Did the Labour government improve people's lives? Are we healthier, wealthier or wiser; happier or safer than in 1997, when Labour came to power? If we are, how much do we have to thank Blair and Brown and their cabinets for? In The Verdict, Polly Toynbee and David Walker strip away spin, personality and political rhetoric to judge how our lives have changed. They consider Labour's lasting legacy and what its successors can learn from Labour's performance. Travelling the country, Toynbee and Walker compare Labour's promises with people's own accounts of what they experienced in recent years. They drop in on a Sure Start centre and visit schools, hospitals and colleges - and estates plagued by disorder - to ask: what different did Labour make? Combining sharp, witty writing, human stories and expert analysis, The Verdict charts Labour's often bewildering array of initiatives, projects and schemes. It questions how many depended on bubble finance and how many will be missed as recent public spending cuts take hold. From the early optimism of 'Things can only get better' to the misery of the financial crisis, Toynbee and Walker hand down the definitive judgement on Labour's record.

Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. Leaving her home, she took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity? exposing the darker side of American prosperity and the true cost of the American dream.

The ten years from 2010 have been devastating. A decade of austerity and paralysis nurtured contempt for leaders, institutions and fellow citizens and fertilised the ground for a rebellious Brexit. It has been a decade characterised by national tragedies from Grenfell to Windrush, and food banks to the property crisis.

But, as Adam Smith said, ‘there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation’. No truthful portrait of an era can be monochrome. Bright spots included the rise of renewable energy, lower crime rates, legalisation of same-sex marriage and the creative industries continuing to punch well above their weight in spite of cuts.

In The Lost Decade, Polly Toynbee and David Walker offer the definitive survey of this most tumultuous of periods in British history and look to what lies ahead for us. This is the anatomy of a dark decade, bringing hope for better to come.

What is the state? And what's it ever done for you? More than you think. The state houses us, educates us, employs us, protects us on the street and in the wider world. It is the country we created together, and a part of our national identity. However, in recent years there has been a systematic and covert attack on the state that has turned us all against it - the government have depleted funding and resources, and mounted an ideological assault on the public sector through the media. Toynbee and Walker travelled around Great Britain gathering the voices of the people who make up the state: nurses and patients, teachers and parents, policemen and civilians. This book is your chance to hear their side of the story. The story they tell is one of dismemberment across our nation state: a fragmented NHS, a reduced police force, divided schools and a vulnerable military. In Dismembered, it becomes clear that this attack on the state is an attack on each and every one of us, for our peace and productivity as a country depend upon a strong state. DISMEMBERED lays bare the deliberate dismantling of the public sector and its consequences. Our post-Brexit well-being and prosperity are now at stake.

While for generations Polly Toynbee's ancestors have been committed left-wing rabble-rousers railing against injustice, they could never claim to be working class, settling instead for the prosperous life of academia or journalism enjoyed by their own forebears. So where does that leave their ideals of class equality? Through a colourful, entertaining examination of her own family - which in addition to her writer father Philip and her historian grandfather Arnold contains everyone from the Glenconners to Jessica Mitford to Bertrand Russell, and features ancestral home Castle Howard as a backdrop - Toynbee explores the myth of mobility, the guilt of privilege, and asks for a truly honest conversation about class in Britain.

'A passionately reasoned and compelling account of the avoidable cruelties still embedded in the underside of British life - by a writer who has literally worn the clothes, lived in the flats and done the jobs of the poor. Every member of the cabinet should be required to read it, apologise and then act'. - Will Hutton. A frank and breathtaking book, this is journalist and broadcaster Polly Toynbee's account of her courageous intention to live and work on the minimum wage. The 'decent living' wage set by the Council of Europe is set at GBP7.39. The minimum wage in Britain is currently GBP4.10 per hour. And often, people are working for less, their voices unheard, their faces unnoticed. The low-paid are caught in an economic double bind that victimises them and shames the rest of us. Toynbee took whatever jobs she could find, often offered for less than the official minimum wage.Living on an estate in Clapham, she started from scratch and found that if she were truly unemployed, she would not even be able to afford a new job, and that faced with starvation, it's impossible not to sink into debt. In this powerful and compelling book, Polly Toynbee journeys to the inside of Britain today and uncovers that world which is invisible to most. This is a damning portrait of social justice in Britain.