Hope Whitmore

The excitement and anxiety was tangible during the election of 1997. Even as a child I was able to pick up on it. I saw the signs of stress in the adults around me: jiggling knees, bitten lips, my mother twirling hair around an index finger. Elections are stressful and this can cause serious health

The government’s Work Programme, launched in 2011 to help long-term unemployed people into work, has been widely condemned in the media. It has been portrayed alternately as greedy, cruel or incompetent, and sometimes all three. Yet one of these providers, Ingeus, helped me. Many journalists, who have no experience of such places, have maligned this