Poverty, Welfare and the Disciplinary State

Chris Jones, Tony Novak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415182898
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134739585
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In a forward looking appraisal of the welfare state, Poverty, Welfare and the Disciplinary State examines such issues as: *the current dynamics of poverty in Britain, drawing on similar developments in Europe and the US *the major areas of social policy within which this abandonment and demonisation of the poor is taking place *the historical antecendents to this relationship between the state and the poor *the creation and expansion of a 'welfare' state that characterised the era of social democracy until the mid-1970s and from the point of view of the poor, was limited and conditional *the ideology and organisation of the New Right *the new terrain on which the struggle over the future of welfare and social policy must take place.

Redefining the Poor

DOI: 10.4324/9780203003664-1

In February 1993, following the killing of 2-year-old Jamie Bulger by two young children, John Major, the British Prime Minister, urged the country ‘to condemn a little more and to understand a little less’. His comments came in the wake of a mass of media reports and scrutiny that had portrayed this tragic but rare and isolated event as symptomatic of a much wider and deep-rooted malaise within British society, most especially amongst the working-class poor. Over the following days and weeks pages of newsprint and television documentaries represented the event as a defining moment in British social and cultural life: as symbolising a fundamental breakdown of moral order, reflected not only in the apparently senseless death of a young child, but also in a fear of rising crime in general, in rioting and other social disturbances on the part of young people, and, linked to these, high levels of dependency on state benefits and the disintegration of the family and its mechanisms of order and control within poor working-class communities. In its lead editorial of 28 February 1993, the Sunday Times, which had long campaigned on these issues, encapsulated this concern in a scathing attack on a ‘popular culture’ which, it argued, had come to despise and undermine the traditional nuclear family. Laying the blame firmly at the feet of the ‘British intelligentsia’, it went on:

Now the nation is having to deal with the consequences of this trahison des clercs in the form of soaring crime, increasing squalor, widespread welfare dependency, the spread of the yob culture and crumbling communities … It is becoming increasingly clear to all but the most blinkered of social scientists that the disintegration of the nuclear family is the principal source of so much social unrest and misery. The creation of an urban underclass, on the margins of society but doing great damage to itself and the rest of us, is directly linked to the rapid rise in illegitimacy … The past two decades have witnessed the growth of whole communities in which the dominant family structure is the single-parent mother on welfare, whose male offspring are already immersed in a criminal culture by the time they are teenagers and whose daughters are destined to follow in the family tradition of unmarried teenage mothers. It is not just a question of a few families without fathers; it is a matter of whole communities with barely a single worthwhile male role-model. No wonder the youths of the underclass are uncontrollable by the time (sometimes before) they are teenagers … In communities without fathers, the overwhelming evidence is that youngsters begin by running wild and end up running foul of the law.

(Sunday Time.s 28 February 1993)

The ‘overwhelming evidence’ for such an argument was, as we shall see, by no means so clear-cut. But this was not really the point. The Bulger tragedy allowed the media, politicians and a range of other commentators to portray Britain as in a state of terminal moral decline. At the heart of this decline, it was argued, lay the erosion of ‘family values’, of respect for the law and for authority, and the weakening of the work ethic – the values that had made Britain ‘Great’. It was not, as we shall see, a new concern; nor did the fact that it harked back to a mythical golden age, or greatly exaggerated and distorted the social changes that had indeed occurred over the previous decades, diminish the force of its argument. On the contrary, it fed into a way of looking at British society, and at the poor and the most marginalised in particular, that was to replace reality, objectivity and understanding with myth, dogma and condemnation. In a rare exception to the hysteria which the news media in particular whipped up, Neil Ascherson, writing in the Independent on Sunday, warned of the need to look more closely at what was going on:

We are going through a period of monstrously artificial media uproars – stories which are exaggerated and inflated into ‘issues’ supposed to reveal this or that sickness of our society … The trick in such spasms of provoked anxiety is to look in the opposite direction. Who exactly wants the British public to understand less and condemn more? Who is encouraging us to demonise sections of our society as if they had been infiltrated by aliens? … What is this spectacle really about? It is about the grand British engineering project of the 1990s – the construction of the Underclass. Much of the preparatory work has already been done. Unemployment has passed three million … welfare payments have been reduced, inequality has been drastically increased, and an imaginative programme for poverty creation is on the way to completion. What remains, in the second phase, is to shift the whole bottom third of British society to these new foundations, by establishing that poverty, combined with idleness and savagery, is its natural and incurable condition.

