This adaptation of the traditional English folk song, originally entitled ‘The jovial beggar’, mischievously conflates the myth that begging is a time-honoured ‘profession’ with the reality that the existence of contemporary begging signals a failure of the welfare state. The beggar has always been an ambiguous figure (see Chapter Three in this volume): an ascetic pilgrim or a lawless wanderer; a deserving object of pity or an undeserving scrounger; a hapless victim of welfare retrenchment or a venal representative of an emergent modern underclass. In Britain, neoliberal economics and welfare retrenchment in the Thatcherite era were inclined (if they were not contrived) to drive more people into begging, while the social democratic instincts of old Labour deplored this process and sympathised with its victims. In the political discourse of the 1990s, however, a new consensus has been born. The beggar is no longer either quaint or pitiable, but is universally reviled.

The seeds of this consensus were sown by Margaret Thatcher's successor as Conservative Prime Minister, John Major. In 1994 Major condemned begging, describing it as an ‘eyesore’: “There is no justification for it these days. It is a very offensive problem to many people” (The Guardian, 28 May 1994). The following September, New Labour's Shadow Home Secretary similarly spoke out, but more specifically against the “winos, addicts and squeegee merchants … whose aggressive begging affronts and sometimes threatens decent compassionate citizens” (Times, 6 September 1995). Then, just a few months before his 1997 General Election victory, Labour Leader Tony Blair, in an interview for The Big Issue (ironically, a magazine produced for homeless people to sell as an alternative to begging), announced his support for New York style ‘zero-tolerance’ policing, which would sweep petty offenders, including beggars, from the streets. Referring to the King's Cross area in London, where such an approach had already been tried on an experimental basis (see Fooks and Pantazis, 1999 and Chapter Thirteen in this volume), Blair claimed that he found the area – with its reputation for drug-dealing, prostitution and begging – “actually quite a frightening place.