We are delighted to welcome China Mills to Juno Books to discuss her angering and inspiring new book No More Deaths by Welfare.
No More Deaths by Welfare exposes the lethal mechanics of Britain’s social security system that has been weaponised against the very people it claims to support, and how people are beginning to imagine a new society, refusing the confines of a welfare system built on shame.
China Mills connects the dots between the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the arms trade, the immigration system, and colonial extraction. In doing so, she traces the dark history of a department rooted in state-sanctioned policing of who is (and is not) deemed deserving.
But it is more than a chronicle of harm. Drawing on over a decade of activism led by disabled people and bereaved families, and from police abolitionists, the book delves into the power of collective imagination, healing shame, and refusing ‘perfect victim’ narratives. From direct action on the streets to the quiet, powerful mutual aid practised from bed, the book is a call to action not only to build solidarity and power against state violence but also to imagine, practice, and build welfare justice.
China Mills is Head of Research at Healing Justice Ldn, where she created and leads the Deaths by Welfare Project. She is part of the Stigma Free Futures design team at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and was previously an academic, researching austerity, poverty, state violence and corporate violence, mental health and suicide. She is the author of Decolonizing Global Mental Health and is published in The Lancet, Critical Social Policy and Transcultural Psychiatry. She currently lives in Manchester, UK.