Mary Louisa "Polly" Toynbee (; born 27 December 1946) is a British journalist and writer. She has been a columnist for The Guardian newspaper since 1998.
She is a social democrat and was a candidate for the Social Democratic Party in the 1983 general election. She now broadly supports the Labour Party, although she is critical of its left-wing former leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
Toynbee previously worked as social affairs editor for the BBC and also for The Independent newspaper. She is vice-president of Humanists UK, having previously served as its president between 2007 and 2012. She was named Columnist of the Year at the 2007 British Press Awards. She became a patron of right-to-die organisation My Death My Decision in 2021.
Background Toynbee was born at Yafford on the Isle of Wight, the second daughter of the literary critic Philip Toynbee by his first wife Anne Barbara Denise (1920–2004), daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel George Powell, of the Grenadier Guards.An Historian's Conscience: The Correspondence of Arnold J. Toynbee and Columba Cary-Elwes, ed. Christian B. Peper, 1986, Beacon Press, p. 266.
Her grandfather was the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, her grandmother was Rosalind Murray, and her great-grand uncle the philanthropist and economic historian Arnold Toynbee, after whom Toynbee Hall in the East End of London is named. Her parents divorced when Toynbee was aged four and she moved to London with her mother, who married the philosopher Richard Wollheim.Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960, Isaiah Berlin, ed. Henry Hardy, Random House, 2012, end note no. 361
Toynbee attended Badminton School, a private girls' school in Bristol, leaving with 4 O-levels, which she described as "bad". She then attended Holland Park School, a state comprehensive school in London, where she took the missing O-levels, passed one A-level, and obtained a scholarship to Oxford University to read history at St Anne's College.
She had a teenage affair and became pregnant. Despite pressure from the father's family, and having visited his student sister (mother of the infant Boris Johnson) in Oxford, they decided to separate, and she took illegal abortion-inducing pills. They remained "remote" friends.
Toynbee dropped out of university after eighteen months, which she regrets, as she was told by her tutor she would. She has variously attributed this to having an affair with a married TV presenter, to having her first novel published in her first term at Oxford, to the pressure of her scholarship and family expectations, and to taking up with Jeremy Sandford.
During her gap year, in 1966, Toynbee worked for Amnesty International in Rhodesia (which had just unilaterally declared independence) until she was expelled by the government. She published her first novel, Leftovers, in 1966. Following her expulsion from Rhodesia, Toynbee revealed the existence of the "Harry" letters, which detailed the alleged funding of Amnesty International in Rhodesia by the British government.
After Oxford, Toynbee found work in a factory and a burger bar, hoping to write in her spare time. She later said: "I had a loopy idea that I could work with my hands during the day and in the evening come home and write novels and poetry, and be Tolstoy... But I very quickly discovered why people who work in factories don't usually have the energy to write when they get home." She went into journalism, working on the diary at The Observer, and turned her eight months of experience in manual work (along with "undercover" stints as a nurse and an Army recruit) into the book A Working Life (1970).
Career Toynbee worked for many years at The Guardian, before joining the BBC, where she was social affairs editor (1988–1995). At The Independent, which she joined after leaving the BBC, she was a columnist and associate editor, working with then editor Andrew Marr. She later rejoined The Guardian. She has also written for The Observer and the Radio Times; at one time she was an editor for the Washington Monthly.
Following in the footsteps of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (2001), in 2003 she published Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain about an experimental period voluntarily living on the minimum wage, which was £4.10 per hour at the time. She worked as a hospital porter in a National Health Service hospital, a dinner lady in a primary school, a nursery assistant, a call-centre employee, a cake factory worker and a care home assistant, during which time she contracted salmonella. The book is critical of conditions in low pay jobs in Britain. The book was reviewed in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and was their book of the month.Stanwell-Smith, Rosalind (2003). "Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain". Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 96 (6): 307–308. . PMC 539518. Toynbee also contributed an introduction to the UK edition of Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
Toynbee writes for The Guardian, and serves as President of the Social Policy Association. She is chair of the Brighton Festival and is a member and deputy treasurer of the Fabian Society.
Political history and opinions
Toynbee has written about her privilege in the British class system, saying that all her family "lived on the left ... locked in combat with the ... forces of conservatism", but were clearly members of a privileged class. Toynbee did badly at school as she was "too rebellious to work, too angry to obey, too impatient to get out of there"; she attributed her gaining an Oxford scholarship to its "heavily class-biased exam" being designed "to reward people of exactly my background". After deliberately taking on menial jobs, she took a job that led to her becoming a journalist, something she had never intended.
