The New Right are a group of sociologists and politicians who value individuals taking responsibility for their own welfare, and who are against the state interfering in welfare. You will remember them from the first unit on Families & Households, and should try to make links with those ideas if you can. Although definitely not New Right (he died over a hundred years ago!) a good place to start is with Herbert Spencer, a Victorian sociologist who said that the poor were to blame for their own problems. Poverty was an individual issue, a matter of "poor character", or "poor moral fibre". Although there are the "deserving poor" who should be helped because they have fallen into poverty through no fault of their own (widows, orphans, war-wounded, etc), the "undeserving poor" have fallen below the poverty line because of their individual laziness and lack of talent. This relates to the idea of meritocracy: the able and hard-working rise to the top of society, whereas the idle and less able sink to the bottom. This is a conservative or right-wing argument, because it says that the state does not need to help those in poverty.

This individualistic approach is continued in the modern New Right. Murray, for example, tends to blame the poor for their condition. He says that there is an underclass or "new rabble" of people who do not take responsibility for their lives - they expect the state to sort their problems out. This underclass is prone to single parenthood, violent crime, and welfare dependency (living off benefits).

Marsland is another New Right thinker who echoes this. He says that the generosity of the welfare state has created a culture of dependency which destroys individual initiative and pride. Universal benefits (the ones that go to everyone, regardless of need - Child Benefit, Education, the NHS) are particularly damaging. They should be replaced by selective benefits, which are targetted on the really needy cases.

Critics of this idea argue that selective benefits require a "means test" (i.e. a test to see if people are really in need) which is costly, stigmatising, and leads to the poorest people going without because they are ignorant of their rights, or too proud to claim.

So the New Right say that poverty is usually the fault of the individual, and society should not provide welfare for the poor because it only makes things worse.

This has features in common with the New Right. You will remember that the culture of a society or group is the set of norms, values, and attitudes which it possesses and lives by. This theory says that "the poor" constitute a subculture who have different norms and values from the rest of society, and this subculture keeps them in poverty.

Oscar Lewis is the main theorist here. He studied poor communities in Mexico and Puerto Rica, and found that they had a "design for living" which kept them poor. Their culture was passed from generation to generation (i.e. was intergenerational) and included features such as

• Apathy (they can't be bothered to exert themselves)
• Fatalism (they think that they can't affect their lives: "what will be will be".)
• Immediate gratification (they can't delay their gratification or happiness - they will rather spend than save, get drunk rather than wait till friday, and sleep rather than go out to work).