In April 1894, Sir William Harcourt, Liberal MP and Chancellor of the Exchequer, had a problem. For the tax year 1893–94, government tax revenue equalled £91,133,000. Government expenditure in the same period amounted to £91,303,000.[1] The deficit between income and expenditure totalled £170,000 and it the prospect was no rosier for the year ahead. Government accountants predicted that government revenue from taxation would be £90,956,000 for the 1894–95 tax year, while expenditure was projected to reach £95,458,000.[2] The government was therefore compelled to raise an extra £4,502,000. It fell to Harcourt to balance the books.[3]

Harcourt’s attempt to restore credibility to the nation’s finances garnered much criticism in the newspaper press. Satirists took aim at him as well, and in the Victorian era’s famous Punch magazine, in a poem by Edwin James Milliken titled ‘Bold Robin Hood: A Fytte of Foreste Finaunce’, Harcourt found himself represented as Robin Hood, taking from the wealthy to give to the poor. Yet this was not a positive appropriation of the Robin Hood principle. In Milliken’s poem, redistribution is presented not as justice but as something criminal. Milliken’s poem, through the adoption of a contrived Middle English, appropriates the authority of the older Robin Hood tradition to repudiate redistributive taxation. In doing so, the satire reveals how late-Victorian conservative satire could hollow out Robin Hood’s customary moral economy.

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Sir William Harcourt, MP, and the Liberal Budget of 1894

Harcourt’s plan to balance the nation’s finances came to fruition on Monday 16 April 1894. With the tax year having come to an end, Harcourt introduced a new budget to the House of Commons that would raise the much-needed £4,502,000. It would be funded with a combination of measures. The government would £2,123,000 from the sinking fund. Reforms to death duties and income tax were also on the horizon. These measures, combined with duties of 6d. on every barrel of beer and 6d. on every barrel of spirits would result in the government enjoying a revenue of £95,749,000, resulting in a comfortable surplus of £291,000.

Harcourt was a member of Lord Roseberry’s Liberal Government, who had taken the reins of government after the departure of William Ewart Gladstone in March 1894. This had been Gladstone’s fourth premiership and the party had, under Gladstone, increasingly turned away from laissez-faire social and economic policies in favour of a more interventionist approach. After the Second Reform Act of 1867, when many working-class householders received the right to vote, the Liberal Party the increasingly courted electorally significant working-class interest. The resulting “Liberal-Labour” coalition was broadly successful and in electoral terms and the obligation that Liberal governments faced towards their new constituent base resulted in the passage of several labour-friendly measures. Gladstone’s first government passed the Trade Union Act (1871) which allowed unions to hold strikes legally for the first time in history.[4] It was Gladstone’s party who were responsible for the passage of the Education Act (1870) which, while it did not mandate compulsory education for children, made provision for state-run primary education by establishing local education authorities who were permitted to use public funds to set up schools.

When Gladstone left politics and Lord Roseberry, governing from the House of Lords, became prime minister, Harcourt was left as the leader of Liberals in the Commons and in charge of the national budget. He was also, to use a modern term, one of the most left-wing members of the Liberal Party and fervently believed, when it came to improving life and extending political rights to the working classes, ‘the privileged order’ should ‘act with that prudent generosity which is the true secret of their strength’.[5] He also surmised that it made political sense to court the favour of the recently-enfranchised working-class householders, some of whom had gained the right to vote in 1867, with a further expansion to the electorate in 1884.[6]

Thus, amid the tax rises he proposed in 1894, Harcourt had to ensure that those on lower incomes did not see too much of their wages swallowed up by the state. Income tax was to rise by one penny in the pound, from 7d to 8d, but this increase was accompanied by more generous allowances for smaller earners. Under the proposed changes, those with incomes under £500 a year would be exempt on the first £200, while those earning under £400 would be exempt on the first £160. This was more generous than the existing system, under which incomes below £150 were wholly exempt, and those under £400 paid no tax on the first £120. In other words, the government intended to increase the overall burden of income tax while at the same time cushioning its effect on those least able to bear it.

Alongside these changes to income tax, Harcourt also proposed a major reform of death duties, designed to make them fall more evenly on real and personal property and, above all, to weigh more heavily on large fortunes. In future, there would effectively be two principal charges: an estate duty levied on the total capital value of the deceased’s property, rising in stages according to the size of the estate, and a succession duty paid by those who inherited, graded according to their relationship to the deceased. Smaller estates would continue to pay relatively little, but the rate would climb steadily for wealthier ones, reaching 8 per cent on estates of £1,000,000. In the case of land, payment could be made by instalments, although interest would be charged until the full amount had been paid. The purpose of these reforms was both fiscal and social: they were intended to increase revenue significantly while ensuring that the burden of taxation at death fell most heavily upon the owners of substantial property. Ultimately, the people who would have ‘suffered’ from the new graduated tax were already wealthy Victorians.

