Eradicating poverty through empowerment: what’s the responsible thing to do?

Posted by Stephen Crossley, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy, Northumbria University

On this day, 17th October, in 1987, at the instigation Father Joseph Wresinski, the founder of ATD Fourth World, an anti-poverty movement, around 100,000 people congregated in Paris to honour victims of poverty, hunger, violence and fear. Five years later, and following the death of Father Wresinski, the United Nations announced the day as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, and published a resolution by the General Assembly that, amongst other things, ‘invited all states to devote the day to presenting and promoting, as appropriate in the national context, concrete activities with regard to the eradication of poverty and destitution’.

This year is the 27th anniversary of that resolution and the theme of this year’s observance is ‘Acting Together to Empower Children, their Families and Communities to End Poverty’. Themes such as this matter. How people in poverty are spoken about has consequences for how they are viewed, and the solutions that are put forward to address poverty. Discourses of empowerment are often used by governments and service providers to encourage people to view themselves as active agents with the ability, if not the responsibility, to change their circumstances for the better. This reflects attention away from what governments themselves can do.

In an examination of ‘dimensions of family empowerment’ within the ‘troubled families’ discourse in England, Sue Bond-Taylor (2014) highlights the merging of empowerment talk with encouraging families to take responsibility for both their situation and the improvement of it. This occurs not only in the ‘troubled families’ discourse, but also in the practices of family workers, suggesting that families are empowered ‘only in so much as they are compliant and accept the normalising discourses of the services through engagement with their agendas for change’ (2014: 12). She argues that families’ participation in the programme ‘merely legitimates existing power relations under a veneer of empowerment discourses’ (2014: 8). 

In another similar research project examining how education services engaged with disadvantaged families, Fretwell et al (2018: 1056) highlight how a project exhorted parents to take greater responsibility for the educational performance of their children and to take measures to address it. Notions of empowerment were deployed, particularly when discussing employment:

This aspect of the programme was couched in a discourse of empowerment. The parameters of choice are firmly circumscribed, though. Parents can choose which activities to pursue, but they are not free to choose just anything; they must make the right choices. Empowerment is thus restricted to making choices within conditional limits and is itself a strategy of government; a sanctioned means for producing the kind of active citizen demanded by neoliberalism (2018: 1056).

One of the most powerful organisations in the world
is encouraging us to 'act together' to end poverty 

It is therefore interesting, perhaps even worrying, to note that one of the most powerful organisations in the world, made up of over 190 national governments, is encouraging us to ‘act together’ to ‘empower children, their families and communities to end poverty’, as if the responsibility for ending poverty lies primarily with ‘us’ as individuals or with the people experiencing poverty. Not only are impoverished groups expected to deal with and be ‘resilient’ about their own hardship, and the problems that come with it, but they’re now also expected to be the solution. Nelson Mandela argued powerfully that overcoming poverty was an act of justice, not a gesture of charity, and John Veit-Wilson (2000, 144) has noted that the responsibility for ending poverty ultimately rests with governments:

“Ensuring that all the members of society, residents in or citizens of a nation state, have enough money is a clear role which governments can adopt or reject, but they cannot deny they have the ultimate power over net income distribution.”

It is shameful that this is where we are at in 2019. Poverty continues to exist because of political and economic decisions, by powerful groups, regarding the allocation of resources, both nationally and globally. Impoverished communities lack political power because they lack economic power. Nobody feels the need to empower millionaires or politicians to take greater control of their lives. Perhaps if we increased the economic power of those living in poverty, we might find that they were more fully able to participate in society and there might be less need for ‘empowering’ projects and services. That would be the responsible thing to do.


