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.
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.
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.
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).
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. 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. She was one of the few SDP members who believed in unilateral nuclear disarmament, founding an unsuccessful group "Unilateralists for Social Democracy". 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." She is also critical of neoliberalism.