Lynn Hancock

'Welfare Ghettos' and the 'Broken Society': Territorial Stigmatisation in the Contemporary UK

Abstract The idea of a “broken society” is advanced by Conservative politicians in the UK as emblematic of social and moral decay. With many echoes of long-standing claims of societal and moral breakdown, the narrative centres on “irresponsibility” and “disorderly” behaviours in disadvantaged working-class communities and asserts that welfare dependency is the underlying condition which produces “social breakdown”. Social housing estates and the populations therein, in particular, are represented as problematic and vulnerable on a number of different levels, especially in the frequently interlinked notion of “welfare ghetto”. In this paper, we adopt an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing Loïc Wacquant’s recent work on “territorial stigmatisation” and his thesis on the “ghetto”, to critique these narratives; and we explore the work these notions perform to legitimize increasingly pervasive state interventions to regulate and control working-class lives and communities. The classed assumptions underpinning these discourses are revealed in this context.

Crisis social policy and the resilience of the concept of community

This paper considers the continuing resilience of the notion of community in social policy making and wider political commentary in the contemporary UK. Focusing in particular on the ways in which community is negatively and positively invoked and mobilized in narratives of the ‘big’ and ‘broken’ societies, it considers why the notion of community, so popular with the previous New Labour government, continues to enchant the present UK Coalition government and has been given added resonance in the context of the economic crisis and of the ‘austerity’ measures currently being adopted. The paper argues that placing community at the heart of current welfare provision illuminates a number of tensions in the UK government’s policy-making agenda. Informed by a discussion of Liverpool – once one of the big society ‘laboratories’ – we highlight the contradictions between top-down, depoliticized understandings of community and the types of community engagement and participation that are to be found in poor, disadvantaged communities in particular. Such communities are also where the impact of UK government ‘austerity’ measures are being most keenly felt.

‘Saints and scroungers’: constructing the poverty and crime myth

According to the old adage, ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’! For many, the connections between poverty and crime are a matter of common sense; little scrutiny is required. Our concern is to look at how common sense understandings are re-made and to challenge some common misconceptions about poverty and crime. We have used the word ‘myth’ in our title, but we are not referring to simple falsehoods about poverty and crime – although de-bunking these is important. Rather, we wish to apply Flood’s (2002) discussion of ‘political myths’ in this context. As Flood (2002) puts it: ‘a political myth 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’. We are concerned with how political myths are circulated, the authority and the pervasiveness of the messages, and the functions of these myths.

Community Regeneration and Crime Reduction: some tensions and dilemmas

Since 1997 there have been a number of regeneration initiatives aimed at communities experiencing deprivation. Reducing crime and involving communities form important parts of the remits of these initiatives, and all involve ‘partnership’ approaches involving public, private, voluntary and community sectors. Key initiatives include the New Deal for Communities, many activities and programmes under the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, and new funding mechanisms.