(Independent on Sunday 28 February 1993)

Holding the poor responsible for their poverty has been a constant ever since the word – and the poor themselves – first appeared in the Middle Ages. But it has been tempered, and at times over-ridden, by different and competing explanations such as injustice, oppression, exploitation, misfortune or the inadequacy of social support that have offered alternative understandings and solutions. With the emergence of the concept of the poor as an ‘underclass’ over the past decade the victim-blaming ideology of poverty has returned with a vengeance. In this new description or construction of the poor there is little if any recognition of the devastating structural changes that have reshaped British society over the past twenty years: the failure of the labour market and the re-emergence of mass and long-term unemployment, the withdrawal of welfare services, the widening gap between rich and poor, or the effects of prolonged poverty on individuals, families and communities. On the contrary, according to Charles Murray, a member of the American Enterprise Institute, the right-wing US think tank whose book Losing Ground has been credited with providing the ‘blue-print for the Reagan administration’s war on welfare’ (McCrate and Smith 1998: 64), members of the ‘underclass’ are ‘defined by their behaviour’ (Murray 1990: 1). In the late 1980s Murray was sponsored by the Sunday Times to spend a year in Britain in order to study ‘the emerging British underclass’. As he himself put it ‘I arrived in Britain earlier this year, a visitor from a plague area come to see whether the disease is spreading’ (Murray 1990: 3). His conclusions predictably were that at the core of the poverty problem in Britain were a group of people identified by their abnormal and amoral values and their wilful rejection of the norms of the society around them: ‘Britain has a growing population of working-aged, healthy people who live in a different world from other Britons, who are raising their children to live in it, and whose values are now contaminating the life of entire neighbourhoods’ (Murray 1990: 4).

This image of a ‘different world’ is a recurring theme in such depictions of the poor, at the same time both alien and threatening. In 1983 the Metropolitan Police Commissioner spoke of ‘what many commentators refer to as “the underclass” – a class that is beneath the working class’ that was to be found ‘where unemployed youths – often black youths – congregate … They equate closely with the criminal rookeries of Dickensian London’ (cited Campbell 1993: 108). The drawing of the historical parallel is significant. As John Macnicol has argued:

The concept of an inter-generational underclass displaying a high concentration of social problems – remaining outwith the boundaries of citizenship, alienated from cultural norms and stubbornly impervious to the normal incentives of the market, social work intervention or state welfare – has been reconstructed periodically over at least the past one hundred years, and while there have been important shifts of emphasis between each of these reconstructions, there have also been striking continuities. Underclass stereotypes have always been a part of the discourse on poverty in advanced industrial societies.

(Macnicol 1987: 296)

While something of an historical constant, such stereotypes have differed significantly over time, both in their dominance over other explanations and, importantly, in the extent to which they have seen the poor as capable of escaping their fate. In the 1960s and 1970s poverty, despite its persistence, was widely seen as something that, with proper intervention, could be eradicated. By the 1990s poverty has become seen, when it is mentioned at all, as largely inevitable, as the consequence of the actions or failures on the part of poor people themselves, and something which not even economic growth can solve. In general such pessimistic and negative constructions of the poor have tended to be most prevalent and powerful, and the view of their innate defects most rigid, at times of high levels of poverty and unemployment. So it was in the 1830s and the 1880s, as well as in the 1930s and now in the fourth great cyclical depression to afflict modern capitalism. This relationship between the labour market and dominant conceptions of poverty has always been significant in shaping state policies and practices. It is when the system is most under threat – when its claim to equality and fairness is most visibly denied by the distress and unfairness it manifestly creates – that poor people have been subject to the most criticism and attack. In this process both the reality and the consequences of poverty are denied, and the lives of the poor both disparaged and distorted. Thus according to David Hunt, Employment Secretary in the Conservative government in 1994:

It is often said that poverty and unemployment create crime. In my experience the converse is true … Some of the so-called cultures springing up in our country reject all decency and civilised values – the cultures of the housebreaker, the hippy and the hoodlum. The bulk of thieving today of course has nothing to do with poverty. It is the result of wickedness and greed.

(Guardian 21 March 1994)

At the end of the twentieth century when, particularly in Britain and the USA, the market economy has once again come to be celebrated as the most efficient, indeed the only possible, basis for economic and social life, it is no accident that there has been a return to harsh and brutalising depictions of those who are its greatest victims. With the collapse of communism, capitalism is triumphant, its ravages inflicted on a global scale. Holding the poor responsible for their own fate undermines the anger that poverty and inequality provoke while removing blame from the system that is responsible. Instead, the poor are seen as an expensive ‘burden’ on society, for whom the ‘average taxpayer’ supposedly has little sympathy, especially when depicted as welfare ‘scroungers’, homeless, criminals and drug addicts. As David Blunkett, later to become Secretary of State for Education in New Labour’s government, put it, ‘those committed to a new twenty-first century welfare state have to cease paternalistic and wellmeaning indulgence of thuggery, noise, nuisance and anti-social behaviour’ (Independent 28 February 1993). Just as the provision of welfare services is seen as encouraging their dependency, so its removal is justified as both reducing the cost and halting the supply of their numbers. The result is increasing distress and further poverty. But although, from the point of view of contemporary capitalism, the so-called ‘underclass’ are deemed to be surplus to current and future economic projections, in reality, as we shall see, their demonisation fulfils an essential economic and social purpose.

