Introduction

Concepts such as ‘troubled families’ are, of course, nothing new. The idea of a group of families, or a class of people, cut adrift at the bottom of society, exhibiting different cultural values and representing a threat to the ‘mainstream’, has ‘a long and undistinguished pedigree’ (Macnicol, 1987: 315). By way of example, in 1816, the Committee for Investigating the Causes of the Alarming Increase in Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis (1816: 10) suggested that the ‘principal causes’ of the boys’ ‘dreadful practices’ were:

• • The improper conduct of parents

• • The want of education

• • The want of suitable employment

• • The violation of the Sabbath, and habits of gambling in the streets.

It has also been claimed that ever since ‘the happy sixteenth-century custom of chopping off the ears of vagabonds, rogues and sturdy beggars, the British have had some difficulty in distinguishing poverty from crime’ (Golding and Middleton, 1982: 186). Cameron's conflation of ‘families with multiple disadvantages’ and ‘neighbours from hell’ highlights the enduring similarities between different reconstructions of the ‘underclass’ thesis. With his (Cameron, 2011b) announcement at the launch of the Troubled Families Programme that ‘troubled families’ were characterised by anti-social behaviour (ASB), poor school attendance or educational exclusion and ‘worklessness’, he revealed the lack of progress that has been made in both analysing the ‘problem’ and identifying a solution to it. However, while throughout history the ‘ragged classes’ have often been conflated with ‘dangerous classes’ (Himmelfarb, 1984: 381; Morris, 1994), there also exists an extensive history of attempts to delineate different types of poor people. Early Poor Laws in England included attempts to distinguish between ‘vagrants’ and the ‘impotent poor’ and the Poor Law of 1834 included an official distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. In 1852, Mary Carpenter argued that there existed ‘a very strong line of demarcation which exists between the labouring and the “ragged” class, a line of demarcation not drawn by actual poverty’ (in Himmelfarb, 1984: 378).