ABSTRACT
While these two brief quotations originate in very different historical periods, they serve to illustrate some important enduring legacies in the representation of the relationship between individuals and groups defined as poor, and welfare expenditure by the state. The idea that state welfare provision has detrimental consequences for the behaviour and attitudes of poorer sections of the working class has a long history in discussions of social
policy in the UK. One does not have to look far to locate arguments made during the nineteenth century that the poor were being ‘demoralized’ as a result of their reliance on what the Charity Organization Society, one of the leading philanthropic agencies of the period, referred to as ‘indiscriminate’ charitable relief. This, it argued, resulted from a growing separation of social classes, leading to the relative isolation of ‘the poor’. The argument that within society there dwells such a ‘demoralized class of the poor’, or an ‘underclass’, has been part of poverty and welfare discourse for almost 150 years (see Chapter 3; also Morris, 1998). In the mid nineteenth century these ideas were integral to much of the dominant social commentary about ‘social problems’ and the role of philanthropy and state welfare intervention. In the 1980s and 1990s similar concerns have re-emerged in a context of renewed debates, amid rising poverty levels, about the consequences of long-term state welfare provision for the ‘moral health’ of its recipients. Prolonged reliance on state welfare has been regarded by a number of social commentators and Conservative politicians as producing moral ‘degradation’, weakening family values and contributing to the development of a pervasive ‘dependency’ culture (see, for example, Institute of Economic Affairs, 1997; Marsland, 1996b).