The budget caused a stir throughout the entire British Empire. Major newspapers in places as far afield as Australia and Canada (both at this point self-governing dominions) offered commentary on the unprecedented taxes on wealth. Even the former prime minister, Gladstone, found that he was unable to support his former chancellor’s measures and found himself questioning its morality.[7] Nevertheless, the budget carried, in large measure because Harcourt was able to win over the waverers in the House of Commons with his debating skills.

Robin Hood in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Satire

With such a transfer of wealth from the haves to the have-nots as a result of Harcourt’s budget, it is unsurprising that some journalists and satirists began to speak of Harcourt in the same breath as the medieval outlaw, Robin Hood.

The comparison of tax-raising and seemingly corrupt statesmen with robbers was hardly new in the late nineteenth century. In John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1727), the thief taker, Peachum—who represents the infamous real-life thief taker Jonathan Wild—scoffs that ‘the statesman because he’s so great, thinks his trade as honest as mine.’^[8] With Robin Hood being England’s most famous robber, it was only natural that comparisons were made between the medieval outlaw and those in power. As a mid-eighteenth-century writer in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1738 put it:

Had [Robin Hood] turn’d his head to politics, had he been placed in the finances, or promoted to the station of Paymaster, Receiver General, Treasurer […] and robb’d the Exchequer, as Falstaff says, with unwash’d hands; had he plunder’d the publick, in a civil employment, till he had been almost the only rich man in the kingdom, we may conclude from many passages of history that there would have been no signs of him at this day.[9]

In the eighteenth century, too, which was to some extent the golden age of English satire, Robin Hood was equated with the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, in two ballads: Robin Hood and the Duke of Lancaster (1727) and Little John’s Answer to Robin Hood and the Duke of Lancaster (1727). Both of these ballads have become part of the Robin Hood tradition owing to their inclusion in twentieth-century Robin Hood ballad anthologies and critical editions.

Echoing the sentiments of The Gentleman’s Magazine just shy of a century-and-a-half later, Punch published a little piece titled “Alderman Robin Hood, M.P.” which argued that

If Robin Hood had been alive at the present day, he would have lived in Sherwood Forest, but instead of sallying out at intervals and robbing castles, he would have acquired forest-land by various means, would have become Alderman of his Corporation, and a Member of Parliament for his County, and would have suggested and promoted railways through the forest to give a new value to his ‘eligible mansions’ and “semi-detached villas.”[10]

Punch appropriated the outlaw legend to mock politicians and their policies on several occasions. Tom Taylor published a short poem titled ‘The Knaves in Lincoln Green’ in 1863.[11] The poem was published to criticise Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the American Civil War (1861–65).[12] In Percival Leigh’s ‘The Railway Robin Hood and Little John’ (1868), the outlaw and his sidekick come to the realisation that highway robbery simply does not pay and that it would be better to become railway operators, make railway fares expensive, and legally steal from people.[13]

Punch and Victorian Print and Political Culture

Punch occupies a central place in Victorian print and political culture. Established by Henry Mayhew and Ebenezer Landells in 1841, Punch soon achieved a wide circulation, mainly amongst the middle and upper classes, and even Royalty were known to have read it.^[14] Intended as ‘a new work of wit and whim embellished with cuts and caricatures’, some of the Victorian era’s leading literary lights joined the Punch Brotherhood, including Douglas Jerrold (1803–57), John Leech (1817–64), and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63).

Thackeray, of course, is familiar to Robin Hood scholars for having produced his own humorous addition to the Robin Hood legend, Rebecca and Rowena (1850) under the pseudonym of M.A. Titmarsh. Intended as a parody on Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and the historical novel genre more generally, Thackeray’s novella sought to correct Scott’s original plot by having Ivanhoe marry Rebecca the Jewess, showing Richard the Lionheart up as a vain king to whom his subjects give hollow praise and durst not criticise. Finally, readers were presented with an aged and very fat Robin of Locksley who, having been pardoned by the king, became a most severe magistrate who was fond of sending prisoners to Botany Bay.

