This podcast provides Some basic left wing analysis of the likely effects of the recent Tory Benefit cuts – from the web site –

‘The changes to housing benefit include a 10% cut for those out of work for more than a year and an overall cap of £250 a week for a one-bedroom property, rising to £400 a week for a four-bedroom or larger home.Critics say the coalition’s housing benefit cuts will displace 200,000 people from Britain’s major metropolitan areas, ghettoising the poor.’

This is potentially relevant to the A2 module in Crime and Deviance

This effect will of course be generalised across other regions – rich and poor neighbourhoods will become ever more polarised – so on the one hand we see here a likely intensification of ‘sink housing estates’ that, according to both and Right and Left Realist criminology, create the conditions for crime and on the other hand we should also see a longer term increase in gated high security communities – maybe even the emergence of Bauman’s ‘Fortress Cities’ – as those that can afford it strive to protect themselves from the dangerous poor, desperate people living in ghettos.

Thanks Giddeon!

Interestingly in John Heale’s book one blood he argues that most of the of the present gang crime problem emerged in inner city ghettos that were cuased by Thatcher’s neo – liberal policies of the 1980s causing greater inequalities.