Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/21688
Title: A British national scandal: hunger, foodbanks, and the deployment of a Dickensian trope
Authors: Howarth, A
Keywords: hunger;foodbanks;welfare state;social imaginaries
Issue Date: 20-Oct-2020
Publisher: Routledge (Taylor and Francis Group)
Citation: Howarth, A. (2022) 'A British national scandal: hunger, foodbanks, and the deployment of a Dickensian trope', Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 30 (1), pp. 136 - 150. doi: 10.1080/14782804.2020.1839395.
Abstract: The normalization of foodbanks in Britain has sharply polarized public debates around issues of hunger. Government supporters laud their presence as a timely revival of an earlier tradition of voluntarism able to offset an unaffordable welfare state or stigmatize foodbanks as new spaces of ‘dependency’. Government critics view foodbanks as a consequence of ministerial indifference to growing hunger and a betrayal of the core values envisaged by the founders of the welfare state. The very presence of foodbanks in one of the richest countries in the world is denounced as a national scandal that violates an intrinsic quality of Britishness and signifies a regression to an earlier, more heartless era. In mooting this argument, critics have deployed a Victorian trope that evokes familiar figures and narratives from popular culture in a circular social imaginary of ‘what we were’ in the Victorian era as distinct from ‘what we have been’ in the post-war welfare state to ‘what we are reverting to’ now. The paper critically deconstructs the trope as a device to hold the government to account while also critiquing its nostalgia rooted in a mythic notion of the welfare state which was never as inclusive as popular imagining would believe.
Description: This article is part of a special issue: Counter-Narratives of Europe: edited by Richard McMahon and Wolfram Kaiser.
URI: https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/21688
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2020.1839395
ISSN: 1478-2804
Appears in Collections:Brunel Law School Research Papers

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