Polly Toynbee

Background

Toynbee was born at Yafford on the Isle of Wight, the second daughter of the literary critic Philip Toynbee by his first wife Anne Barbara Denise (1920–2004), daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel George Powell, of the Grenadier Guards.

Her grandfather was the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, her grandmother was Rosalind Murray, and her great-grand uncle the philanthropist and economic historian Arnold Toynbee, after whom Toynbee Hall in the East End of London is named. Her parents divorced when Toynbee was aged four and she moved to London with her mother, who married the philosopher Richard Wollheim.

Toynbee attended Badminton School, a private girls' school in Bristol, leaving with 4 O-levels, which she described as "bad". She then attended Holland Park School, a state comprehensive school in London, where she took the missing O-levels, passed one A-level, and obtained a scholarship to Oxford University to read history at St Anne's College.

She had a teenage affair and became pregnant. Despite pressure from the father's family, and having visited his student sister (mother of the infant Boris Johnson) in Oxford, they decided to separate, and she took illegal abortion-inducing pills. They remained "remote" friends.

Toynbee dropped out of university after eighteen months, which she regrets, as she was told by her tutor she would. She has variously attributed this to having an affair with a married TV presenter, to having her first novel published in her first term at Oxford, to the pressure of her scholarship and family expectations, and to taking up with Jeremy Sandford.

During her gap year, in 1966, Toynbee worked for Amnesty International in Rhodesia (which had just unilaterally declared independence) until she was expelled by the government. She published her first novel, Leftovers, in 1966. Following her expulsion from Rhodesia, Toynbee revealed the existence of the "Harry" letters, which detailed the alleged funding of Amnesty International in Rhodesia by the British government.

After Oxford, Toynbee found work in a factory and a burger bar, hoping to write in her spare time. She later said: "I had a loopy idea that I could work with my hands during the day and in the evening come home and write novels and poetry, and be Tolstoy... But I very quickly discovered why people who work in factories don't usually have the energy to write when they get home." She went into journalism, working on the diary at The Observer, and turned her eight months of experience in manual work (along with "undercover" stints as a nurse and an Army recruit) into the book A Working Life (1970).

Career

Toynbee worked for many years at The Guardian, before joining the BBC, where she was social affairs editor (1988–1995). At The Independent, which she joined after leaving the BBC, she was a columnist and associate editor, working with then editor Andrew Marr. She later rejoined The Guardian. She has also written for The Observer and the Radio Times; at one time she was an editor for the Washington Monthly.

Following in the footsteps of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (2001), in 2003 she published Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain about an experimental period voluntarily living on the minimum wage, which was £4.10 per hour at the time. She worked as a hospital porter in a National Health Service hospital, a dinner lady in a primary school, a nursery assistant, a call-centre employee, a cake factory worker and a care home assistant, during which time she contracted salmonella. The book is critical of conditions in low pay jobs in Britain. The book was reviewed in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and was their book of the month. Toynbee also contributed an introduction to the UK edition of Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

Toynbee writes for The Guardian, and serves as President of the Social Policy Association. She is chair of the Brighton Festival and is a member and deputy treasurer of the Fabian Society.

Political history and opinions

Toynbee has written about her privilege in the British class system, saying that all her family "lived on the left ... locked in combat with the ... forces of conservatism", but were clearly members of a privileged class. Toynbee did badly at school as she was "too rebellious to work, too angry to obey, too impatient to get out of there"; she attributed her gaining an Oxford scholarship to its "heavily class-biased exam" being designed "to reward people of exactly my background". After deliberately taking on menial jobs, she took a job that led to her becoming a journalist, something she had never intended.

Toynbee is a member of the Labour Party. She and her first husband, Peter Jenkins (from 1970), were supporters of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) breakaway from Labour in 1981, both signing the Limehouse Declaration. Toynbee stood for the party at the 1983 general election for Lewisham East, garnering 9351 votes (22%) and finishing third. She was one of the few SDP members who believed in unilateral nuclear disarmament, founding an unsuccessful group "Unilateralists for Social Democracy". She later refused to support the subsequent merger of the SDP with the Liberals (to form the Liberal Democrats), reacting instead by rejoining Labour only after the rump 'continuing SDP', led by David Owen, collapsed in 1990.

In 1995, Toynbee criticised Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Condon's comments that 80% of mugging cases were committed by black people, stating that it was "an over-simplification that is seriously misleading". She approvingly quoted academic researcher Michael Keith, who said: "If you were to standardise for everything else – education, unemployment, housing estates, life chances – race on its own would have virtually no significance."

In a 2002 debate hosted by the Royal Society of Arts and Prospect magazine, Toynbee argued that the West should pursue liberal internationalism by intervening through the United Nations to promote democracy around the world: "Spreading people's right to self-determination, and their right to think and vote for themselves, is a moral obligation... We should be intervening now in the Congo and Sudan." She is also critical of neoliberalism.