Stephen is currently working with Kayleigh Garthwaite (University of Birmingham) and Ruth Patrick (University of York) on an online project exploring representations of people living in poverty in the UK. This blog also appears on their website www.whatstheproblem.org.uk



References:

Bond-Taylor, S. (2015) Dimensions of Family Empowerment in Work with So-Called ‘Troubled’ Families, Social Policy and Society, 14 (3): 371-384. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746414000359

Fretwell, N., Osgood, J., O’Toole, G. and Tsouroufli, M. Governing through trust: Community‐based link workers and parental engagement in education, British Educational Research Journal, 44 (6): 1047-1063. DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3478

Veit-Wilson J (2000) Horses for Discourses: poverty, purpose and closure in minimum incomes standards policy. In: Gordon D and Townsend P (eds) Breadline Europe: The Measurement of Poverty. The Policy Press, Bristol, pp 141-164. https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/breadline-europe

The website for the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty can be found here:
https://www.un.org/en/events/povertyday/

Images:

1. Courtesy of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: https://www.un.org/development/desa/socialperspectiveondevelopment/international-day-for-the-eradication-of-poverty-homepage/2019-2.html
2. 'I like the campaign so far, Bob- I've already made my poverty history' by David Austin via University of Kent, British Cartoon Archive (Reference number: 86494, Published by: The Guardian, 02 July 2005, with thanks to Copyright holder: Janet Slee): https://archive.cartoons.ac.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=86494

The myth of a dangerous ‘underclass’: a real horror story for Hallowe’en

Guest post by Stephen Crossley, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at Northumbria University

With Hallowe’en nearly upon us, many parents will be telling their children tales of ghouls and ghosts that can be found in haunted houses. Adults will entertain themselves by watching horror movies and other productions where other-worldly creatures and monsters intrude upon peaceful and civilised spaces to threaten the status quo and the existing order of things. Most of us know that ghosts, spirits, and the like are the stuff of legend and lore and tend not to believe the mythology associated with them. But many people in contemporary society do believe in myths about groups of people that are different to the rest of ‘us’, who exhibit different social norms and values to the mainstream population, and who invoke fear and dread in many of us. Many people watch the behaviour of ‘the underclass’,[1] in the name of entertainment, with a mixture of fear, horror, fascination, and contempt. The ‘underclass’, it is believed, can be found in certain locations. There is a long history to such beliefs.

William Hogarth's depiction of London vice, Gin Lane.

In Victorian times, the middle and upper classes of London spent a great deal of time going ‘slumming’, visiting poorer parts of the East End for various reasons, including their amusement and titillation, and for philanthropic and journalistic purposes.[2] In 1883, George Sims, an English poet, journalist, dramatist and novelist, began his book How the Poor Live by inviting the reader to go a journey with him, not across oceans or land, but ‘into a region which lies at our own doors – into a dark continent that is within easy walking distance of the General Post Office’.[3] Sims hoped that this continent would be:

As interesting as any of those newly-explored lands which engage the attention of the Royal Geographic Society – the wild races who inhabit it will, I trust, gain public sympathy as easily as those savage tribes for whose benefit the Missionary Societies never cease to appeal for funds.

William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army argued in 1890 that certain areas of London were like parts of Africa that had just been discovered by explorers such as Henry Morton Stanley Africa, and were similarly full of primitives and savages. In 1977, the sociologist E.V. Walter noted that, whilst such beliefs had changed somewhat, traces of them remained:

In all parts of the world, some urban spaces are identified totally with danger, pain and chaos. The idea of dreadful space is probably as old as settled societies, and anyone familiar with the records of human fantasy, literary or clinical, will not dispute a suggestion that the recesses of the mind conceal primeval feelings that respond with ease to the message: ‘Beware that place: untold evils lurk behind the walls’. Cursed ground, forbidden forests, haunted houses are still universally recognised symbols, but after secularisation and urbanisation, the public expression of magical thinking limits the experience of menacing space to physical and emotional dangers.[4]

Indeed, in recent times, the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Ian Duncan Smith argued that the television programme Benefits Street offered the middle classes a window into the ‘twilight world’ of neighbourhoods where many people received financial support from the state.[5] The ‘twilight world’ of welfare dependency that Duncan Smith refers to elicits feelings of mystery, anxiety, and the unfamiliar, feelings of nervous excitement that the original social explorers must have felt in the late nineteenth century or what middle class travellers of today might experience whilst ‘doing the slum’ on foreign holidays.

Whilst the words have changed slightly, the myth of a dangerous ‘underclass’ who dwell in ‘dreadful enclosures’ or ‘sink estates’, and who represent a threat to wider society remains. If we want a real horror story for Hallowe’en, we need look no further than how large sections of society view a mythical ‘underclass’ and how they view the places associated with impoverished communities.

