Workers or Shirkers? Ian Hislop's Victorian Benefits

'Let me introduce you to someone who was

'so well-known in early 19th-century London that he was included

'in artists' views of the city, just like any other famous landmark.'

I reckon he's in the middle of the road.

'But he wasn't a king, soldier or politician - he was a beggar.'

Right. He was standing right here.

Charles McGee was a one-eyed Jamaican ex-sailor with a broom.

And what he did was sweep away the rubbish

and horse manure out of the way of people on this busy crossing.

He was the equivalent of someone at the traffic lights with a rag,

offering to wipe your windscreen clean.

Suits ya! About time you done a bit of work.

-Clean your window, guv?

-Yes, please.

'McGee worked and begged at this very spot for 40 years,

'which made him controversial and earned him

'a place here in a book of biographies of London's poor.'

In his preface, the author explains that many of the curious characters

that he's collected are, in fact, clever scoundrels

rather than genuine poor people in need.

He says, "The deceptions of the idle and sturdy were

"so various, cunning and extensive,

"that it was in most instances extremely difficult to discover

"the real object of charity from the impostor."

That hunch, that there were many scroungers, has never gone away.

It motivated some extraordinary individuals

over the next hundred years to try to crack the problem of the poor.

'This is a story of a still divisive dilemma -

'that some people do need help...'

Charities for the deserving poor!

..but others, frankly, are taking the piss.'

Sleeping off a life on benefits...

'It's about the media who stir things up...'

I'm not a bad person. I wasn't being a bad person.

'..and about the state we're in.'

We moved away from the Victorian approach to poverty...

Gamblers, alcoholics, fallen women...

..but we've gone back again.

There's no doubt, we're confused about all of this,

and have been for hundreds of years.

But can history tell us

whether poverty is an inevitable fact of life,

a moral fault of individuals or a failure of our whole society?

Benefits - what to give, what to cut?

It's a massive issue in Britain today,

where certain strong opinions will always come up.

It's unfair that those in work should be paid less than

those on benefit.

You can't just stand by and do nothing to help people in need.

If hand-outs are too generous, then there's no incentive to work.

The truth is,

this isn't a new argument - it's been around for centuries.

But what are its implications for the way we tackle poverty today?

Well, to answer that, we have to go back to the 1830s

to the man who made these public opinions public policy.

He was one of the prime architects of the notorious workhouse system -

Edwin Chadwick.

Chadwick was geeky, pernickety, cantankerous

and also a brilliantly original thinker.

As a dedicated civil servant,

he's remembered as one of the greatest bean counters

of the 19th century, said to be the only man

who'd actually counted the rats in London's prisons.

The thing about the Victorians is

they thought they were terribly rational and scientific.

You know, this was this great age of reason and everything

now suddenly could be solved with rational solutions

and good, decent, educated, rational men just sat down in a room

and sorted everything out.

And that's how they approached the world.

Chadwick's progressive ideas were heavily influenced

by Jeremy Bentham - the godfather of Victorian rationalism.

His Table of Cases Calling for Relief,

found among Chadwick's personal papers,

shows a systematic attempt to classify

all the different types of poor people.

He starts with people who you can see he's reasonably sympathetic to -

those who are infirm in mind, those verging towards idiotism.

There's people who've lost work.

He talks about canal diggers on completion of the canal.

He lists gardeners who can't work

because they're in a time of long-continued frost.

And also, a category of immigrant foreigners

driven from home in multitudes, all at a time.

Got to find some way to cope with them!

Then there are people who he's clearly less sympathetic to -

inability to work through badness of character.

And here we have thieves, habitual beggars, vagrants,

gypsies and prostitutes.

What I love about this document is its energy

and its refusal to accept that any problem is not solvable.

The poor - oh, they've always been there,

there's nothing you can do about it, it's intractable -

no, no! You can sit down, you can write lists of them

and put them in neat columns and work out what to do.

So Chadwick took this exhaustive list of all the kinds of people

claiming poor relief,

which was a sort of 19th-century version of benefits,

then moved on to the next stage, which is how to get

people off welfare and into work.

His chance came in 1832,

when he joined a government commission tasked with

reforming Britain's poor relief system, known as the Poor Law.

For centuries, local parishes had given hand-outs - food, clothes

and money - to the destitute in what was known as outdoor relief.

And for the few who really couldn't look after themselves,

mostly the sick, elderly or orphaned, there was indoor relief -

those special buildings known as poorhouses or workhouses.

But the system wasn't working.

Edwin Chadwick was really trying to deal with what we'd call today

spiralling welfare costs.

This outdated system

of what was known as outdoor relief was costing far too much money

and the new Poor Law was meant to rein in some of the costs,

but it was also meant to change the behaviour of the poor.

