From Transmitted Deprivation to Social Exclusion

Filling a major gap in social policy literature, this book looks at the history of debates over the poverty cycle and their relationship with current initiatives on social exclusion. The book uses Sir Keith Joseph’s famous “cycle of deprivation” speech in 1972 as a backdrop to explore British New Labour’s approach to child poverty: initiatives such as Sure Start, the influence of research on intergenerational continuities, and its new stance on social exclusion. Making extensive use of archival sources, private papers, contemporary published documents, and oral interviews with retired civil servants and social scientists, John Welshman provides the only booklength treatment of this important but neglected strand of social policy history.