All Together Now?: One Man's Walk in Search of His Father and a Lost England

This important, disturbing and frequently heartbreaking book should be read by every politician in Westminster. Adrian Tempany, Observer In a few weeks time, it would be thirty-five years to the day since those men and women had walked 340 miles to try to save their communities and their culture, and thirty-five years since I had turned down Petes invitation to join them. I called work and booked some time off. Then I bought a one-way train ticket to Liverpool. In 1981, Mike Carters dad, Pete, organised the Peoples March for Jobs, which saw 300 people walk from Liverpool to London to protest as the Thatcher governments policies devastated industrial Britain and sent unemployment skyrocketing. Just before the 2016 EU referendum, Mike set off to walk the same route in a quest to better understand his dad and his country. As he walked, Mike found many echoes of the early eighties: a working class overlooked and ignored by Westminster politicans; communities hollowed out but fiercely resistant; anger and despair co-existing with hope and determination for change. And he also found that he and Pete shared more in common than he might have thought. All Together Now? maps the intricate, overlapping path of one mans journey and that of an entire country. It is a book about belonging, about whether to stay or go, and about the need to write new stories for our communities and ourselves.