Chadwick felt that hand-outs for the poor encouraged them

to be lazy and were fundamentally unfair.

He wrote, "The poor hard-working rate-payer rises early

"and retires late to his rest - he works hard.

"He would, from what he has to spare of his hard earnings,

"give greater comforts to his own offspring

"and to his own aged parents,

"but the parents of the pauper and of the criminal

"must first be comforted."

That, of course, sounds familiar.

Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift worker,

leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning,

who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour

sleeping off a life on benefits?

APPLAUSE

The vast, vast majority of people

would like to get on, improve their lot and have their kids do well,

if not better than they are doing.

So they have a very dim view of those who don't share that view

and that's pretty much, I think,

a perennial feeling for people down all the ages, I think.

In a sense, what Chadwick hits is the core of the issue, which is,

everybody needs incentives in life and they respond to incentives.

Chadwick's solution was an expanded national system of workhouses.

This one in Southwell in Nottinghamshire was the prototype,

and hundreds of them were built throughout

the country in a drastic programme of reform of the Poor Law.

"Into such a house none will enter voluntarily.

"Work, confinement and discipline will deter the indolent."

HE KNOCKS

From now on, the only help the poor were meant to get was on the inside.

This is the forbidding world of the workhouse, which

we all learnt about at school and can still evoke in our mind's eye -

a Dickensian world of shuffling paupers, of hungry urchins,

of sanctimony and cruelty, of thin gruel and stale crusts.

If you please, Sir?

Please, Sir, I want some more.

What?

Please, Sir, I want some more.

Mr Bumble! Mr Bumble!

The workhouse cruelty Dickens portrayed

so memorably was deliberate policy.

The thinking was that man wasn't necessarily this higher being

with a great soul but, actually, was quite an animalistic individual,

drawn to pleasure and repelled by pain.

So the conditions in the workhouse had to be

so terrible that you would never really want to go there - it would

always be better to work rather than to be in support by the state.

Families would be broken up and placed in separate dormitories.

The able-bodied men in here...

..the elderly and the infirm in here...

..the women in here - a long way from the men -

and the children in here, separated from both their parents.

And almost everyone was put to work - recycling rope, making glue

from old bones or breaking rocks - for which they weren't paid a penny.

The place feels a bit like a prison and a bit like a hospital,

and I think that's probably deliberate.

I mean, a prison because they didn't want people to come here.

It was meant to be awful.

It was meant to be worse than if you were a hard-working family.

You had to be desperate to come here,

and once you came here, you had to be desperate to get out again.

So it was awful, deliberately.

But also, it is a bit like a hospital

cos the Victorians saw poverty as a sort of public health issue.

It was something that could be cured.

The new Poor Law succeeded, as Chadwick had hoped,

in drastically cutting the amount spent on poor relief.

But there was widespread opposition to his harsh reforms,

which were accused of having turned poverty into a crime.

In some places, riots broke out, attacking the workhouses.

And Chadwick himself was criticised for being all head and no heart.

He was said to be a cold-blooded martinet, who was eager to sacrifice

the comfort, the feelings and the physical welfare of the poor

to his theoretical crotchets of mathematical exactness.

Most workhouses were harsh places.

But occasionally managers ignored the punishing conditions

the law demanded and were more humane.

My mother told me that her great grandfather, William Bragger,

was master of the Wrexham workhouse.

I have got a photograph that might show William.

Ah, that will do.

I'm guessing that's William on the left.

Well, he was the fencing instructor for the

Denbighshire Yeomanry Cavalry.

He was wonderful.

-A wonderful workhouse master.

-Yes, yes, that's what I thought.

He was well known for taking toys

and cakes back for the children in the workhouse.

Tobacco for the old men.

He's meant to be handing out gruel, not giving people sweets.

Oh, I know. I know.

Did anyone ever complain that it was so nice in the workhouse

that you couldn't get them to do anything?

Well, there was a farmer who said that one of his servants said

she was going to go back to the workhouse

because she got better food and a warmer bed.

-More than he was offering.

-Yes, that's right, yeah.

The newspapers actually reported that there were no

Oliver Twists in the workhouse, that they didn't fear asking for more.

-Right, because they'd get it.

-Yes, that's right.

I suppose the moral of the story is that the British public isn't

always as strict and as judgmental as the rhetoric that appeals to it.

So they hear someone is going to sort out the problem

and make sure you're poorer when you're not working,

than when you're working, and all this sounds terrific.

And then they're confronted by the reality,

say in the workhouses, and they say, "This is appalling."

I mean this must be stopped and then the compassion kicks in.

Even ultra-rational Chadwick had his compassionate side.

He realised that the biggest budget savings of all would come from

a healthier population and became the driving force behind sanitation

reforms that would bring better sewers and clean water for everyone.

