In conversation with Alastair Laurence
Polly Toynbee has been a Guardian political and social commentator since 1998 and is the former BBC Social Affairs Editor.
Author of Hard Work: Life in Low Pay Britain, she researched this 2003 book by spending periods on the minimum wage as a hospital porter, dinner lady, on the phones in a call centre, factory worker and care home assistant. She also wrote The Verdict, about the New Labour government of Blair and Brown, and The Lost Decade 2010-2020 on recent Tory administrations. Other works include Hospital, a portrait of the NHS, Lost Children, on adoption, and the Way We Live Now. She has won two national press awards and the George Orwell prize.
Her latest book is An Uneasy Inheritance: My family and other radicals, a memoir and a tale of British social class. Reviews have called it a ‘work of love, forgiveness and understanding’ and a ‘laceratingly honest and often funny book.’
Since 2021 Polly Toynbee has been a patron of My Death, My Decision, a campaigning group for assisted dying reform.
Alastair Laurence, who is curating this series, is a freelance documentary film maker who lives near Abergavenny. In recent years Alastair has made films about The Battle of the Somme, a history of British Photography and the poets John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and TS Eliot.
