I think she’s a genius master of SM bullshittery. She’s got people so convinced she had a horrific, poverty-stricken working class childhood and now still lives with her son in massive penury (in a huge house with enormous garden in the most expensive area of her town, surrounded with designer dog, Botox and teeth whitening, Cotswold Co furniture and designer goods for years and years). As others have said, her Patreon alone brings in over £2.5k a month for NO WORK.
In her defence, followers like @Tsandjdarethrbest say things like this: “In terms of their work, they do a lot of campaigning which is very time consuming. They persuaded the ONS to change their criteria for calculating the cost of living.”
She really, really didn’t. If you can find hard evidence of her doing anything (and that evidence doesn’t just include the Guardian repeating her claims) I’ll eat my hat.
Shouting about Tories on Twitter is not campaigning; shouting on Twitter about economics with a GCSE-level understanding of how global economics works is not campaigning; getting oneself mentioned in the proximity of Martin Lewis and Marcus Rashford is not campaigning. I’d love to read a really long-form breakdown of her and I do wish her all the best, once she stops asking vulnerable people to pay her because she “needs” the money.
She’s a fascinating figure because of this profile she’s created from smoke and mirrors; she may be broke, but she absolutely is not a campaigner, a full-time single mother, or someone struggling with ongoing income issues. She’s good at what she does - it’s just that poverty campaigning isn’t what she does.