How did we get here? - Scoundrels and Shirkers Book Review
Scoundrels and Shirkers
Capitalism and Poverty in Britain
Jim Silver isn’t a historian, and as the title of this book suggests, this isn’t a straightforward history. Silver is a social scientist who has worked for many years on anti‐poverty initiatives, and from the first pages his interests and sympathies are immediately clear. But readers deterred by the title’s threat of a political treatise – or fearing an unrelenting picture of misery – would miss out. This is an interesting, dense and cohesive history of social security policy in Britain from the twelfth to the twenty‐first century.
Headlines on our social security system regularly warn of ‘unprecedented’ dangers, but reading Silver’s history, it is clear there is nothing remotely unprecedented about them. Panics and pressure on some key themes – like migration, worklessness and people in poverty having children – have clearly been around since the Middle Ages.
The movement of people, for example, was already a hot topic by the end of the Elizabethan era when the first Poor Law of 1601 set out a parish‐based system of poverty relief. Aided later by the 1662 Act of Settlement, parishes went to great lengths to make particular individuals or families another area’s responsibility. Later, workers escaping famine in Ireland faced ‘relentless discrimination’, as did Jews escaping European pogroms in the 1800s, most of whom were excluded from early twentieth‐century welfare benefits. Silver traces this trend through to the entrenched anti‐migrant rhetoric of the 1960s to 1980s – and we know that much of this rhetoric, and the default of excluding overseas nationals from social security, continues today.
The question of worklessness and benefits is a topic of fevered debate in 2024, with the prime minister announcing in April his ‘moral mission to reform welfare’. On Silver’s account, this moral dimension is ageless. The book makes it clear that non‐disabled, non‐working people – the ‘scroungers and shirkers’ of its title – have always faced particular moral disapproval in Britain. This stretches from being labelled the ‘undeserving’ poor in mediaeval Christian thought and called by the Poor Law Commission in 1834 the ‘master evil’ of the social security system, right through to their demonisation in the period leading up to Margaret Thatcher’s social security reforms of the 1980s. Not only have these moral judgements affected benefit entitlement rules, but they have also had a huge impact on benefit adequacy. The expectation that low‐income households can be ‘driven to work by want’ has a long history, with policies like the benefit cap only the latest chapter.
Withholding child benefits from parents who ‘can’t afford to have children’ is not a topic explicitly taken up by Silver, but the book clearly identifies the forerunners of policies like today’s two‐child limit. In the nineteenth century and earlier, it was widely felt that the perceived failings of poor parents should be ‘visited on their children’. By the 1980s and 1990s the prevailing rhetoric was about causation and dependency: as Thatcher put it, ‘welfare benefits, distributed with little or no consideration of their effects on behaviour, encouraged illegitimacy’.
This type of argument, which casts benefits as a cause of rather than a solution to child poverty, is still popular today. Indeed, the two‐child limit wouldn’t have looked out of place much earlier in British history.
It’s hard to resist drawing other parallels, too. There is no fundamental difference, for example, between the government’s current proposal for bank spying powers and the 1870s ‘cross‐visitors’, who spied on welfare recipients to check that they weren’t secretly cohabiting. Or the means‐test home visits of the 1920s and ’30s, which often involved interviewing the claimant’s neighbours or grocer.
Does Silver’s book achieve its ambition of finding inspiration for solving poverty by looking to the past? Not exactly, although it contains plenty of lessons in what does not work. In trying to identify positive lessons, the book’s conclusion anchors on the successes of 1940s welfare reform and its attendant ‘new theory of poverty’: ‘that a positive role could be played by the state to achieve a collective overcoming of want’. This was ‘a move away from the long‐held view that poverty was the result of moral, behavioural or other personal failings and that government intervention would erode people’s independence’.
While he is realistic about the shortcomings of the post‐war reforms, it is clearly Silver’s view that they are our best prototype for a successful anti‐poverty regime. The book concludes by identifying the courage and agency of political leaders as a key feature of those reforms; in an election year when child poverty stands at 30 per cent,4 this is an appropriate closing message.
— Journal of Child Poverty Action Group Issue 178 Summer 2024