I thought I would share the book cover for my upcoming new book. Everyone reading this will know I am one of the 3 million #ExcludedUK and tomorrow sees me start my 55th week of having no income or government support and whilst Shielding alone too.

So rather than write a history book dealing with the past, I thought I’d compile a history book all about the present and have a collection of accounts of people who to varying degrees are going through a similar situation to me, where the Coronavirus is absolutely the least of our problems.

More about that another time but for now here is the front cover and a bit of an introduction to the book as it will appear on the book product pages online.

Most discriminations that we have in this world are relics of prejudices and biases centuries or even millennia old. In the UK, we are fortunate to live in a time where being treated negatively because of our sex, race, age, beliefs (if any) or any impairments is increasingly legally and morally wrong.

However, in the spring of 2020 as the world fell under the horrors of COVID-19, life, as we knew it, came to an end. The British government announced a series of support packages – described as, “Unprecedented” and although support was very generous to many, it was not world-beating or in any measure the best. Billionaire Chancellor Rishi Sunak famously announced that, “No-one will be left behind… or without hope”. Yet that is exactly what proceeded to happen to some three million UK tax payers.

In a time when it be rightfully abhorrent to discriminate against anyone due to their sex or race, religious beliefs or any other number of long-since taboo factors, the UK government went out of its way to discriminate against people solely due to their chosen, entirely legal and in my case, actually encouraged by the government, method of earning a living.

Imagine going through the entire pandemic with all the worries of ill-health, death, worries for the future but on top of that, be unable and often legally not allowed to work but not receiving any government support whatsoever. Whilst, at the same time, others were helped time after time after time. If such a series of events were to happen in a far-off country there would be widespread outrage and condemnation by governments and opposition alike and yet here we are, over a year later since the first virus cases hit the UK – and nothing has changed.

The government narrative would like you to believe that everyone has been helped. Yet the three million members of the club that no-one wanted to join, say differently – we tell the stories of ever worsening, poverty, debt, homelessness, discrimination, persecution and suicides. £xcluded Voices is a compilation of accounts of what may well be the last great state act of deliberate discrimination. It’s told by the normal, everyday people that were once known as ‘the back-bone of the British economy’.

Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Oliver Dowden, Keir Starmer and many more might label us as fraudsters or even deny our existence, but history will tell a different story. One day people will look back at this less-known but deliberately enacted government policy disaster of the Coronavirus epidemic and wonder how it could happen in the third decade of 21st Century Britain. It is to the eternal shame of everyone who decided to ruin three million lives and also those others who were so well supported by the state they chose to look the other way.