Manchester Ragged University

Come along to Gullivers (109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW) at 7pm for a talk on ‘Financial Exclusion, Disappearing Public Goods and Poverties: The Dwindling Habitat’ by Alex Dunedin. There is food provided and everyone is invited to bring along an item of food to put on the table if they like and take away what is left at the end.

### Title of talk:

Financial Exclusion, Disappearing Public Goods and Poverties: The Dwindling Habitat

### Bullet points of what you would like to talk about:

• The Impact of Privatization on Education and Community
• Financial Exclusion from Culture and Participation
• The UK Select Committee on Financial Exclusion
• The Modern, Denuded Habitat of the Financially Poor
• The Rhetoric of Personal Responsibility
• Structural Displacement and Artificial Scarcity
• The United Nations Definition of Overall Poverty
• Poverty, Dignity, and Dehumanisation
• Poverty Criteria Met in Developed Nations

### A few paragraphs on your subject:

I plan on doing a presentation around 40 minutes long followed by a discussion with those in the room. I am involved in poverty research following particularly the human rights scholar and former UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty Prof Philip Alston. This work fascinates me especially as I have been born in and grown up in what is judged by the economic measure GDP (Gross Domestic Poverty) to be the 6th richest nation in the world. Britain is rich, and Edinburgh wealthy, and yet there is relatively little public discussion about the extreme disparity.
In this talk I am going to discuss some basic economic histories putting in context what it means in practice when things run by the state in order to enrich the lives of its citizens (Public Goods) are turned into businesses which extract profit from the population and concentrate it in the hands of the owners. Ultimately so much of life becomes a pay-to-play situation. People struggle to participate in normal social and familial activities thus becoming more isolated and removed from each other.
In this presentation I examine some of the findings of the UK parliament Select Committee on Financial Exclusion. What does it mean to be financially excluded ? What impact does that have on the economy as a whole ? How does this impact on health and psychology ? All are questions which poverty researchers ask.
I take a brief look at the United Nations criteria of assessing poverty in different ways. Like Charles Dickens starts in his book ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ – “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”; like Victorian times, if you have a lot of money you live in the best of all possible worlds however, if you have no money you live in the worst of all possible worlds.
This is why under the auspices of the United Nations, Prof Philip Alston visited Britain the 6th richest country in the world in 2018 in order to study poverty delivering a damning verdict. There is structural poverty in Britain which is artificially produced. This offers an account for a magnitude of research done by the likes of Professors Marmot, Wilkinson and Pickett which reveals the illness caused by the deliberate production of poverty in our sociological ecosystem.

### A few paragraphs about you:

I have been involved in independent library research for 28 years and independent community education for 15 years. Being born and having lived in Edinburgh I have lived in most quarters of the city, from the abundance of Morningside to the high flats of Oxgangs and Leith. I have been the beneficiary of many teachers and been taught to map histories, social arrangements, and institutional arrangements in order to study the sociology – that is, study and make sense of human society and social behaviour as we find it.
I am currently studying a Masters degree in Public Sociology which takes a special focus on critical aspects of psychiatry. My interests in poverty research intersect and overlay because I believe that the isolation which the structure of our society is promoting through its move from a Mixed Market economy to a Neoliberal one is causing much mental and physical illness.

###