This essay, on the history of blaming the poor, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 2 August 2020, under the headline ‘Illness, obesity, racism; who gets blamed for our crises? The poor of course’. The role of government, the US political scientist Lawrence Mead wrote in his 1986 book Beyond Entitlement, is to ‘persuade [people] to blame themselves’. Mead is the godfather of workfare (schemes that make welfare benefits conditional on the claimant working) and a key proponent […]

Categories: Class, Politics • Tags: african americans, coronavirus, culture, culture of poverty, george orwell, inequality, lawrence mead, obesity, poor, poverty, racism, underserving poor, working class