Terms like ‘underclass’ do not help the poor

These two views are not as incompatible as they first seem. Most people are able to move off the lowest tiers (although usually not very far), but that still leaves some who stay, and there is evidence that their children are likely to be disadvantaged as well.

On the other hand, using terms such as “underclass” risks making too strong a link between poverty and antisocial behaviour. Just because someone has to survive on a low income or is not a high educational achiever does not make them a hooligan or a criminal. To be fair though, that is not what the home secretary said.

It is harder still to accept that such attributes are exclusive to groups such as lone parents, the unemployed or any other vulnerable groups in society. Complex social problems cannot be generalised – and simply blaming the poor for their plight is as unedifying as it is futile.

The government has carefully avoided this. Its favourite term has been “social exclusion” – the implication of which is that the fault does not lie entirely with the individuals concerned. However, New Labour, unlike the traditional left, also takes the view that the poor are not merely victims of an amoral market economy. They have rights but they also have responsibilities.

Anyone who has worked in housing knows about so-called “problem tenants”, who have multiple and challenging problems, and for whom criminality, truancy, drug addiction and antisocial behaviour are never far away.

New Labour, unlike the traditional left, takes the view that the poor are not merely victims of an amoral economy. They have rights but they also have responsibilities

Some of these problems may have become more acute in the last 20 years or so. The traditional buttresses that helped sustain many working-class communities have been undermined. Mass employment linked with identified areas of rented public housing, strong trade unions, churches and chapels – all these pillars, together with relatively stable families, helped to keep communities together and set standards of behaviour.

As employment patterns have changed, family breakdown has increased and drug use has risen, the institutions that formed this social glue have become less potent, and the economy has left some behind – not just unemployed but apparently unemployable.

Frank Field once described them as the last carriage of an express which had become decoupled from the rest of the train, abandoned as others speeded ahead for a better life. Hence the idea of a class stuck in ghettos of poverty, caught in a depressing world of dependency and decline.

So what is to be done? Thus far the government has introduced a series of initiatives to turn communities around, make work pay, encourage parental responsibility and address antisocial behaviour. It is perhaps too early to tell what impact the current range of measures will have. Lots of people now have jobs who did not have jobs five years ago, but that has more to do with economic rather than social policy.