It is perhaps not unfair to suggest that many, if not most, adult mental health services have become psychosis services, dealing with those who are suffering from severe and enduring mental illness. Personality disorders are common, and are also disabling conditions. Many of those who suffer

Personality disorder: no longer a diagnosis of exclusion

This article argues that the decline of the ‘underclass’ discourse in the UK, and the rise of the ‘chav’, are not unconnected. We contend that there are numerous homologies between the meaning content, objects and tenor of these two terms, and suggest that the ‘chav’ represents a popular reconfiguration of the underclass idea. However, we are also keen to note the way in which the concept of social marginality is reconfigured in this substitution. Specifically, we argue that the discourse of the underclass turned crucially upon a (perceived or real) pathology in the working classes’ relations to production and socially productive labour. Its emergent successor, the concept of the ‘chav’, is in contrast oriented to purportedly pathological class dispositions in relation to the sphere of consumption. In a bid to highlight this shift we consider the emergence of debates upon social marginality and consumption practices, and attempt to locate popular media discourse surrounding the ‘chav’ within this frame, i...

The ‘chav’ phenomenon: Consumption, media and the construction of a new underclass

Drawing on ten years of research into educational innovation and socio-technical change, working with educators, researchers, digital industries, students and policy-makers, this book questions taken-for-granted assumptions about the future of education. Arguing that we have been working with too narrow a vision of the future, Keri Facer makes a case for recognising the challenges that the next two decades may bring

Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change

This is a single authored work in a key Open University series for crime and criminal justice. The book has been extremely well reviewed and is a key text on a number of courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It is routinely cited in other works, including leading journal articles. It draws on extensive literature, a wide research base, and the author’s own research. At time of publication it was the first to thoroughly explore the role of risk in criminal justice practice and policy and is recognised as a key authority in the subject.

Understanding risk in criminal justice

This article links together three themes in recent discussion of welfare. First, the extent to which current patterns of state welfare provision are likely to continue has been called into question...

Welfare State Regimes and Welfare Citizenship

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Charles Murray and the Underclass : The Developing Debate

This article outlines the prospects for new political strategies for state welfare in Britain in the 1990s, based upon the notion of citizenship and the idea of right to welfare as alternatives to ...

Why citizenship and welfare rights offer new hope for new welfare in Britain

Social secutity reform is very much on the political agenda at the moment -put there, unfortunately, by a gevernment who have demonstrated themselves to be prepared to cut the leyels of basie income support in order to meet economic targets. Theri actions have, however, created space for the populatrisation of alternative measures for changing the basis of income support in Britain and have placed the need for a socialist response clearly in the left’s court. This article is an attempt to survey the context of proposals for social security reform, to look at some of the problems of the major proposals for reform and to suggest the basis for a socialist response. It is hoped that it will stimulate further debate on this important issue in the pages of CSP ans elsewhere. Social security is now by far the largest item of state expenditure in Britain, expected to reach around £40,000 million in 1984/85. It directly effects the weekly incomes of over one third of the population and indirectly, as I shall briefly discuss, conditions the fears and expectations of us all. In spite of this neither the present government nor previous post-war administrations have appointed cabinet ministers with sole responsibility for it. What this government has done, however, is institute a series of supposedly far-reaching reviews into the current social security scheme under the broad control of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Services, Norman Fowler. These are due to report in Spring 1985, probably after the March budget. Fowler has called the reviews the most fundamental examination of social security since Beveridge. Given their piecemeal organisation, however, with separate investigations into pensions, benefits for young people, housing benefit and supplementary benefit, and the fairly limited nature of the questions which seemed to have concerned the members of the review teams, this seems something of an overstatement. Their recommendations are far more likely to revolve around a streamlining of current Supplementary Benefit entitlement and restriction of other benefits for the young and old and for housing costs, than any radical rebuilding of the whole social security system. * Socialist security is the campaign slogan of the Labour Social Security Campaign, the author is a member of the Campaign’s Executive Committee, but is writing here in a personal capacity. The criticisms and proposals discussed here are also taken up in more detail in the context of the politics and ideology of social security provision in a forthcoming book: Poverty and State Support (Longman).

Socialist security: where should we be going and why?

At the end of a decade in which major changeshave been made troughout all aspects of social and economic policy, it is now becoming increasingly clear that the underlying aim of Thatcherism hasbeen...

The end of the line for social security: the Thatcherite restructuring of welfare:

This article is a critical review of the increasing number of Take-up Campaigns being run by local authorities in the 1980s in order to increase the levels of benefit take-up within their area. It outlines how these campaigns have developed as a pan of the growing welfare rights work which is now so much a feature of the British benefit system: and discusses how, after some initial problems, they have become more sophisticated and successful in their ap proach. There are, however, inherent limitations within the achievements to be made through such campaigning; these are summarised and explained, and a plea made for a more general campaign for the reform of benefits themselves to be a central feature of future local take-up initiatives.

Pete Alcock

Papers

Charles Murray and the Underclass : The Developing Debate

Why citizenship and welfare rights offer new hope for new welfare in Britain

Socialist security: where should we be going and why?

The end of the line for social security: the Thatcherite restructuring of welfare:

Take-up campaigns: fighting poverty through the post: