Social Union

Unionists have defended the United Kingdom as a social or ‘sharing’ union in which resources are distributed according to need. It is true that income support payments and pensions are largely reserved and distributed across the union according to the same criteria. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are net beneficiaries. On the other hand, welfare has been detached from older understandings of social citizenship and ideas of the deserving and undeserving poor (strivers and skivers) have returned. Spending on devolved matters including health, education and social services is not equalized across the union. Instead, the Barnett Formula, based on historic spending levels and population-based adjustments, is used. Contrary to the claims of many unionists, there is no needs assessment underlying it, apart from a safeguard provision for Wales. The claim that the UK is a sharing union thus needs to be qualified.

The Production of Precarity in Denmark’s Asylum Regime

The special issue discusses the intersections between social welfare and migration control, as well as how stratified access to welfare services is used to govern ‘unwanted’ groups. This article explores these intersections in Denmark’ deterrence-oriented asylum policy regime, analysing the discourses and practices whereby people seeking protection are constructed as ‘undeserving’ poor. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in different sites of enforcement of Denmark’s asylum regime as well as interviews with street-level workers and people who sought asylum in Denmark, I trace how the Danish deterrence approach operates through the production of poverty and precarity among people seeking protection in asylum reception camps, deportation-oriented integration programmes, and finally, deportation camps. I show how the Danish welfare state, as a result of the merging of external and internal bordering practices, produces a condition of precarity and (non)deportability that extends from the asylum camps to those awarded temporary protection status. Hence, while the deterrence-oriented Danish policy regime has not proven ‘effective’ from the point of view of immigration control, it has served to reinforced a dualised, hierarchically ordered welfare rights’ regime that gradually erodes the rights and life opportunities of unwanted noncitizen ‘others’.

Deceit, Deservingness, and Destitution: Able-Bodied Widows and the New Poor Law

The death of a husband had adverse economic effects for the majority of Victorian women, but for working-class mothers the threat of destitution was an almost inevitable feature of widowhood. Widows, with some restrictions, were entitled to outdoor relief under the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), and they comprised the largest group of adult paupers outside of the workhouse well into the early twentieth century, outnumbered only and always by their children. Able-bodied widows therefore presented crucial opportunities for poor-law officials in the quest to minimize outdoor relief and make significant reductions in welfare spending. Focusing particularly on the 1830s, 1840s, and 1870s, this article examines the competing discourses of deservingness and deception that dominated the representations and treatment of able-bodied widows in poor law legislation, orders, reports, and parliamentary debates. An uneasy combination of sympathy and suspicion shaped officials’ treatment of these women, rendering them ambiguous figures in the dominant dichotomy of the deserving and undeserving poor, potential drains on the economic prosperity of the state, threats to the nuclear family, and, by extension, a danger to the nation’s moral core. These discourses, I suggest, reflect a wider ideological unease with, and attempts to mitigate and police, the widow’s exceptional social status in Victorian Britain as a woman with sexual experience, potential economic independence, and yet no male guardian.

‘The do-gooders and scroungers’: examining narratives of foodbank use in online local press coverage in the West Midlands, UK

This qualitative study using a grounded theory approach, assesses the construction of claims in online news articles and below the line comments in connection with foodbank use in the West Midlands region, UK. The sample includes 146 online news articles and 132 below the line comments, commencing 23 September 2010 until 8 April 2019. Individual foodbank users’ stories are told and these relay discourses of stigma, shame, embarrassment and desperation. In contrast, the below the line comments centre on the undeserving poor. Here, emphasis is on the migrants who are ‘flooding’ the country, and the scroungers who are work-shy.

Poverty-aware social work: a paradigmatic proposal1

This chapter provides a full overview of the theoretical principles of the Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP). Following a brief introduction of the concept of the paradigm and a discussion of its contribution, the chapter goes on to describe the PAP and its ontological, epistemological, and axiological premises and their influence on social work practice. The chapter compares the PAP and the two historically dominant social work paradigms—the conservative and the structural. The conservative paradigm, with its distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, notions of the “culture of poverty”, “underclass”, and the currently popular neuroscience of poverty, is strongly challenged in this chapter. The structural paradigm is presented as offering a fruitful analysis of poverty. However, it has not inspired direct practice on a large scale. The chapter builds upon the structural paradigm and combines it with concepts from critical theories and current psychoanalytic concepts to present the PAP as a useful paradigm for analysis and practice.

Electronic supplement analysis of multiple texts

This paper adapts O’Halloran’s (2010) electronic supplement analysis (ESA) to investigate debates about UK poverty in online newspaper articles and reader responses to those articles. While O’Halloran’s method was originally conceived to facilitate close reading, this paper modifies ESA for corpus-based discourse analysis by scaling it up to include multiple texts. I analyse (key-)keywords and concordances to compare seven articles from the Mail Online (2010–2015) with their 2354 reader responses generated using the newspapers’ Below the Line (BTL) comments feature. The analysis provides a snapshot of the discourses BTL commenters draw upon when writing about UK poverty. Unemployment, benefits receipt, and single parenthood were repeatedly referred to in the newspaper articles and their comments, but BTL commenters also drew on personal narratives and (fictional) anecdotes to index notions of flawed consumerism, scroungers, and the deserving and undeserving poor.