“Welfare Ghettos” and the “Broken Society”: Territorial Stigmatization 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.

Key Words:

• Class
• Stigmatization
• Marginalization
• “Broken Society”
• Ghetto
• Social Housing

Acknowledgement

We are very grateful to Joe Sim, Tom Slater, Jamie Peck and Paul Watt for insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. The UK Coalition–Liberal Government introduced its White Paper Universal Credit: Welfare that Works in November 2010 (DWP 2010) and launched a range of reforms, the Welfare Reform Bill (DWP 2011) most notably, to prepare for the introduction of Universal Credit in 2013. In the discourses surrounding these reforms, “incentivising work”, reducing welfare expenditure and “fairness” towards “taxpayers” are central themes.