ABSTRACT
The term 'underclass' has become a metaphor for all that troubles postindustrial societies as they experience the convergence of several disturbing new trends. There has been widening social polarisation and income inequality on a scale unprecedented in recent history. British poverty discourses over the 20th century have included periodic reconstructions of the broad 'underclass' idea: the' 'residuum' of the pre First World War period, the 'social problem group' of the 1920s and 1930s, the 'problem family' of the 1940s and 1950s, and the 'cycle of deprivation' or 'culture of poverty' of the 1960s and 1970s. One clear consistency is that, historically, behavioural definitions of the 'underclass' have been marked by class, gender, race and age distancing on the part of those social elites who tend to define prevailing political agendas. The two most demonised groups of welfare recipients have always been young, allegedly workshy males and reproductively potent young women.