Dr Stephen Crossley is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at Northumbria University. His first book In Their Place: The Imagined Geographies of Poverty is out now with Pluto Press. He tweets at @akindoftrouble


References:

1. John Welshman, Underclass: A History of the Excluded Since 1880 (2nd edition), London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
2. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004.
3. George Sims, How the poor live, London: Chatto & Windus, 1883, p1.
4. E.V. Walter, Dreadful Enclosures: Detoxifying and Urban Myth, European Journal of Sociology, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1977), p 154. 
5. BBC News online, Benefits Street reaction shows poor 'ghettoised', says Duncan Smith, 23 January 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25866259 [Accessed 27 November 2016] 

Images:

1. William Hogarth [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
2. Generations' (8690911868_23ce2c05a0_z) by ‘Byzantine_K’ via Flickr.com, copyright © 2013: https://www.flickr.com/photos/november5/8690911868

Looking for trouble: deceit and duplicity in the Troubled Families Programme

Introduced by Peter van der Graaf

Guest post by Stephen Crossley, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at Northumbria University

Many families facing health problems, limiting illnesses, or with disabled family members have been labelled as ‘troubled families’ under the government’s Troubled Families Programme. Originally established following the 2011 riots to ‘turn around’ the lives of 120,000 allegedly anti-social and criminal families, the programme is now in its second phase and is working with a far larger group of families, many of whom experience troubles, but don’t necessarily cause trouble. In April of this year, the focus of the programme shifted again in an attempt to improve the number of so-called ‘troubled families’ who moved back into employment, despite the majority of them being in work and many of the remainder not being expected to be looking or available for work.

The programme has been dogged by controversy from day one. Research about families experiencing multiple disadvantages was misrepresented at the launch of the programme to provide ‘evidence’ that there were 120,000 troublesome families in England. The government has since been accused of suppressing the official evaluation of the first phase of the programme after it found ‘no discernible impact’ of the programme and also of ‘over-claiming’ the 99% success rate of the first phase. 

David Cameron with Louise Casey, former Director General of Troubled Families

Many health workers will be involved with the delivery of the Troubled Families Programme in their day-to-day work, although there is also a good chance that they will not be aware of it. Many local authorities do not refer to their local work as ‘troubled families’ because of the stigmatising rhetoric and imagery associated with it. Many families are not aware that they have been labelled as ‘troubled families’ for the same reason, and because it would undoubtedly hinder engagement with the programme. They are not always made aware that the data that is collected on them as part of the programme, is shared with other local agencies and, in an anonymised format, with central government.

My PhD research, conducted in three different local authority areas, found that the programme was based on, and relied upon duplicity from design to implementation. Despite government narratives about the programme attempting to ‘turn around’ the lives of ‘troubled families’, the programme appeared to be more concerned with helping to restructure what support to disadvantaged families looks like, and reducing the cost of such families to the state.

For example, support – both symbolic and financial - for universal services, such as libraries, children’s centres and youth projects, is reducing. Direct financial support to marginalised groups is also being cut, with welfare reforms hitting many of the most disadvantaged groups hardest. These forms of support, and many other more specialist services, are being replaced, rhetorically at least, by an intensive form of ‘family intervention’ which allegedly sees a single key worker capable of working with all members of the family, able to ‘turn around’ their lives no matter what problems, health-related or otherwise, they may be facing or causing.

The simplistic central government narrative of the almost perfect implementation of the Troubled Families Programme was not to be found ‘on the ground’, where there were multiple frustrations and concerns about the depiction of the families and the programme, and numerous departures from the official version of events. Despite the rhetoric of ‘turning around’ the lives of ‘troubled families’, in the face of cuts in support and benefits to families, my PhD thesis concluded that the Troubled Families Programme does little more than intervene to help struggling families to cope with their poverty better, despite the efforts of local practitioners.

Put simply, the programme does not attempt to address the structural issues that cause many of the problems faced by ‘troubled families’, but instead encourages them to ‘learn to be poor’. In my previous Fuse blog, I drew on the concept of ‘lifestyle drift’ advanced by David Hunter and Jenny Popay: where the focus of interventions drifts towards attempting to change individual behaviour, despite the wealth of evidence pointing to other solutions. There is no room in the narrative for wider determinants of people’s circumstances. Because of this, the government’s Troubled Families Programme will do little to turn around the lives and health of the families it claims to help.