Edwin Chadwick was clearly obsessive and opinionated but he was committed

to what we in modern jargon would call investing in people.

Not just giving them a hand-out, but creating conditions in housing,

health and at work in which they could thrive.

Obituaries rarely put the boot in and this

one in the Daily News of Monday, July 7th 1890, is no exception.

Goes through all his achievements, makes a Victorian joke.

His epitaph shouldn't be "vanitas, vanitatum", the vanity of vanities.

It should be "sanitas, sanitatum". Very good.

But it ends by saying,

"Had he killed in battle as many as he saved by sanitation, he

"would have had equestrian statues by the dozen put up in his memory."

What are you filming, then, today?

Well, it's a documentary about British attitudes to the poor.

'I'm certainly not the first journalist to go

'poking around this subject.'

Do you believe all the stuff in the media about scroungers

living on benefits?

Well, you read so much about it but funnily enough, there's a couple

down my street who actually...

Ever since I've been living there, have never worked a day in their

life and they're a lot younger than me.

So would you cut the benefits?

There's a certain part of me that wants to crack down

but I wouldn't cut it to everyone, no, actually.

There's people that are out of work and it's no fault of their own.

You're a perfect picture of confusion.

I certainly am at times, I'm sure.

When the British public are confused about this,

they usually turn to the media.

Back in 1866, a tenacious British journalist drove in a taxi

carriage in pursuit of a story that would spark the debate.

The man inside that carriage was James Greenwood,

one of 11 children of a coach trimmer.

He was well connected in the press.

His brother, Frederick, was the editor of the very tabloid

Pall Mall Gazette.

And James himself wrote rip-roaring adventures like The Bear King,

Wild Sports of the World and Curiosities of Savage Life.

It was a different type of savage curiosity

that James Greenwood was investigating that night in 1866.

His brother, Frederick, like all editors,

was worried about circulation figures.

And those of the Pall Mall Gazette were on the way down.

His solution - to get his brother to write a sensational piece

called a Night in the Workhouse.

The big idea was to take a new immersive approach.

James Greenwood got out. He looked dirty, unkempt, poor.

Not because he was a journalist but because he was in disguise.

He wore a filthy long black coat

and underneath, the typical rags of a Victorian pauper.

He was Britain's first undercover reporter.

Can I have a receipt, please?

'Greenwood had come to spend a night in the Casual Ward

'of the Lambeth Workhouse,'

as he wrote, "There to learn by actual experience,

"how casual paupers are lodged and fed."

This is the first of James Greenwood's three-part

sensational expose of his night in the workhouse.

It's written in beautiful first-person tabloidese

in an attempt to grab and distress his readers.

He starts off by saying,

"I am telling a story which cannot all be told.

"Some parts of it are far too shocking,

"but what I may tell, has not a single touch of colour in it."

He goes into the workhouse,

he has a grimy bath and then he's given a mattress for a bed.

"In the middle of the bed I'd selected was a stain of blood

"bigger than a man's hand.

"To lie on such a horrid thing seemed impossible."

And he finds the worst thing as the night wears on, is the coughing.

"The hollow cough, the short cough, the hysterical cough,

"the bark coming at regular intervals."

I think he is genuinely distressed by the poor people who

are down on their luck who need this and it is humiliating and you see

the filth and grime and the complete lack of dignity, but I think

he is still shocked by the more resilient of the young men,

who just turn up, smoke, take the bread,

take anything that is on offer, swear all night,

try and get out of the work and run for it in the morning.

At the end of his description, Greenwood comes across as the

objective and balanced journalist and he says,

"The moral of all this I leave to you."

He is, in fairly classic style, unsure where he's coming down.

Greenwood's article was lapped up by the public,

and it was reprinted again and again, taking on a life of its own.

Within a month it had even become a popular stage play and made

some of the workhouse characters he wrote about overnight celebrities.

Hi, I'm White Dee and I'd like to welcome you to my BeneFIT video.

Greenwood's article helped establish a long tradition of the media

making judgments about those receiving hand-outs.

Are you going to put the sugar in first?

I, I put the sugar in first. Do you not put the sugar in first?

-Oh, no.

-No? Why?

Deirdre Kelly, also known as White Dee, recently found

herself at the centre of a similar media storm, when she emerged

as a central character of the Channel 4 series

Benefit Street.

At the heart of James Turner is single mum, White Dee.

She's bringing up two kids on benefits.

You see, I was going to say, I'll be single mother.

But, you know, I didn't. Which was lucky.

Dee, who was once convicted for theft, split opinions

amongst the British public, many of whom condemned her as a scrounger.

I've suspended your claim as there's been change in your income.

Do you know, hand on heart don't worry about it.