Class and Continuity

Punitive and negative images of the poor are deeply sedimented, historically, within British society. These images reflect not only the periodic reconstruction of the poor as morally degenerate and culpable, but also a more widespread, deep-rooted and long-standing antagonism that has characterised social and class relationships in Britain. These divisions, remarked upon by many commentators, especially from abroad, who see in Britain, and in England in particular, an entrenched divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and a culture and set of institutions that reflect, embody and maintain this, are in part the product of Britain’s long historical experience of capitalism. The first country to create an industrial working class, it was some 200 years ago a society polarised into waged workers on the one hand, and an industrial, financial and landed aristocratic elite on the other to an extent unparalleled in any other country, some even to this day. Unlike in the rest of continental Europe, the independent peasantry in Britain was long ago eliminated, its transformation into a class of dependent wage workers achieved by a process of attrition and violence over many centuries before then. For the most part it was a very bloody history, and the scars still remain.

The fact also that the ruling class in Britain has remained in power, if not without challenge, then at least without overthrow, throughout this process has contributed to its sense of confidence and arrogance, as well as giving it its own historical experience of rule to draw upon. The British ruling class has proved, more than most others, eminently adaptable. It has throughout its history been more than prepared to use violence to defend its position and power, but it has also learned, when violence is not enough, to accommodate the challenges that have faced it. Thus the aristocratic order in Britain largely survived the challenge posed by the rise of capitalism, allying itself to the interests of the new bourgeoisie, where elsewhere it was overthrown. The British establishment – that curious mixture of wealth, power, tradition, church and state – has maintained its privilege through turbulence and challenge. The ‘lower orders’ have by and large been kept in their place; and the ruling class has maintained its continuity, buttressed by pomp and ceremony.

Allied to this has been a viciousness, admittedly present amongst ruling classes in many parts of the world, whereby simply to make money has never been enough. British capitalism has been fêted for the benevolence and humanitarianism of some of its owners: its enlightened employers such as Robert Owen and its social reformers and philanthropists. The more common reality is very different: Britain as the world leader in the inhuman slave trade, from which the former wealth of cities like Liverpool was made, its employers ruthless and determined, and its philanthropy, to coin a phrase, ‘as cold as charity’. It is a history of contempt on the part of the ruling class towards those who work to maintain them in place.

If the British ruling class has viewed the poor in general with contempt, policy towards the poorest, especially those who could not or would not find work, has verged on hysteria and hatred. During the Middle Ages the poor were, quite literally, branded as rogues and vagabonds, subjected to whippings and, ultimately, death as penalty for their fate. The callousness with which many mine and factory owners treated men, women and children during the course of the industrial revolution – treating their animals better than their workers – prompted international comment and even revulsion amongst a minority of the British establishment itself. It is a telling indication that Britain’s elite formed a Royal Society for the Protection of Animals before it formed a similar organisation for the protection of children. During the nineteenth century the British state perfected what it saw as the ultimate policy for dealing with poverty – a national system of deterrent workhouses designed to instil terror in the minds of anyone in need of assistance. By the end of that century, faced with the outbreak of mass unemployment and rising poverty during the first great depression, the poor – or at least the poorest – were again to be redefined along familiar lines. Thus Charles Booth, one of Britain’s most noted social investigators, wrote of those who ‘from shiftlessness, helplessness, idleness or drink are inevitably poor … a deposit of those who from mental, moral and physical reasons are incapable of better work’ (Booth 1904: 44). Seen as ‘perhaps incapable of improvement’ this ‘residuum’, as it came widely to be called, was, like today’s ‘underclass’, to be subjected to increasingly punitive control and containment.

As in the second great depression of the 1930s, or indeed that of the 1980s, the able-bodied unemployed at the end of the nineteenth century were to be made a particular target. But the challenge of poverty as faced by politicians and reformers was to prevent its growth from becoming an issue of further working-class identification and mobilisation. In a context where, for most of the nineteenth century, poverty had been seen as an inescapable and necessary feature of working-class life, this required a redefinition of poverty that would demarcate ‘the poor’ from the rest of the working class. This was to be the lasting and ultimately limiting achievement of social investigators and reformers such as Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree.

Once separated, the poor were to be subject to further classification. The concept of the residuum – like that of the present-day ‘underclass’ – similarly defined a section of the poor not so much by their poverty as by their behaviour and morality. Earlier distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor based on their ability to work were replaced with one based not on ability but on attitudes to work and self-reliance. Those deemed undeserving of state help were to be left to rot in the workhouse.

This punitive treatment of the residuum at the end of the nineteenth century was ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• 1 Redefining the Poor
• 2 Impoverishing the Poor
• 3 The Abuse of the Poor
• 4 The Vile Maxim of the Masters
• 5 Re-Tooling the State
• 6 Abandoning the Poor
• reference
• Index