Family holidays should be something everyone can afford, but too many of us go without

I recently holidayed in the Balearics with my son. It was only his second time travelling outside of the UK with me. I would say we were privileged, in spite of any hardship. We made it there.

Many people living in poverty experience a lack of enrichment – the enrichment that taking ourselves and our young people out of the UK on holiday can bring. There was some melancholy and sadness that his childhood, at 17, is almost over, and that we didn’t get this opportunity earlier because of poverty. It was an unimagined, unexpected and entirely unprivileged, poverty.

A family holiday is a baseline for many people, and that is good. I celebrate that. I just feel I want to tell politicians, wealthy people, decision makers, power hoarders and the vast sums of people in poverty that this should be everyone’s baseline. Every child should be able to enjoy enriching experiences and the freedom to explore safely, with an invested parent or carer. But how can we do that if we are struggling to make ends meet and exhausted from working and trying to cope in such environmentally fractured times? ‘Heating or eating’ is now the accepted baseline.

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What’s more, the continued pervasiveness of the pandemic still shocks. We reduced people to those who would and would not survive, and ‘heat or eat’ became the national narrative. We normalised lack of ambition and opportunity for people and further opened the fissures of poverty and privilege in our communities and systems in the UK.

We are given such low markers for what we should accept as the masses, that we cannot see if these small things were a baseline for all of us, that life would be sweeter, our children would grow and learn other ways and foods and languages and the infinite possibilities of dreaming. 

On holiday, I spoke with a man who lives in the Balearics. He waxed lyrical about his kids sailing, motorbiking, travelling and more. There was a huge amount of money where we were staying, with yachts drifting in for lunches and more. Yet still, I felt privileged. The right exposure to one person can change the course of our lives. I thought about that a lot because support from the right people has become some sort of twisted privilege for us to combat the lack of ambition that has filtered from successive governments to our own spaces as they are squeezed of financial support by the greedy private equity firms and individuals we see daily, extracting from our systems and jetting to a pub in the Balearics to watch a football match.

From a political standpoint, it’s exhausting. There is a lack of ambition for the future of this country. And time feels limited. We are one giant place of extraction by the ultra-wealthy and it’s time we said that is not, and can never be, the baseline for the UK and its people. As huge organisations and vastly wealthy individuals jet all over the world never ever struggling to pay the bills, commodifying everything they come across, they are making finite decisions on all of our lives. That is why we need a better baseline, and that is what I want to tell politicians and particularly our new prime minister Andy Burnham.

Changing Realities – a collaborative, participatory research project between the University of Glasgow, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG_ and over 200 parents and carers across the UK living on a low income – has been exploring what changes should be introduced by the new government to support those living on the sharpest end of the crisis.

Our Changing Realities diary entries, which can be read here, show that many of us feel the precarity of this time, and we are calling on the PM to respond to the deep need of people living in poverty and without the privilege that the right connections do bring. 

Some recent online diary entries reflect on this. Montague said: “The new PM will want to make a strong first impression, and cuts to welfare are low hanging fruit that the newspapers will like. It doesn’t matter that welfare cuts harm society in the long run, or that it affects the most vulnerable people the most.”

Meanwhile, Zara said: “I worry that the new prime minister Andy Burnham might not be as engaged [with the Child Poverty Strategy], as he was not involved with its creation. I worry that this might lead the Child Poverty Strategy being put aside, in favour of issues that the new prime minister is passionate about.”

People need less rhetoric and posturing and more action. We are all worried that the work we have done will be lost in favour of yet another apparent ‘solution’ when the answers are already there. 

Set a better standard for all the people of the UK. The prime minister cannot just accept wealth inequality. He must challenge the norms and work in our interests because it will be the most radical thing he will ever do.

Joanne Barker-Marsh is a participant of Changing Realities.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

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