Desmond King, Actively Seeking Work? The Politics of Unemployment and Welfare Policy in the United States and Great Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, £39.95, paper $14.25, xvi1331 pp.

Robert MacDonald (ed.), Youth, the ‘Underclass’ and Social Exclusion, London: Routledge, 1997, paper £13.99, xii1228 pp.

Both of these books deal with issues central to the programme of ‘New Labour’. In their very different ways they have significant contributions to make to the current debate (such as it is!) about welfare to work. MacDonald's collection takes us into the territory of the intellectual debates around the ‘underclass’ that underpin ‘New Labour's’ moral panic about welfare dependency and their crudely Protestant worship of ‘waged labour’ at any price. King's book is different, focusing quite specifically on work-welfare policies in Britain and the U.S. from the 1900s to the 1990s, immediately prior to the dawn of ‘New Labour’.