The limits of the welfare state are evident in the experiences of Black people, whom Britain has, for centuries, treated as expendable, except inasmuch as they enrich the state and serve white citizens. In other words, there are the deserving and undeserving poor. The difference was enshrined in the Act for the Relief of the Poor of 1601, which defined the deserving poor as unable to work to provide for themselves: young children without parents, the elderly, people with physical (and, presumably, visible) disabilities. Those who were considered able to work were denied financial assistance. The same year, Elizabeth I issued an order to round up and deport Africans and those descended from Africans, on the grounds that they had “crept into” her realm and were consuming “the Relief” that rightfully belonged to her subjects, to their “great annoyance.” The origin of state relief coincided with the determination that Black people in poverty must not receive the sovereign’s provisions, however paltry.
The Elizabethan Poor Law remained unaltered until the 1830s, when reformers on both sides referred to the Black slave as an analogue for the illegitimate beneficiary of the state’s largesse, as Robbie Shilliam observes in Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (2018). In 1942, the economist William Beveridge perpetuated the same logic in “Social Insurance and Allied Services,” which came to be known as the Beveridge Report and was the basis of the Labour Party’s welfare program. The report outlined “a comprehensive policy of social progress” geared toward Britain’s “reconstruction” following World War II. In reality, though, Beveridge’s proposal was not an eternal contract between subject-citizens and the state but a short-term plan to rebuild the white labor force. Beveridge advocated for the “defeat” of “want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness,” as well as the preservation of the skewed dynamic between the ruling class and the rest.
