Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Steven King, "Fraudulent Lives: Imagining Welfare Cheats from the Poor Law to the Present" (McGill Queen's UP, 2024)
Description: 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: Imagining Welfare Cheats from the Poor Law to the Present (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024) Dr. 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 wa...