Introduction

Continuities between the cycle speech, the Research Programme, and current policy can be explored in relation to government initiatives on social exclusion and child poverty. How far do these illustrate links between the policies endorsed by New Labour, and the earlier cycle of deprivation hypothesis? Alan Deacon (2003) has suggested that New Labour has been concerned to strike a balance between responsibility and opportunity. Its policy on child poverty provides a good example of the ‘third way’ on welfare. Thus the ending of child poverty is often presented less as an objective in itself, and more as a means of reducing inequalities in opportunity. The emphasis that people should take up the opportunities that are offered has led New Labour to revisit earlier debates, including the Research Programme. Deacon concludes that New Labour's interpretation of the cycle of disadvantage does recognise the significance of structural factors, and in general its rhetoric is closer to an adaptive explanation. However, its emphasis that people should take full advantage of the opportunities that are created also reflects elements of the rational, permissive, and cultural explanations. Thus New Labour seeks both to ‘level the playing field’ and to ‘activate the players’ (Deacon, 2003, pp 123-37). Other work has explored policy developments against the historical backdrop of area initiatives in the US and the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, and looked at New Labour and Croslandite conceptions of equality in historical perspective (Alcock, 2005; Meredith, 2006).

In this chapter, we focus on the way that New Labour has chosen to tackle social exclusion and child poverty from its election in May 1997, relating this to CASE research and to work on poverty dynamics, and looking in particular at the Sure Start initiative. It is argued that these, along with the focus on transmission mechanisms and intergenerational continuities, point to marked continuities with the 1970s’ debate over transmitted deprivation. Moreover, the chapter also looks at other pressures, most notably those around antisocial behaviour, and at Blair's JRF speech on social exclusion on 5 September 2006. The argument of the chapter is that New Labour started out with a focus on social exclusion; Blair's Beveridge Lecture on child poverty came out of the blue; the government has increasingly been drawn into debates about antisocial behaviour; and new initiatives on social exclusion mean that the continuities with transmitted deprivation are now much stronger than ever before.