Toynbee is a member of the Labour Party. She and her first husband, Peter Jenkins (from 1970), were supporters of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) breakaway from Labour in 1981, both signing the Limehouse Declaration. Toynbee stood for the party at the 1983 general election for Lewisham East, garnering 9351 votes (22%) and finishing third.Polly Toynbee and Andrew Pierce on air and rail strikes, The Daily Politics, BBC, 19 March 2010. She was one of the few SDP members who believed in unilateral nuclear disarmament, founding an unsuccessful group "Unilateralists for Social Democracy".Jenkins, Roy. A Life at the Centre (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 588. She later refused to support the subsequent merger of the SDP with the Liberals (to form the Liberal Democrats), reacting instead by rejoining Labour only after the rump 'continuing SDP', led by David Owen, collapsed in 1990.
In 1995, Toynbee criticised Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Condon's comments that 80% of mugging cases were committed by black people, stating that it was "an over-simplification that is seriously misleading". She approvingly quoted academic researcher Michael Keith, who said: "If you were to standardise for everything else – education, unemployment, housing estates, life chances – race on its own would have virtually no significance."
In a 2002 debate hosted by the Royal Society of Arts and Prospect magazine, Toynbee argued that the West should pursue liberal internationalism by intervening through the United Nations to promote democracy around the world: "Spreading people's right to self-determination, and their right to think and vote for themselves, is a moral obligation... We should be intervening now in the Congo and Sudan."Polly Toynbee, John Gray and Hazem Saghiyeh, "(Re-)ordering the world: dilemmas of liberal imperialism", RSA Journal Vol. 149, No. 5501 (2002), p. 52. She is also critical of neoliberalism.
Toynbee strongly supports state education, though she had two of her three children partly educated in the private sector, leading to accusations of hypocrisy. Although consistently critical of many of Tony Blair's New Labour reforms, she wrote in 2005 that his government "remains the best government of my political lifetime". During the 2005 General Election, with dissatisfaction high among traditional Labour voters, Toynbee wrote several times about the dangers of protest voting, "Giving Blair a bloody nose". She urged Guardian readers to vote with a clothes peg over their nose if they had to, to make sure Michael Howard's Conservatives would not win thanks to vote splitting. "Voters think they can take a free hit at Blair while assuming Labour will win anyway. But Labour won't win if people won't vote for it."
In December 2006, Greg Clark (a former SDP member, later to be a Conservative minister) claimed Toynbee should be an influence on the modern Conservative Party, causing a press furore. Reacting to this, Conservative leader David Cameron said he was impressed by one metaphor in her writings – of society being a caravan crossing a desert, where the people at the back can fall so far behind they are no longer part of the tribe. He added, "I will not be introducing Polly Toynbee's policies." Toynbee expressed some discomfort with this embrace, adding, "I don't suppose the icebergs had much choice about being hugged by Cameron either." In response to the episode, Boris Johnson, at the time a Conservative MP and journalist who had been severely criticised by Toynbee, rejected any association with Toynbee's views, writing that she "incarnates all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending schoolmarminess of Blair's Britain. Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and 'elf 'n' safety fascism".
Having advocated for Gordon Brown to succeed Blair as prime minister, Toynbee continued to endorse him in the early part of his premiership. By spring 2009 she had become sharply critical of Brown, arguing that he had failed to introduce the social-democratic policies he promised, and was very poor at presentation too. She subsequently called for his departure, voluntary or otherwise. In the European Elections of June 2009 she advocated a vote for the Liberal Democrats. During the 2010 general election she advocated a tactical vote for whichever candidate was best able to keep the Conservatives out of power.Polly Toynvee "Your heart might say Clegg. But vote with your head", The Guardian, 24 April 2010
In 2009, Toynbee wrote that the proposed Equality Bill, which was drafted under the guidance of Harriet Harman, was "Labour's biggest idea for 11 years. A public-sector duty to close the gap between rich and poor will tackle the class divide in a way that no other policy has... This new duty to narrow the gap would permeate every aspect of government policy. Its possible ramifications are mind-bogglingly immense."
In October 2010, Toynbee was criticised for an article in The Guardian in which she said the government's benefits changes would drive many poor people out of London and could be seen as a "final solution" for their situation. Some people interpreted this as a reference to the Nazis, which Toynbee said was not her intention. A Press Complaints Commission report on the matter ruled the comments were "insensitive", but did not breach any rules as the organisation's remit does not cover matters of taste and offence. She later apologised for using the term.
Toynbee has been described as "the queen of leftist journalists", and in 2008 topped a poll of 100 "opinion makers", carried out by Editorial Intelligence. She was also named the most influential columnist in the UK. Andrew Marr has said that "[w]hat makes her stand out as a journalist is not only her strong views but also her ferocious appetite for research. In a media world in which too many media columnists simply voice their top-of-the-head opinions, Polly always arrives heavily armed with hard facts".