I had one of them and I ignored it

and then they paid my landlord anyway.

It created an enormous storm, didn't it?

I mean, you know, you became unbelievably famous,

everybody had an opinion on it.

It's one of the things that people are so passionate about.

You've got the, you know, the taxpayer that some of them

do begrudge, you know, people who are on benefits.

It's just a group of people that were just catapulted into this

complete world of hatred and this, that and the other.

But it wasn't only that because a lot of people ended up

rather liking you, didn't they?

I think... A lot of people, did they, Ian?

Yeah, obviously not me.

I'm just saying "a lot of people".

I'll just drink my tea.

I mean there's a long history in Britain of journalists going

and having a look at the poor.

And their motives were partly sensational, but partly

they wanted to show everyone else what the poor looked like.

Show people what the poor look like?

It's like you might as well just shove them all in a big tent

and sell tickets to people and say, "Come on down,

"this is what the poor look like."

It's like, you know, it can happen to anybody.

It's... It's not a joke, it's not a laughing matter,

-they're not there to be ridiculed.

-Yeah.

-Do you know what I'm saying?

It's like they're just people, normal people like anybody

else who's in a certain situation at that particular time of their life.

I suppose this is a tradition which goes

back before the age of television, what we now call poverty porn, the

idea of being titillated by people in poverty, that we are entertained

by them, that we have this kind of mixture of horror and astonishment.

You know it can be the sense of the Victorian freak show.

Someone like Greenwood would have said,

they don't have a voice unless I give them one, that's why I've

gone to do this rather sensational article about the workhouse.

Is that not a fair point?

The issue is not that he's writing about it, it's that others aren't.

If it's not your lived experience being in a workhouse or just

being poor, full stop, and you're writing about others,

you end up othering them.

They become this exotic... These exotic creatures with their...

Look at their lives and how awful it is.

You turn them into objects of pity. You know, there's a flipside.

You either end up with poor people being demonised or the other

is being turned into saints, and in both cases you strip them

of their humanity, they're no longer quite people.

So, should we middle-class journalists ignore the subject?

The press and the media are perfectly capable of producing

poverty porn and exploitive pieces about the poor as

though there only interest was as a sort of zoo.

Erm, but on the other hand, they are at least focusing

attention on one of the major problems in any society.

For the Victorians, concentrating on the poor was a new idea.

The idea you had to do something about the poor,

as opposed to just ignore them, was partly the result of people

shoving it in your face in newspaper articles and the equivalent.

So as soon as you've said there is a problem with the poor,

the next question is, what do we do about it?

For some, the answer is charity.

Following Greenwood's article, it became fashionable for the better

off to go and see how the poor lived, driven both by curiosity

and by deep moral purpose.

There was at the heart of the gilded middle class life, this sense of sin

this notion of the wealth and riches of late Victorian life was built

upon the terrible urban slavery of those working in the cotton industry

in Manchester, the pot banks in Stoke, the docks in Liverpool.

And in order to alleviate this sin, well,

something had to be done about the poor.

A culture of philanthropic do-gooding led to voluntary

organisations springing up across the country.

This is one of them,

the Providence Row Night Refuge for Deserving Women, Men and Children.

On a winter's night there was cocoa, bread and a bed

for up to 300 people. There was even a giant footbath

which could accommodate 12 pairs of tired feet.

And this sort of charity was happening on an enormous scale.

There were institutions for every conceivable niche.

Shipwrecked sailors, homeless cabbies, orphan girls,

lame painters, a reference to their disability rather than

the quality of their work.

But the tricky question with charity is always who do you give it to?

One of the do-gooders with strong opinions on that score was

Helen Bosanquet, a quiet, ironic and donnish woman, whose old-fashioned,

high-handed manner had given her the university nickname Tone Raiser.

Given her moral approach to life, perhaps it's not surprising

that she met her philosopher husband at the London Ethical Society.

Bosanquet worked in the East End as a social

worker for the Charity Organisation Society, which wanted to stop

all this haphazard giving and target help to the most deserving.

She made detailed inquiries into the lives of the poor...

..sometimes by looking out of her own back window.

She wrote, "I am fortunate in commanding the survey of

"five or six of these gardens, sooty, dingy strips they are."

"Number one consists of four or five little boys.

"They are as sturdy well cared for little fellows as one could

"wish to see."

"But at number four, the children

"are half-starved, cross little things.

"In a few years' time the boys will be running

wild on the street, qualifying for reformatory or prison."

But, Bosanquet concluded, "Their life might be as good as

" number one. They live in the same surroundings,

"they might go to the same school.

"It is the wholesome home atmosphere that is wanting."

Bosanquet's big idea was that to tackle poverty, you need to do

more than just dole out money.

You have to intervene early with chaotic families.

