ABSTRACT
When the United Nations Human Development Report 1998 appeared, it revealed a somewhat damning picture of the U K as one of the most impoverished nations of the developed world: the U K was ranked fifteenth out of the seventeen countries included in the poverty index used by the report. In the U K one in seven of the population was below the poverty line, and the country contained about 30 per cent of Europe's children in poverty ( U N D P 1998: 28). This was not the image conjured by the sparkling glitter of new Labours 'cool Britannia', its millennium dome ascending symbolically skyward from reclaimed London mudflats, and consumer spending running riot on digital television sets in the homes of a population who were now all middle class.
