Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Bennes and every week I sit down for a 40 minute conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode I'm joined by my cats and also joined on Zoom by the journalist and author Mario Hira where I ask her.

When did we start to demonize poverty?

Welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Bennes and I'm so excited to introduce our guest this week.

Mario Hira returning writer, star, activist, advocate, extraordinaire. You really are just incredible genius.

If you are someone who has been listening to getting curious for some time, you will recognize this voice because she was our expert and updater on Brexit,

which how do you on getting curious like days before the Brexit vote? Welcome back.

It's great to be here again, Jonathan.

So Matilda is at her first getting curious recording and she's really excited about it.

Okay. So that's kind of fun. So first of all, I definitely want to talk about how Brexit relates to your book and all of your incredible work outside of Brexit that is what you're here to talk about,

which is, you know, our overlying question is what is poverty? How do people come out of it? What causes poverty?

And so that's really what we're here to talk about in all of your work around that.

But just really quickly Brexit three years later.

Yeah. In a nutshell, three years later, I think everyone thought 2020 was going to be completely dominated by it.

Of course, it's vanished from sight. It's still a problem because apparently it's still going to get done by the end of the year. But I don't think many people see that truly happening.

It's crazy. Oh my god, because that actually didn't even occur to me that like the UK having to like rewrite all of their own new non EU laws and all that other stuff is going to.

It's in the system.

It's already a hell of a tight deadline never mind now. So you imagine all those civil servants who are beavering away in the background trying to get this done already up against the wall on this and we're in the middle of a global pandemic.

So really it's probably not going to happen in the way that they thought it would.

Nothing like contracting COVID-19 to make you gain sympathy for someone like I feel like Boris Johnson, Prime Minister got COVID.

Like it is it has made me feel very.

I don't want him to die and I am shocked the amount of stress and sympathy I have.

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