On Thursday evening I caught up with my old friends at BBC Radio Three with an interview on Free Thinking: how Channel Four’s (atrocious) Benefits Street has become the centrepiece for a battle over welfare payments and the (un)deserving poor. I followed a column by another former New Generation Thinker, the Oxford historian Jonathan Healey, who told us how these voyeuristic rogues galleries of the ‘idle poor’ go right back to the 16th century. You can listen to the show here: Jonathan and I get the last 15 minutes or so.
Academic and author
Philip Roscoe 