A summary of Stephen Crossley’s PhD research can be found here. His first book In Their Place: The Imagined Geographies of Poverty is out now with Pluto Press. He tweets at @akindoftrouble


Photograph ‘Almost 40,000 troubled families helped’ (14087270645_3453006d12_c) by ‘Number 10’ via Flickr.com, copyright © 2014: https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/14087270645

The big countdown

Posted by Emma Dorée, Communications Assistant for Fuse

It’s that lovely time of the year again when we count down the days to Christmas. Whilst we are frantically running around trying to complete our Christmas shopping, we are also eagerly waiting in anticipation to see if this year’s X Factor winner will make the number one top spot and whose festive Foxtrot will lead them to become the Strictly Come Dancing winner.

The Fuse Blog however is having a countdown of its own. Seeing as so many great blogs have been written this year, we thought it would be a good idea to have a look at all of the blogs from 2015 and create our very own ‘Top 5 chart’ of the ‘bestsellers’.

 

So let’s begin….

At number five: No time to run: role overload contributing to physical inactivity in parents? Caroline Dodd-Reynolds’ post looks at how parents find it difficult to fit physical activity into their daily busy routines. With 604 views, this is clearly a subject that lots of people, especially parents, can relate to.

At number four: How active are pregnant women? Measuring the methods. Louise Hayes and Cath McParlin debunk the ‘pregnant pause’ and tell us that guidance recommends that pregnant women should actually be doing at least 30mins of exercise on most days of the week to help reduce the risk of gestational diabetes. This post squeezes into fourth spot by the narrowest of margins, reaching 606 views since publication in May 2015.

In at number three: The troubled families programme: what’s health got to do with it? A guest post by PhD student Stephen Crossley explaining how the Government is helping (or rather not helping) families that need the most help. Stephen goes into great detail about the Troubled Families Programme explaining that health plays a huge role in this issue. This post has had 657 views since it was published in June 2015.

At number two: Bull Sperm and ‘poor parents’: the role of myths in public health practice. Another entry for Stephen Crossley. In this post he takes on the urban myths that surround energy drinks and political myths about benefits and austerity. This post has had close to 750 views.

And finally, time for the top Fuse blog post of 2015. Drum roll please….

Thunder, thunder, thunderclap: when a blog post hits the campaign trail. This blog was written by Fuse Communications Officer Mark Welford and has had an amazing 1575 views. It describes how a Fuse blog post caught the imagination of readers and became a national viral campaign, prompting a campaign page to be set up for people to support the idea that supermarkets should remove unhealthy food from their checkouts. This post followed two other ‘big-hitters’ on the same subject by Mel Wakeman and Amelia Lake: Who’s opting out of responsibility? Battle of the checkouts and Time to chuck the checkout junk? Both have received more than 900 views.

So there you have it, the top five Fuse blog posts from 2015. Let’s see if we can create even bigger and better blogs for 2016!

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The Troubled families Programme: what's health got to do with it?

Guest post by Stephen Crossley, PhD student in the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University

A couple of weeks ago, the expansion of the Troubled Families Programme was formally announced during the Queen’s Speech. This formality came two years after the government itself announced their plans to expand it, around 10 months after they announced further details such as the criteria to be called a ‘troubled family’ under Phase 2 of the programme, and around six months after some local authorities started working with ‘troubled families’ as part of the expanded programme.

Another troubled family?

There have been numerous criticisms of different elements of the Troubled Families Programme since the programme was announced in the wake of the riots in England in 2011, with David Cameron promising to ‘turn around’ the lives of the most troubled and troublesome families in England by the end of the Parliament that finished in May 2015. Ruth Levitas and Jonathan Portes highlighted that the figure of 120,000 ‘troubled families’ used by the government (characterised as ‘neighbours from hell’ in the prime Minister’s launch speech), actually referred to research published four years earlier on families thought to be experiencing multiple disadvantages such as maternal mental health, poverty, material deprivation, poor quality or overcrowded housing. Levitas argued it was a discursive strategy which succeeded in feeding vindictive attitudes towards the poor.

