ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at responses to growing concerns about urban deprivation, at the assumptions on which policies were created and the inherent principles underpinning those policies. Political motivations drove policy, but these were usually short-term reactions to immediate concerns. Social and cultural responses towards the urban poor both reflected, and reinforced, these attitudes and interpretations. Welshman's research underlines how, while the language used to describe the urban poor across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has changed, the same negative values attached to key terms continued to frame public attitudes. Moral concerns about child welfare and the number of 'fatherless families' fused with fears about rising racial tensions and the American urban riots. Labour's semi-panicked response was to create a general fund, the Urban Programme, which provided limited resources for new social facilities and programmes. It was a disparate approach that reflected the lack of any effective cohesive urban policy.
