This article draws on a number of sources to demonstrate that public attitudes towards ‘the poor’ appear to be hardening, with many seen as undeserving of support from the government or ‘the taxpayer’.
As Mark Smith shows, we seem to be moving away from the notion (as demonstrated by the work of Peter Townsend) of a range of products, services and activities that everyone ought to be able to afford, to something akin to a poverty line where people ‘deserve’ only the most basic of resources — anything else is up to them to achieve by their own efforts. Smith likens this attitude to the notion of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor found in the research of Booth and Rowntree — and indeed also in the framing of the various Poor Law Acts over the past few centuries.
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