Poor Sources: Constructing the Underclass

• In Event: 127 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Paper Session: Table 15. Policy and Change

Abstract

This paper provides a historical overview of the way journalists have reported the issue of poverty. The paper outlines three identifiable paradigms relating to how journalists frame poverty. The first paradigm was dominated by intellectuals from the Victorian-era who promoted ideas about poverty within an individualist framework that used various intellectual justifications that blamed the poor for their own poverty. The ideals promoted by Victorian-era intellectuals could be understood as operating through the conceptual lens of ‘social Darwinism’.

These elite narratives became unsustainable following the great depression, the rise of workers movements and the expansion of the democratic franchise in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the aftermath of the Second World War a transatlantic economic consensus of collectivism developed with the creation of the New Deal in the United States and the British welfare state. These narratives dominated until the late 1970's when the press embarked on a widespread critique of social welfare programs.
The critique of social welfare programs manifested itself as a critique of the poor themselves. This developed into a range of critiques which reflected the individualist narratives of the Victorian-era.

Discourses that blamed the poor for their own poverty re-emerged through concepts like the ‘underclass’ which echoed the ‘social Darwinism’ of the Victorian-era. This paper will examine the use of the ‘underclass’ concept by journalists by focusing on its links to the discourses of the Victorian-era and its development and promotion by intellectual elites who, in the contemporary-era work for Conservative think tanks.

Author

• Steven Harkins, University of Sheffield