ABSTRACT
Welfare policies are linked with, indeed part of, the elaboration of the State that has occurred as a part of the rise of industrial capitalism and its development into fully fledged monopoly capitalism (Hobsbawm 1968a). Reflecting the needs of capitalism as it developed it also responded to the demands of the organized working class. These two contradictory forces acting upon welfare legislation are themselves influenced or distorted by the ideological component always present, which has stamped the Welfare State with attitudes repressive both to women and to ‘the poor’. The ideology of the Welfare State displays itself in the way in which welfare provision works in practice (an example would be the assumptions underlying the ways in which scarce nursery places are rationed, or the kind of housing allocated to one-parent families). It expresses itself
above all in what is written about social work and social workers; the literature of social work is the ideology of welfare capitalism.
