'Reframing the poverty debate' the New Labour way

"Poverty is back on the agenda, but back on it in particular and very worrying ways. ... how poverty is defined, understood and talked about says much about the shape and nature of any policy and political response to it." Here, Mooney draws "attention to some of the ways in which the question of poverty is being reconstructed by New Labour and an assortment of journalists, academics and social and political commentators today." And rather than a "neo-liberal vision of social justice premised on a celebration of the market" advances "an entirely different conception and understanding of social justice that argues for social and economic equality through an attack on wealth and vested interests.

Urban nightmares and dystopias, or places of hope?

Addressing the spectre of the council estate, Mooney establishes that "there's no escaping that what we have ... is the continuing prevalence for a people and place stigmatisation that is shaped ... by decades of conservative thinking around poverty and disadvantage." Countering, that social housing provides a unique opportunity for building community

Stigmatising poverty? The ‘Broken Society’ and reflections on anti-welfarism in the UK today

In the context of deep economic and financial crisis, and amidst rising inequalities, blame for several of the main social problems affecting the contemporary UK is being apportioned to some of the most disadvantaged sections of society. This blaming is driven by a strong anti-welfarism that regards social welfare provision as among the key factors contributing to a social and moral crisis in the UK today. The media also plays a key role in producing and reproducing anti-poor and anti-welfare ways of thinking, sensationalising some of the more negative aspects of life in disadvantaged communities. This representation of people experiencing poverty serves to set them as a group apart from ‘normal’ and ‘mainstream’ society. Anti-poor narratives, together with media misrepresentations of poverty increasingly referred to as ‘poverty porn’, work to harden attitudes to social welfare in general and to people in poverty specifically

'We’ve never had it so good’:the ‘problem’ of the working class in devolved Scotland

Class has become the social condition that dare not it speak its name in the devolved Scotland. This is despite the persistence of marked class divisions and structured inequalities within contemporary Scottish society. We critically examine the most empirically sophisticated and coherent analysis of social class in Scotland – that provided by ‘the Edinburgh school’ of social scientists, particularly their claim that Scotland is now a prosperous, ‘professional society’ where only a small but significant minority are trapped in poverty. This paper further considers the extent to which ‘devolution’, and the dominant representations to which it has given rise, serve to generate a series of other myths in which class is both devalued but simultaneously mobilized in the negative portrayal of some of the most disadvantaged sections of the working class. Against an emerging, home-grown view of ‘New Scotland’ as a prosperous ‘Smart, Successful Scotland’, poverty and wealth inequalities continue to be a necessary feature of the division of labour. In Scotland, as elsewhere, class remains the pivot-point around which much of social policy is encoded and enacted

Urban 'disorders', 'problem places' and criminal justice in Scotland

[About the book] The existence of the separate criminal jurisdiction in Scotland is ignored by most criminological texts purporting to consider crime and criminal justice in 'Britain' or the 'UK'. This book offers a critically-informed analysis and understanding of crime and criminal justice in contemporary Scotland. It considers key areas of criminal justice policy making in Scotland; in particular the extent to which criminal justice in Scotland is increasingly divergent from other UK jurisdictions as well as pressures that may lead to convergences in particular areas, for instance, in relation to trends in youth justice and penal policy. The book considers the extent to which Scottish crime and criminal justice is being affected both by devolution as well as the wider pressures resulting from globalization, Europeanisation and new patterns of migration. While the book has a Scottish focus, it also offers new ways of thinking about criminal justice – relating these issues to wider social divisions and inequalities in contemporary Scottish and UK society. It extends the ‘gaze’ and analysis of criminology by exploring issues such as environmental crime, urban disorder and the new urbanism as well as crimes of the rich and powerful and corporate crime, giving it a relevance and resonance far beyond Scotland. Criminal Justice in Scotland will be an essential text for students in Scotland taking courses in criminology, sociology, social policy, social sciences, law and police sciences, as well as criminal justice practitioners and policy makers in Scotland. It will also be an essential source for students of comparative criminology elsewhere and academics wishing to take Scotland into account in thinking about criminal justice in the UK

Scotland and alternatives to neoliberalism

No abstract available