That view is still pretty popular.

We need to tackle the root causes of poverty.

Homes where no-one works, children growing up in chaos,

addiction, mental health problems, abuse, family breakdown.

We will never deal with poverty unless we get to grips

with these issues.

What sympathy does the man who spent six

years in charge of benefits have for Bosanquet's approach?

Sometimes people grow up in a household, for example,

where your parents didn't work and you imbibe a sense that work

isn't that important in your life, you don't go to school very much,

and therefore you enter the world of work with no skilling and no

sense of this is what you do.

That, in a sense, you need to put right. So you...

Like her, you would intervene at that point.

I remember visiting a lone parent a few years ago in an estate

which had a very high number of single parents, young women.

And when I sat and talked to her, I sensed that she wanted

to do something, she wanted to be better than her circumstances.

But she had no skills, she had fallen out of school,

she didn't know where to go.

And I remember leaving there thinking very simply, "This is my daughter."

I'm sorry, I got emotional about it.

19-years-old.

My aspiration for my daughter was boundless.

And here I'm sitting with a 19-year-old girl who had

written off her life and had no aspiration and no self worth.

She was a product of a system. And my point was...

What could I have done, what could we do, to change her life?

-So that really is heart as well as head?

-Yes.

You want people to be responsible, you want them to make choices.

You want them to improve themselves.

That's quite Victorian.

You want people to make every step of the way as much as

they can, to be able to be then be masters of their,

their own fate, not leaving me as master of their destiny.

-Yeah, Helen Bosanquet would love this.

-Exactly.

The idea of bettering yourself was an incredibly powerful one to

Victorians like Bosanquet.

She believed that charitable help should be targeted

only at those who were willing to help themselves.

Mind Management.

It was down to each individual to make a success of their own life.

Alistair Campbell - Winners.

And here it is, the one that inspired all the others that

launched the entire genre - Samuel Smiles' Self Help.,

First published in 1859 and still in print.

The idea of self help was hugely attractive to the Victorians,

who turned this book into a major best seller.

It contained a series of inspiring portraits of go-getters who'd

pulled themselves up by their boot-straps from humble

beginnings to become high achievers.

Idleness is "the curse of man,"

said Smiles, while labour is "an honour and a glory."

Smiles' mantra was industry and thrift.

You worked hard and you saved, preferably in a savings account,

and that prevented you from becoming poor.

It was basically this idea that if you do well, then that shows

you are a good, thriving individual and if you fail, well,

that's your own fault and you've brought it on yourself.

Self-help is very convenient for justifying inequality,

because inequality looks quite irrational, you know,

why should some people live incredible luxurious lives

while other people live in such abject poverty?

But if you say, "Ah, well, the people at the top deserve to be there,

"they work harder, they're more intelligent, they're brighter.

"The people at the bottom, on the other hand, they're stupid,

"they're feckless, they're lazy," that's a convenient way of saying

inequality is deserved.

MUSIC: Joy To The World

What you saw through the 19th century

was a notion of the deserving and the undeserving poor.

Collecting for the poor, both deserving and undeserving!

There were those who were wantonly unwilling to work and support

themselves and there were those who had fallen on hard times.

And charitable relief had to make a distinction

and a difference between the two types of poverty.

You have to decide whether to give money to the deserving poor,

the industrious workers, old people, orphans or the undeserving poor?

Gamblers, alcoholics, fallen women?

That sounds good.

Well, obviously, the deserving poor.

Deserving poor.

I think the deserving poor.

Deserving.

It's easy to laugh at Victorian censoriousness

and that vocabulary they developed.

But even now, if we're honest just for an instant,

when someone comes up to you on the street asking for money,

you think or part of you thinks, "Do they really deserve my compassion?"

-Why do you say that?

-Because it's basically their fault.

Do you feel sorry for these people at all?

Do you think we should help them?

What state they are in is their fault.

So it's this lot that you feel sorry for?

It's this lot that need it.

Do you think there are deserving and undeserving?

Yes, always. Yes.

The trouble with only helping the deserving, though,

is that it often implies not helping those in greatest need

because they might squander it.

It was a problem brilliantly satirized in the film

My Fair Lady, based on George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion.

Stanley Holloway expertly plays dustman Alfred Doolittle,

gloriously poking fun at Victorian pieties about the deserving poor.

I'm one of the undeserving poor, that's what I am.

Think of what that means to a man.

It means that he's up against

middle-class morality for all of time.

If there's anything going, and I puts in for a bit of it,

it's always the same story. You're undeserving, so you can't have it.

But my needs is as great as the most deserving widows that ever

got money out of six different charities in one

week for the death of the same husband.

I don't need less than a deserving man. I need more.

I don't eat less hearty than he does, and I drink, oh, a lot more.