A report carrying a series of interviews with families, written by Louise Casey, the senior civil servant in charge of the programme, was criticised for its lack of ethical process and the government admitted it was a ‘dipstick’ process which didn’t meet the government criteria for research and therefore didn’t require ethical approval. My own investigations revealed that a ‘survey’ used by Casey to highlight the need for ‘radical reform’ didn’t actually exist. In a series of speeches during 2013, Casey told audiences of a survey which showed that, in one deprived area in the North East, not one out of 3000 children had attended a dentist for a routine check-up, but that 300 had presented at A&E for emergency dental care. The survey was, in fact, an anecdote shared during a meeting about a different government programme, which Casey never thought to check before sharing with audiences, preferring instead to tell them it ‘encapsulates the problem’ of ‘troubled families’ in a single example. Casey also told the 2013 RCGP conference that these 120,000 families ‘dominated NHS budgets. That’s the long and the short of it’, which isn’t exactly true either.

To date, however, health has played a relatively minor part in the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) and health issues were not mentioned in either the criteria for families in Phase 1, or the outcomes expected in order for their lives to be considered ‘turned around’. But this is starting to change. The government published a report in July 2014 entitled: ‘Understanding Troubled Families’ which included information on the characteristics of families entering the programme in its early stages (my brief (Mis)understanding Troubled Families is available here). The data showed that the majority of the families being worked with under the banner of the TFP were not particularly anti-social, weren’t serial offenders and most of the children were in education, albeit not all of the time. In fact, the only characteristics that could be applied to a majority of families included in the report were that they were white, they lived in social housing, they had an adult on out-of-work benefits (although we don’t know why) and they had a family member with a serious health issue or a disability. In short, and if any personal characteristic can adequately explain unemployment, these families were probably more likely to be out of work because of health, disability or caring issues than because of any intergenerational culture of worklessness.

In the expanded second phase of the programme, ‘parents and children with a range of health problems’ is included as one of the six criteria for families, who have to hit two of the criteria to be labelled ‘troubled’. Other criteria include ‘children who need help’ and ‘children who have not been attending school regularly’. These vague criteria are open to interpretation and councils will be encouraged to go out and find ‘troubled families’ in order to ‘turn them around’ (or make ‘significant and sustained progress’ in phase 2) and claim the cash bonus, via the Payment By Results process, for doing so. A health bulletin on ‘troubled families’ was also published when the new criteria were announced, highlighting the health related issues some ‘troubled families’ faced, and a ‘leadership statement’ followed shortly after, accompanied by information on skills and training and interim guidance on data sharing amongst partner agencies. With health visitors and school nurses now under the remit of local authorities in England, it is likely that many will become involved with the TFP.

All of these developments should concern health professionals. The TFP assumes that the answer to the families problems lie firmly within the four walls of the family home, with a strong rhetorical focus on ‘getting in through the front door’ and working with the family ‘from the inside out’. In short, there is no room in the narrative for wider determinants of people’s circumstances. Its alleged success has never been proven. There is scant evidence to justify such an approach and it is unlikely that having a determined, non-specialist key worker will make much difference to many of the health problems ‘troubled families’ experience. The programme is a good example of what David Hunter and Jenny Popay and others have called ‘lifestyle drift’, where the focus of interventions drifts towards attempting to change individual behaviour, despite the wealth of evidence pointing to other solutions. But this ‘responsibilization’ strategy is also a punitive, stigmatising discourse which is targeting some of the poorest and most vulnerable families in England, telling them that they are the architects of their own misfortune and that they just need to try harder and follow a routine. A simultaneously fascinating and alarming article in the BMJ recently, exploring the role of psychology in government workfare programmes highlights that this approach is not a unique aspect of the government’s welfare ‘reforms’. Health professionals should tread carefully.

Stephen Crossley's first peer-reviewed article on ‘troubled families’ can be found here.

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Bull sperm and ‘poor parents’: the role of myths in public health practice

Posted by Stephen Crossley, Research Assistant on the Fuse HYPER! Energy Drinks research project and a PhD student at Durham University

One of the most interesting themes, in my opinion, emerging from the current research into young people’s consumption of energy drinks, is the way that different messages about energy drinks – who (supposedly) consumes them and how – circulate and often deliver contradictory images and information. Not only are young people targeted by a range of clever advertising strategies from the companies that produce and sell these drinks, but they also receive information from teachers, parents, public health practitioners, media outlets (including social media) and their peers. Adults also receive information from similar sources.

