This salient piece of work takes a broad historical sweep on the development of poverty in Britain which is regarded as being endemic and perpetual in both pre- capitalist and capitalist society despite some variations in its extent and form.
Moving on from its preliminary coverage of the medieval enclosure movement, the Elizabethan Poor Laws and the industrial revolution, and charting the period from the late 19th century onwards, the book places a focus on the somewhat ambiguous role of the State, both in clamping down on the ‘undeserving poor’ and in mitigating the worst aspects of poverty not least to avert serious unrest amongst the populace and to protect the capitalist status quo. A chink of light is witnessed in the mid -1900s, when a progressive Labour government influenced by ‘pressure from below’ from trade unions and enlightened intellectual discourse, set an unprecedented and promising course of ‘mild redistribution’ associated with the establishment of the Welfare State and National Health Service. However, the final chapters of the book point to serious retrenchment from such redistributive and welfarist ideals through the neo- liberalist Thatcher period, ‘New Labour’, more recent austerity measures and the contemporary debacle of child poverty and similar social malaises. It is concluded that Britain has come full circle to the ‘unimaginable extremes of inequality that had prevailed in previous centuries’.
A key theme is that the ranks of the poor have historically and invariably been divided into the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’. The former category has at least been the legitimate beneficiary of minimal statutory and charitable benefits, while the latter has been subject to scorn, vilification and, more recently, ‘poverty porn’ and the like. The author contends that it has indeed been through the stigmatisation of the undeserving poor that an ideological consensus has been built at a societal level detrimental to a serious commitment to a fundamental programme of redistribution.
The Canadian author, who has worked on anti-poverty initiatives for many years in the Canadian context, has selected Britain, and more specifically England, for critical investigation as it was the first industrial capitalist power, a leading imperial power, and the first in developing a Welfare State. Unfortunately, the overtly negative and polemical treatment of Britain’s socio- economic history, as a ‘worst case’, leading to the conclusion that capitalism needs to be undone if poverty is to be eliminated, tends to be at the expense of more finely grained and empirically- based argumentation. Notably the important grass roots sources of sympathy and resistance to stigmatisation of the poor, both deserving and undeserving, tend to be subsumed in the overriding conviction that Britain has become a ‘savagely unequal’ society.
Graham Hollinshead