I'm playing straight with you. I ain't pretending to be deserving.

No, I'm undeserving and I mean to go on being undeserving.

I like it and that's the truth!

The satire highlights how difficult these issues can be.

I'm going to a St Mungo's Shelter for the Homeless to hear

from some of those who have been on the receiving end of such attitudes.

I think sometimes poor people fall into two camps.

There's people that are really trying to get back into work

and they're just being squeezed so much, and there are people

that deliberately do want to live off benefits, unfortunately.

This sounds like the deserving and the undeserving poor to me.

Yeah, well you get people trying it on all over the place.

You know they don't have to be homeless to try it on.

This is true.

They might want a bit of crack or something like that.

I don't think it takes away from the fact that people need help.

I don't think anybody would have chosen to be homeless.

You know that's something that unfortunately life throws at you.

It's how you deal with it and that's the thing,

some people know how to deal with it and some people don't.

And the people that don't, fall into that spiral.

Some fall into drugs, some fall into alcohol, prostitution,

who knows, you know.

They've had a really hard life and for you to start saying

try and look over them, and lord it over them saying

you should do this, you should do that. How dare you.

I've been on the streets recently and I couldn't get a hostel place

because I'd been accused of an assault which was fabricated

and for a whole year and I had lung cancer at the time,

they wouldn't give me a hostel place

because the court case was pending and I was sleeping on a derelict

houseboat on the canal and then it went to court and the guy didn't

even turn up, and then within a couple of days I had a hostel place.

Was I deserving or undeserving? I don't know, you know.

I think a lot of people in modern Britain still have an inner

Bosanquet that wants to give the moral high ground to those

who work hard and those who play by the rules.

Yet they're less certain than she was that those who don't

survive, who can't thrive, are somehow immoral.

I don't think anyone deserves to be poor.

I probably veer more towards the deserving poor

but I also have sympathy for drunks and alcoholics etc.

I would absolutely give a pound to each.

It's impossible to determine whether someone's

conditions are a product of their own behaviour or as product of their

mental health or of the situation they've found themselves in.

Distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving was felt to

be problematic, even in the 19th century.

Late-Victorian society was deeply unequal.

Empire and industrialization had made Britain rich as never before,

but many of its population was still desperately poor.

And surely it made no sense to blame them.

That was the position advocated by Bosanquet's ideological adversary,

another forceful woman - Beatrice Webb.

Beatrice Webb was born into a life of luxury.

Her family owned several country houses

and she never learnt to boil an egg.

But she was deeply earnest.

She married socialist theorist Sidney Webb.

They spent their honeymoon working on a weighty history

of trade unionism.

Like Bosanquet, Webb wanted to investigate the underlying

causes of poverty.

She worked for the social reformer Charles Booth, who discovered in a

shocking survey that nearly a third of London's population were poor.

He sent Webb undercover...

..into one of the sweatshops in London's East End.

She assumed a false identity

and got herself hired as a trouser finisher.

But with her privileged and resolutely intellectual

upbringing, she was completely useless at the job.

She had to leave after four days to avoid being

unmasked as an impostor or fired as an incompetent.

Still, her experiences led her to observe that the poverty

she encountered could not be blamed on individuals.

It wasn't their fault they were poor, it was society's.

Beatrice Webb rejected the idea of trying to

distinguish between the undeserving and the deserving poor.

As far as she was concerned, there was

no room for morality in a discussion about unemployment.

She said, "Poverty is not due to a weakness of individual character

"but is a failure of social structure

"and economic mismanagement."

Charity and do-gooding could never be enough, thought Webb.

Instead, she believed the state should provide an array

of centralised services, from labour exchanges to old-age pensions.

As the 20th century began,

attitudes to the poor were becoming ever more polarized.

So what did the government decide to do?

What governments always do in the face of a controversial issue

that divides public opinion.

It set up an inquiry.

In 1905, a new Royal Commission on the Poor Laws was appointed,

just like Edwin Chadwick's over 70 years earlier.

This time, both Webb and Bosanquet were among the commissioners asked

to give their advice to government.

Thousands of visits and interviews were conducted

and nearly 50 volumes of evidence produced.

But Bosanquet and Webb could not agree.

For Helen Bosanquet, the origins of poverty were basically moral.

For Beatrice Webb, the origins of poverty were basically economic.

So differently did they see the issues that they published

two completely different reports,

with completely different recommendations for the government.

Bosanquet proposed an outdoor relief system mainly run

by private charity, which was thousands of volunteer social

workers descending upon the houses of the poor in order to help them

and train them out of poverty.

Webb, meanwhile, proposed a sort of prototype welfare state,

with separate government departments running education,

employment, health and pensions with a national minimum

of benefits available so that people could be kept out of poverty.

