has not lifted a finger. The question is, what do we do, how do we get this message across? And I realised how at the last rally that we did. If any of you have been to London recently, or you were at that last rally, there is a COVID memorial wall that runs a third of a mile down through London. If you go there, you will see the pandemic has been awful. We hear every single day about figures, like 150,000 people who have died, but you do not understand how awful it is until you walk down that wall. Because when you walk down that wall, you see peoples names and you realise that those people who died are grandparents, they are parents, and suddenly it hits home that that number is not just a number anymore. So our figures, we predict that about 6 million people have been excluded, tops.

Now, if you look at that and you were to make the same wall, it would be 13 miles in length. Just imagine a trip down that wall, all the way down. Looking at every heart with people’s names on them and realising the numbers and the scale. Because that is what we are dealing with here is not something small, it is not just a headline figure. It is an enormous number of people, each with their own stories. Another example was that we are here in Liverpool today. It is 12 times the size of Liverpool. 12 times. Everyone you have walked past today, everyone who lives here. It is 12 times. The other one is Wales, now I spent a few years in Wales and realised it is an enormous country. Even some European countries like Cyprus. Nowhere close.

And that hits home that six million is an enormous number, but as I said, it does not get past the fact that there are so many people and so many individual stories. And in some ways, through that pandemic, I have been lucky enough to speak to those people. I have spoken to about one hundred people who have been excluded, and in those stories, you hear stories about their mental health suffering because they have not got any money, the fact that they are drowning in debt, they simply cannot pay their way, that they have fallen through Universal Credit and are not able to support themselves, and in a lot of cases, they are just struggling to put food on the table day by day. And that hits home because you suddenly realise that each of those people, each of them, had their own story. They have gone through something different, and I think it was a real sign of how bad things have gotten. And then there was another thing I thought going down that wall. I have spoken to a lot of people who have been forced to go to work. They had to shield, they should have been shielding, and yet they did not have a choice. They did not have the money to support themselves. They did not have the money to support themselves. They did not get self-employed grants. They did not get furloughed, so they had to go to work. And that was the one number I did not want to know, which was the number of people who had to go to work, and yet they caught the virus because they should not have been there. That, for me, shows that there are a lot of things you can say about the government at the moment, but doing that, allowing that to happen, is complete neglect, and then, of course, you have those twenty-five people who sadly took their own lives because of this. That shows the scale of this. From that six million people down to those twenty-five. And I think that for me was the moment that I started to realise the absolute scale of this crisis.

And of course, we have had so many plans put forward now. In Northern Ireland, they have working plans, the same as in Wales. They have plans that are working in place, including more people. And the government has done nothing about it. You have TIGS, you have the Directors Income Support Scheme by Rebecca Seeley Harris. Nothing. The government spoke but did absolutely nothing. We came up with plans, dozens of plans, that would include millions of people in these schemes, and the government again did nothing. They have sat by and just let it all happen, and in some ways, that is where I think there is another perspective, which is about the economic argument, because at the end of the day, this will damage the economy. It is going to damage the economy, it is going to hit tax revenue, and it is going to hit public services.

If we do it now, I think we can see it more like an investment. We can see it as an investment in the economy, a stimulus package, and that will hit on. That will increase tax revenue, and if you increase tax revenue, then you can spend more on things like schools, doctors, and nurses, and you do that, and eventually, it gets back to the economy. You have a better education, and healthier, happier workers. It is a simple loop. It is not just one action. It is not just about helping those people; it is also about hard economics. So there is a very simple reason for doing this. So really, I think it is about those two things. It is about helping people, but it is also about economics. So I am glad we are doing this. I am glad we are going up and down the country trying to push for this, trying to get people included, as many as we can. Because of those two things, this government had left them behind.

So thank you very much!