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and the poor is particularly notable whenplaced in a European comparative con-text, as Table 9 clearly shows.What this table does not show is that in1985 (in the middle of the Thatcher pre-miership), 48 per cent of British people believed that government ‘deﬁnitelyshould’ reduce the gap between the richand the poor. It would appear that manypeople either believe that there has beenenough (or even too much) redistributionunder the Blair–Brown governments,and/or that further such redistributivemeasures would be counter-productive,either by fostering greater dependencyamong the poor or in deterring futurewealth creation, in which case the rest of the population would suﬀer from lessinvestment,lowerratesofgrowth,dimin-ishing prosperity and fewer jobs.There are two discrete consequences of these attitudes. First, to the extent thatpeople do favour increased governmentexpenditure or (re)distribution, it tendsto be on universal welfare services thatare likely to be used by virtually every-one, or their families, at some stage intheir lives (for example, education andthe NHS), rather than directly transfer-ring money from the rich to the poor.Second, to the extent that people dosupport additional governmental expen-diture on social security, as Table 10illustrates, the distinctions between‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor arecrystalclear.For example,whereas80percent of respondents prioritised old agepensions for any additional social secur-ity expenditure, and 52 per cent opted fordisability beneﬁts, only 15 per cent cited beneﬁts for single parents, while higher beneﬁts for the unemployed were thepreference of a mere 7 per cent of respon-dents.
Blaming the Poor for Inequality
341
#
The Author 2010. Journal compilation
#
The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2010
The Political Quarterly
, Vol. 81, No. 3
Table 8. Attitudes towards redistribution to, and higher spending on, the poor, 1994–2006
1994 2000 2006Agree that ‘government should spend more on welfarefor the poor’50 40 35Agree that ‘government should redistribute from better-oﬀ to less well-oﬀ’51 39 34Source: P. Taylor-Gooby and R. Martin, ‘Trends in sympathy for the poor’, in A. Park et al.,eds,
British Social Attitudes: The 24th Report
, London, National Centre for Social Research,2008, p. 246, Table 11.10.
Table 9. Percentage of respondents saying that governments‘deﬁnitely should’ reduce the gap between the rich and thepoor, 1996–2006
1996 2006Britain 33 27France 53 53Germany 29 30Spain 57 50Sweden 43 37
Source: S. Padgett and R. Johns, ‘How do political parties shape publicopinion? Britain in a European perspective’, in A. Park et al., eds,
BritishSocial Attitudes: The 26th Report
, London, National Centre for SocialResearch, 2010, p. 45, Table 3.2.

 
Conclusion
ItwouldseemthatBritain’srichcansleepsoundly in their beds, for there is littlepublic yearning for wealth redistributionfrom the better-oﬀ to the poor, and cer-tainly no discernible support for left-wingpartiespledgingequality.Whatevercriticism might be targeted at bankers in‘the City’ over their high salaries andhuge bonuses, there appears to be evenmore opprobrium or distaste towardsmany of those living in poverty. Manypeople seem to reason that even if thesalaries and other rewards of those at thetop of the income hierarchy are excessive,the recipients are nonetheless workingand, via their earnings, contributingtowards the Treasury’s tax revenues,from which the rest of society accrues beneﬁts in the form of funding for publicservices and pensions. By contrast, manyof the poor are perceived to be makinglittle or no contribution to society, and insome cases are assumed to have littleinclination or incentive to do so.Although there is nothing new aboutnegative or judgemental attitudestowards the poorest in British society—after all, the afore-mentioned distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeser-ving’ poor can be traced back at least tothe Victorian era—they have becomemore pronounced and entrenched in thelast three decades. Doubtless, the ideo-logical hegemony of economic neo-liberalismandconsumeristindividualismfrom the 1980s onwards, and which NewLabour has broadly acculturated itself to,hasservedtoenhanceorexacerbateindif-ference or antipathy towards the poor tothe extent that even in the midst of wide-spread concern and condemnationregardingthescaleofinequalityinBritaintoday,thereislittleseriouspublicorpolit-ical clamour for direct wealth redistribu-tion from the richest to the poorest totackle poverty. Moreover, concern aboutsocial security fraud and ‘beneﬁt cheats’continues to elicit far more media cover-age, public condemnation and govern-mental attention than tax evasion bycorporations and the rich, even thoughthe latter actually entails much largersums that welfare abuse and thus indir-ectly costs the British taxpayer far more.Furthermore, not only has support foregalitarianism and direct wealth redistri- butionfromrichtopoordeclinedsigniﬁc-antly in Britain during the last thirtyyears, even though inequality itself hasincreased enormously during this time, itis also the case that British people aregenerally rather more critical of, or indif-ferent towards, many of the poor thanmany of their European neighbours. Cer-tainly in most of Western Europe andScandinavia, there is a much greater pro-pensity to acknowledge the structuralfactors that cause poverty, and whichcan—and thus should—be ameliorated by political action. By contrast, manyBritish people still prefer to blame thepoor for their poverty, just as they did
342
Peter Dorey
The Political Quarterly
, Vol. 81, No. 3
#
The Author 2010. Journal compilation
#
The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2010
Table 10. Public preferences if additional money was available for social security
First or second preference(% citing)1986 1989 1994 1996 2000 2003 2005Old age pensions 64 67 64 71 74 78 80Disability beneﬁts 58 60 57 55 61 55 52Child beneﬁts 23 30 34 30 33 38 39Single parent beneﬁts 18 16 14 13 18 15 15Unemployment beneﬁts 22 25 26 26 12 10 7
Source: P. Taylor-Gooby and R. Martin, ‘Trends in sympathy for the poor’, in A. Park et al., eds,
BritishSocial Attitudes: The 24th Report
, London, National Centre for Social Research, 2008, p. 237, Table 11.4.

 
in the nineteenth century. One can onlywonder whether, and indeed how, suchpervasive attitudes will ever change.
Notes
1 National Equality Panel,
An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK: Summary
,London, Government Equalities Oﬃce,2010.2 See P. Dorey,
British Conservatism: The Pol-itics and Philosophy of Inequality
,London,I.B.Tauris, forthcoming.3 A. Park et al., eds,
British Social Attitudes:The 26th Report
, London, National Centrefor Social Research, 2010.4 T. Sefton, ‘Moving in the right direction?Public attitudes to poverty, inequality andredistribution’, in J. Hills, T. Sefton andK. Stewart, eds,
Towards a More Equal Socie-ty?Poverty, Inequality and Policy since 1997
,Bristol, Policy Press, 2009, p. 239.5 L. Bamﬁeld and T. Horton,
Understanding Attitudes to Tackling Economic Inequality
,London, Joseph Rowntree Foundation,2009, p. 27, Table 8.6 Sefton, ‘Moving in the right direction?’,p. 240, Table 11.6.7 See, for example, N. Ridley,
My Style of Government
, London, Hutchinson, 1991,p. 91; N. Tebbit,
Unﬁnished Business
, Lon-don, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991, p. 97;M. Thatcher,
The Path to Power
, London,HarperCollins, 1995, pp. 561–2.8 C.Bromley,‘HasBritainbecomeimmunetoinequality?’, in Park et al.,
British Social Attitudes 2003
, p. 79, Table 4.2.9 T. Sefton, ‘Give and take: attitudes to redis-tribution’, in Park et al.,
British Social Atti-tudes 2005
, p. 6; emphasis in original
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