Bosanquet felt Webb was the thin end of the Communist wedge.

She sarcastically asked, "Will there will be a department for boiling

"kettles for old women, thus obviating the need for

"neighbourly kindliness?"

It was a philosophical battle between the mid-Victorian

vision of the night-watchman state, the minimal laissez faire,

let alone, stand on your own two feet, self-help state

and the much stronger vision for the later 19th century that both

local government and central government had a role to

play in helping the poor.

And people like Helen Bosanquet were adamantly opposed

because this would just create a culture...

A culture of dependency, we'd call it.

A culture of dependency where people wouldn't stand on their own

two feet, wouldn't look after their children.

And that's always been, I think, the battle in welfare thinking.

Faced with this battle, the government chose a third way.

They introduced a new National Insurance scheme,

aimed at helping workers who were temporarily unemployed.

The system, still with us today, was based on contribution.

If you pay in, you can get benefits when you are out of work.

And there were also the first non-contributory benefits,

including old-age pensions.

Deserving or undeserving, the state judged far less.

These new benefits were hailed as a breakthrough towards a new,

progressive and more democratic world.

But would the system cope in unknown economic circumstances?

Are there limits on how much we can spend on welfare?

Just 20 years after National Insurance was introduced,

the question of austerity cuts, so familiar today,

absolutely haunted a government in crisis.

The evening of August 23rd 1931, witnessed one of the most

significant peacetime Cabinet meetings in British history.

It was unseasonably chilly for the time of year,

matching the political mood in Number Ten.

As each of the ministers trudged up to the door heavy in heart,

they knew that the decision they were about to take would

shape Britain for the next decade.

The man at Number Ten was Ramsay MacDonald.

And his government was Labour, a young political party

voted into power by working-class men and women,

many with the vote for the first time.

But it was the worst possible moment for Labour to realise their dreams.

As the Great Depression set in,

the Bank of England warned that national bankruptcy was near.

Ramsay MacDonald looked round at his cabinet that evening

and told them there is no alternative.

It has to be austerity.

Drastically cutting assistance to the poor,

who were self-evidently the victims of economic

forces beyond their control, was, he acknowledged,

a negation of everything the Labour Party stood for.

But, he went on, he was absolutely satisfied

that it was necessary, in the national interest, to implement

these measures to secure the country.

The Cabinet now had to choose which side they were on.

For one of them, the decision would be particularly uncomfortable.

She had come an extraordinarily long way in a life of struggle.

A tough iron lady, known as Maggie.

Over 40 years earlier, at the age of just 14,

Margaret Bondfield had left her large, working-class

family in Somerset, to work as an apprentice shop girl in Brighton.

By saving carefully, in a few years she'd earned enough

to fund a move to London.

"For the next three months I was nearer to starvation

"than at any time since," she later wrote.

"I have taken the whole of Oxford Street,

"going into every shop on the chance that there might be a vacancy.

"I learnt the bitterness of a hopeless search for work."

Eventually Bondfield did find a job, but it was awful.

Fed up with long hours, poor pay and grim working conditions,

she joined the shop girls' trade union, the NAUSAWC, the

National Amalgamated Union for Shop Assistants, Warehouseman and Clerks,

and she committed herself to fighting for a better deal.

From here Bondfield's story transforms from one typical of

so many working-class women of the time, of the daily struggle

to make ends meet, to an absolutely extraordinary one.

With a ruthless determination she pursued her cause and rose through

the ranks, becoming the first woman to be elected to the TUC executive,

the first female chair of the TUC

and eventually one of the first three women MPs.

In 1926, Bondfield's high-flying career took her to

Wallsend in the industrial north-east,

where she hoped to gain her second parliamentary seat in a by-election.

As the election results were due to be announced,

everybody gravitated towards the town hall.

Margaret Bondfield posed for the cameras...

..before going in...

..and went upstairs to the balcony, where, with her rivals,

she waited for the results of the election.

The enormous crowd was thrilled to hear that she was to represent them.

As an open-top bus took her on a victory lap around town,

they cheered, "Maggie MP! Maggie MP! Maggie MP!"

So a lot of hopes were pinned on the new Labour MP.

Within months their faith would be tested.

Although in opposition, Bondfield was appointed to a committee

investigating the abuse of National Insurance benefits.

To reduce costs at a time of high unemployment,

a controversial test had been introduced.

Claimants had to prove that they weren't skiving.

You can imagine the indignation of people living in Wallsend

and places like it.

They'd already paid into the unemployment fund,

and now suddenly they had to prove that they were genuinely seeking

work, even though they knew perfectly well there was no work to be had.

It felt like another subjective moral

judgment on their character, a return to the Victorian

idea of deserving and undeserving poor all over again.

