A platform for people to articulate the reality of poverty and the consequences of fourteen years of decline in social welfare. During the election the shame of child poverty, the injustice of the two-child benefit cap and the rise of inequality were raised many times, but rather than being given a spotlight, the children, young people and families actually affected remained unseen.

Mackay was born in Glasgow and grew up in a working-class tenement beside a more prosperous district, so she saw and felt inequality from a young age. That experience informed her earlier work on class, isolation, life expectancy and discrimination in her own city. Her position is that poverty in Britain was a political choice inflicted on the most disadvantaged — first through austerity, then through the steady erosion of the welfare state. Realising that opinion alone would make for a one-dimensional project, she involved her subjects as collaborators and participants.