Abstract

This project seeks to understand the impact that state policies have on minorities, specifically the impact that the British State’s austerity policies have had on the framing of single mothers. In this project I argue that the rhetoric used by the British Parliament in its discussion of austerity policies contributed significantly to the stigmatisation of single mothers in British society. This paper employs a qualitative approach, and uses a discourse analysis of a section of the debate around the 2012 Welfare Reform Act to examine in depth the stigmatising rhetoric of the British Parliament. This project will build on theories of social reproduction during austerity as put forward by Hall (2023), to ground aspects of the research. This project concludes that the impact of British austerity policies on the framing of single mothers was to stigmatise single mothers, using rhetoric surrounding personal, moral, and financial irresponsibility, apathy towards work and so-called ‘benefit scrounging’.