Assessors were sent in,

essentially snooping, asking people to report on their neighbours.

You could appeal to the umpire, very British idea, he'd insure

fair play, but in some areas up to a third of all claims were dismissed.

But Margaret Bondfield, surely, with her history and background

would be on the side of the hard up unemployed?

Her first instincts were to sympathise with

the plight of her constituents, but Bondfield was convinced that

when times were tight, compromises were necessary.

The committee recommended keeping the Genuinely Seeking Work Test

and cuts to unemployment benefit.

And Bondfield signed her agreement.

Bondfield's old supporters felt utterly betrayed.

She was speaking at the National Conference of Labour Women and she

was heckled.

"A women who has been a member of the working classes and

"has forgotten their struggle to make ends meet

"has betrayed the workers."

"Well, how would Mrs Bondfield like to live on eight shillings a week?"

"Our class has been let down by its own people."

But that was under a Tory government.

From 1929 Labour were in power

having promised to provide more generous benefits.

And Bondfield became Britain's first-ever woman in the cabinet,

as Minister for Labour.

I just want to say how awfully glad we are that we have a

woman in our second Labour government,

a woman who started life as a shop assistant and who is today

the first Privy Councillor, a woman Privy Councillor of this country.

But in power, it wasn't going to be easy.

Wall Street crashed, followed by a banking crisis, then economic slump.

Unemployment hit record levels.

The country was running out of money.

It seemed that the answer was massive further spending

cuts to the dole.

So here we are back where we started, at Ramsay MacDonald's crisis

Cabinet meeting in August 1931.

The first time a Labour government explicitly had to try

and square its ideals with the harsh realities of an austerity budget.

The Cabinet was split. Few could stomach the proposed cuts.

Which way would Maggie turn?

Bondfield, believing it to be in the national interest,

voted for the cuts.

For the shop girl made good it was career suicide.

Unable to agree, the government collapsed.

Bondfield lost her seat at the next election

and never returned to Parliament.

You have to sympathise with Margaret Bondfield.

I mean, that is the ultimate dilemma for a politician who seeks

power, gets into power and finds that the economy doesn't

allow you to make changes in the way that you would like to make them.

Because at the end of it all, you know, a government is

only as good as the economy allows it to be.

You can be as big-hearted as you like, you can

want to eliminate poverty, but people will only trust you to

do it if they also trust you with the public finances.

Despite her outstanding achievements,

Bondfield has largely been written out of history,

condemned by some as a class traitor.

Now, I'm here to try and find out if anyone still knows who this is.

No.

From Wallsend itself? Very good.

She was your MP. Not yours, I know you're younger than that.

Up to the '30s she was like the local heroine.

Her name was Margaret Bondfield.

Margaret Bondfield.

What about you?

-What does he think?

-That's a good smile. That's recognition!

I can't find anybody who remembers her.

So I'm going to give it to you.

The Margaret Bondfield story is rather sad in a sense

because it questions what happens at the outer limits of generosity.

What if there is no money left?

What if you have made a point of saying,

"This is the class I come from, I know these people are on the whole

"decent and deserving of support and there just isn't any money."

I mean, you know, what happens to governments

throughout history, presumably.

They hit a point where they have to make choices,

and those choices will be, "Who do I give this money to?"

And the only answer to that is, "I give it to the people

"who I think are the most deserving."

Even if you don't accept any of those categories, that's what

you end up doing.

Southwell, the quintessential Victorian workhouse, is now

almost 200 years old.

And today it's part of the heritage business.

This is one of the top items in the gift shop.

It's a bowl for putting your gruel in, but on the side of it

are printed all the options of what you could be.

Blameless and deserving.

Idle and profligate.

Or just old and infirm.

Anyway, for nine quid for a bowl,

you're not going to be poor if you're buying it.

Even after the arrival of the post-war welfare state,

with its principle of care from cradle to grave,

Southwell continued to play a role.

It was used to provide shelter for those in need well into the 1970s.

Whilst we've moved on since the days of Oliver Twist,

the dilemmas raised by the past are not remotely consigned to history.

No-one is seriously suggesting we bring back the workhouses.

But they are an extreme symbol of the contradictions

that are still inherent in our attitude to poverty.

We do want to be generous to the poor,

but not, I think, on any terms.

The vocabulary has changed, but the essential problem hasn't.

We want to give people a hand-up not a hand-out,

we want to help those who help themselves, we want to help

hard-working families, we don't want welfare, we want workfare.

It's always more or less the same attempt to find a balance.

Some solutions work, some don't work, and if history is

divided into the workers, those who tried to solve the problem,

and the shirkers, those who said, "Well, there is nothing

"we can do about it, that is just how it is,"

then I'm with the workers.