By way of example, many people are aware that lots of energy drinks contain Taurine. Some people, no doubt helped by internet search engines, social media and classroom rumours, also believe that the taurine that is in energy drinks is extracted from bull sperm. This info lies firmly in the realm of ‘urban myth’, although you can perhaps understand where it originated from, given that taurine was first isolated from ox bile and it is present in bull sperm. It can also be found in fish and meat, and in breast milk, although we’ve yet to come across any young people who believe there is industrial scale maternal ‘pumping’ going on in an effort to give the population wings. Somewhat predictably, the taurine in energy drinks in synthetically produced in labs.

Urban myths, although they contain a degree of plausibility, are relatively easy to disprove due to a lack of robust evidence. But there are other types of myths which are sometimes harder to disprove, despite similarly lacking credible evidence bases. Christopher G. Flood (2002) identified ‘political myths’ as coherent narratives which orient discourses in the one ideological direction rather than another. He argued that political myths:

can be said to exist when accounts of a more or less common sequence of events, involving more or less the same principal actors, subject to more or less the same overall interpretation and implied meaning, circulate within a social group.

Contemporary political myths include there being ‘no alternative’ to austerity, the need to crackdown on ‘skivers’ who are ‘welfare dependent’ and the dangers posed by migrants acting as ‘benefits tourists’ or ‘health tourists’. The idea of a group of ‘poor parents’ (in both senses of the phrase) representing a major public health risk to their children as a result of problematic parenting behaviours is, I would argue, another such political myth. These parents are often marked out as being different from ‘us’ by virtue of their residence in ‘deprived’ areas and by their ‘inferior’ parenting practices. In Flood’s words, therefore, the same principal actors are subject to more or less the same overall interpretation and implied meanings.

During the course of our research, we have encountered a small number of stories about parents blending a MacDonald’s ‘Happy Meal’ or a ‘Sunday dinner’ and putting it in baby’s bottles or parents filling milk bottles with energy drinks or other inappropriate drinks/liquids. Previous experience within the research team suggests that similar stories will probably be familiar to many people working in public health and/or nutrition.

Views about ‘poor parents’ have a long and undistinguished history, stretching back to at least Victorian times when there was concern about a ‘social residuum’ (see John Welshman’s fascinating book Underclass for a comprehensive history). Public health practitioners also have a long history of involvement with these ideas and the roles of Chief Medical Officers in propagating ideas about a ‘social problem group’ in the 1930s and ‘problem families’ in the 1950s are particularly sobering, given that they were influenced and supported by The Eugenics Society. Despite over a century of social scientific research, there is no credible evidence of a large number of families with different cultural values or behavioural norms from ‘the rest of us’.

As noted above, many of these ideas originate from politicians, who are keen to differentiate between ‘skivers’ and ‘strivers’ or ‘troubled’ and ‘hard-working’ families and who would have us believe that there is an ‘underclass’ whose parenting deficiencies are ruining the lives of their children. Unfortunately, some public health practitioners do little more than repeat and embellish these political myths, giving them more credibility and potency than they perhaps deserve.

I am not denying that there may well be a parent - or maybe even parents - who have blended a Happy Meal or given their child an Energy Drink. What I do doubt is whether the potential, but as yet unfounded, actions of an extremely small number of parents is worthy of repetition from some - though not all - public health practitioners on the scale that we sometimes see. Shouldn’t we be setting the bar a little higher than second or third-hand anecdotes in terms of ‘evidence-based’ practice and policy making? Not believing, or at least questioning, some of things we read on the internet or that we are told by politicians and, in some cases, colleagues, would be a good place to start. Failure to challenge such stereotypes leaves the way clear for the wider political myth that, in the words of Stanley Cohen (1985), ‘the deprived are not much different from the depraved’.

Cohen, S. (1985) Visions of Social Control, Cambridge: Polity

Flood, C.G. (2002) Political Myth, Abingdon: Routledge

Welshman, J. (2013) Underclass: A history of the excluded since 1880, London: Bloomsbury

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