Toynbee strongly supports state education, though she had two of her three children partly educated in the private sector, leading to accusations of hypocrisy. Although consistently critical of many of Tony Blair's New Labour reforms, she wrote in 2005 that his government "remains the best government of my political lifetime". During the 2005 General Election, with dissatisfaction high among traditional Labour voters, Toynbee wrote several times about the dangers of protest voting, "Giving Blair a bloody nose". She urged Guardian readers to vote with a clothes peg over their nose if they had to, to make sure Michael Howard's Conservatives would not win thanks to vote splitting. "Voters think they can take a free hit at Blair while assuming Labour will win anyway. But Labour won't win if people won't vote for it."

Views

Views on politics

Writing about the government of PM Rishi Sunak in November 2022, Toynbee argued that choosing Suella Braverman as home secretary was a blunder and that Braverman's promise to reduce immigration to "tens of thousands" was unworkable since more than 270,000 people arrived during the year to March 2022, mostly with visas. Only small numbers arrived in boats. Toynbee further said that Braverman's "dreams" about Rwanda and cruelty and putting arrivals into squalid conditions in the Manston processing centre disrupted policy.

Toynbee also criticised Sunak's initial decision to miss the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference. Later Sunak changed his mind and decided he would attend the COP27 conference.

Views on religion

An atheist, Toynbee is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, a supporter of the Humanist Society Scotland, and was appointed President of the British Humanist Association in July 2007. Since 2012, she has been the BHA's vice president. She has said that she is simply a consistent atheist, and is just as critical of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. She wrote: "The pens sharpen—Islamophobia! No such thing. Primitive Middle Eastern religions (and most others) are much the same—Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust for women's bodies." In 1997 she declared "I am an Islamophobe and proud of it". In 2005 she opposed the Bill to outlaw incitement to religious hatred: "Race is something people cannot choose and it defines nothing about them. But beliefs are what people choose to identify with...The two cannot be blurred into one—which is why the word Islamophobia is a nonsense".

In 2003, upon the 25th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's papacy, she wrote that he "is a hate-figure and with good reason... No one can compute how many people have died of Aids as a result of Wojtyla's power, how many woman have died in childbirth needlessly, how many children starved in families too large and poor to feed them. But it is reasonable to suppose these silent, unseen, uncounted deaths at his hand would match that of any self-respecting tyrant or dictator". In 2011 she accepted an invitation to participate in a debate with the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig on the existence of God but Toynbee later pulled out, stating "this is not my kind of forum".

Toynbee has mixed feelings about the Church of England; she has opposed both religious and secular dogmatic beliefs. In April 2014, she wrote:

"The C of E is a confusing creature. Even while it tussles internally between conservative and liberal wings on gay marriage or female bishops, polls of its members show it's no longer the Conservative party at prayer: more vote Lib Dem and Labour. Look at the 40 bishops' raspberry of an Easter message to Cameron, with their strong rebuke against the "national crisis" of hunger so much worsened by his welfare policies. They know because their churches house the food banks used by almost a million people. [...] Like all humanity, the religious are both good and bad. The C of E is good on food banks, bad on sex and death. Faith makes people no more virtuous, but nor do rationalists claim any moral superiority. Pogroms, inquisitions, jihadist terror and religious massacres can be matched death for death with the secular horrors of Pol Pot, Hitler or Stalin. The danger is where absolute belief in universal truths, religious or secular, permits no doubt."

Views on head of state

Toynbee has written that "the need for an elected president has become urgent".

Honours

Toynbee was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Essex in 1999 and by London South Bank University in 2002. In 2004, she was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Loughborough University. In 2005, she was made an Honorary Doctor of The Open University for "her notable contribution to the educational and cultural well-being of society". The University of Kent awarded Toynbee the honorary title of Doctor of Civil Law in November 2007 in recognition of her concern with poverty and welfare. This was followed in 2008 when University of Leeds awarded her fourth honorary doctorate.

In 2007 Toynbee was named 'Columnist of the Year' at the British Press Awards.

Toynbee declined to be made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2000.

Personal life

Toynbee lives in Lewes, East Sussex. She also owns a villa in Tuscany. She is a member of the Arts Emergency Service.

Select bibliography

Leftovers: A Novel (1966) ISBN 0-586-02643-6

A Working Life (1971) ISBN 0-340-14760-1

Hospital (1977) ISBN 0-09-131390-2

Way We Live Now (1981) ISBN 0-413-49090-4

Lost Children: Story of Adopted Children Searching for Their Mothers (1985) ISBN 0-09-160440-0

Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain (2003) ISBN 0-7475-6415-9

Better or Worse?: Has Labour Delivered? (2005) ISBN 0-7475-7982-2

Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequality in Britain Today (with David Walker, 2008) ISBN 978-1-84708-093-6

Cameron's Coup: How the Tories took Britain to the brink (with David Walker, 2015)

An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and other Radicals (2023)