Poverty and Social Exclusion

This chapter examines the idea of social exclusion in relation to the poverty debate in the United Kingdom. Both the British Government and the European Union see poverty in terms of exclusion, and social theorists on the left, particularly those attached to the Child Poverty Action Group, have characterised poverty as social exclusion since the 1980s. The chapter discusses two political senses of social exclusion and inclusion, a radical sense and a conservative sense. The radical understanding of exclusion holds that people are prevented from participating in their own community through poverty and other factors, and inclusion therefore means empowering people to be active members of that community. The conservative understanding sees exclusion as the loss of status in a social hierarchy, and inclusion as the insertion of people back into that social order. There is a danger attached to the wide sense of social exclusion with its appeal to the idea of citizenship.