The Western welfare state model is beset with structural, financial, and moral crises. So-called scroungers, cheats, and disability fakers persistently occupy the centre of public policy discussions, even as official statistics suggest that relatively small amounts of money are lost to such schemes.
In Fraudulent Lives Steven King focuses on the British case in the first ever long-term analysis of the scale, meaning, and consequences of welfare fraud in Western nations. King argues that an expectation of dishonesty on the part of claimants was written into the basic fabric of the founding statutes of the British welfare state in 1601, and that nothing has subsequently changed. Efforts throughout history to detect and punish fraud have been superficial at best because, he argues, it has never been in the interests of the three main stakeholders – claimants, the general public, and officials and policymakers – to eliminate it.
Tracing a substantial underbelly of fraud from the seventeenth century to today, King finds remarkable continuities and historical parallels in public attitudes towards the honesty of welfare recipients – patterns that hold true across Western welfare states.
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Table of Contents
- Cover 1
- Fraudulent Lives 2
- Title 4
- Copyright 5
- CONTENTS 6
- Figures 8
- Preface 10
- Acknowledgements 20
- Conventions 22
- Abbreviations 24
- PART ONE . FRAMEWORKS 26
- 1 Fraud, Fraudsters, and Doubt 28
- 2 Finding and Doing 45
- PART TWO . HONESTY AND DISHONESTY 64
- 3 Cheating by Intent 66
- 4 Cheating by Association 94
- 5 Cheating by Definition and Redefinition 121
- 6 Cheating by Accident 146
- PART THREE . REACTING 170
- 7 To Tell or Not to Tell? 172
- 8 To Seek or Not to Seek? 193
- 9 To Find or Not to Find? 218
- PART FOUR . LANDSCAPES OF CHEATING 242
- 10 In Whose Interests? Cheating, Residuality, and the Meaning of Welfare 244
- 11 The Future Welfare Citizen 263
- Notes 288
- Bibliography 328
- Index 364