Thackeray was a liberal in politics, and a natural home for his irreverent satirical talents in the early Victorian era was Punch. The periodical began as liberal publication which echoed the sentiments of its founders, and early issues drew attention to the plight of the working classes. On 16 December 1843, for example, Punch printed Thomas Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’ which drew attention to poverty and deprivation experienced by poor seamstresses.[15] The periodical also supported the ‘moral force’ Chartist cause in its earlier years. As the years went by, it seemed that no member of the Victorian establishment, not even the royal family, were safe from the Punch Brotherhood’s pens. Politicians were fair game. The two who were mocked the most in the magazine’s late-Victorian years were Gladstone and his rival, Benjamin Disraeli (or ‘Dizzy’, as the periodical affectionately called him).[16]

By the 1880s, Punch’s satire had lost of some of its teeth, and the periodical that once supported Chartism was gone, replaced by a board that, while still liberal, was also content to accept knighthoods. The individual policies and personal foibles of politicians were still open to mockery, but there was little in the magazine that drew attention to poverty or echoed the spirit of Thomas Hood’s earlier ‘Song of the Shirt’. The magazine became, in effect, a drawing room publication filled with polite jokes such as George Du Maurier’s ‘Curate’s Egg’. Where politics appeared, it often sided with the middle and upper classes.

The Ballad of Sir Robin Hood Harcourt

Edwin James Milliken was responsible for that poem which now occupies our attention titled ‘Bold Robin Hood: A Fytte of Forest Finaunce’. The poem appeared in Punch on 5 May 1894, shortly after Harcourt announced his budget, and is one such example of the magazine siding with the wealthy over the poor.[17]

Born in Ireland in 1839, Milliken was firmly of the middle class. His profession, in the first part of his career, was described by one biographer as ‘a man of business’ in an engineering firm. Throughout his career as a businessman, however, he longed to be a literary man.[18] ‘Bold Robin Hood: A Fytte of Foreste Finaunce’ reveals that, whatever else he might have read in his quest to become a literary man, it is clear that he was familiar with medieval and early Robin Hood poems because the contrived Middle English that he presents in his ‘fytte of foreste finaunce’ mimics that found in the early poems. Milliken begins his poem with the following lines:

When limes beene greene, and laylocks bloom,
     And the blackbirde pipet cleare,
Men wot right well ’tis nigh the ende
     Of the financial yeare.

The words ‘beene greene’, and the reference to a bird, echoes the opening found in ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’:

Whan shaws beene sheene, and shradds full fayre,

And leaves both large and longe,

Itt’s merrye walkyng in the fayre forrest

     To hear the small birdes song.[19]

‘Merrye’ is another word that comes straight out of several of the older poems. The point need not be laboured. However, the resurrection of the Middle English language for this poem suggests, not only that Milliken did his homework, so to speak, but that he could rely on the fact that his audience would be somewhat familiar with the language as well. Certainly, by 1894, there was no shortage of reprinted editions of Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads (1795) available from British booksellers. Joseph Frank’s second edition of Ritson’s Robin Hood had been reprinted in 1884 by William C. Nimmo and again in 1885 by Routledge. By this time, too, Francis J. Child’s third volume of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads had been reprinted. Newspapers covered the proceedings of academic conference panels that focused on the outlaw’s legend.[20] Periodicals, even boys’ penny dreadfuls, either offered commentaries on the early ballads or reprinted them. In addition, new editions of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) were printed by many publishers at this time, too, with the aforementioned Nimmo producing a handsome one-volume set in the same year as their edition of Ritson’s Robin Hood.

Although Milliken left behind no letters or diaries, it might be inferred that his training as a businessman coloured his literary output. One of his most famous series of papers, which appeared in both the London Figaro and Punch, were the ‘Arry Papers (1874–97) and presented readers with a stereotype of a working-class man who is most unlikeable. One of the reasons why he is unlikeable is because ‘Arry is an obnoxious follower of ‘the army of King Demos, every day expanding, every day more objectionable in his insolent assurance’.[21] ‘King Demos’ was used to refer to the working classes or the people at large; the poet, Rudyard Kipling, used this term in one of his works, although it was used in a positive manner.[22] Its use by Milliken was not so positive, however, for in Milliken’s view only the obnoxious likes of ‘Arry follow the ‘army of King Demos’, which was likely a not-so-subtle jab to the recently-enfranchised working class.

Milliken begins his poem by tricking the reader with a quote from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Robin Hood play The Foresters (1892):

We robbed the lawyer who went against the law;

We spared the craftsman, chapman, all that live

By their own hands, the labourer, the poor priest;

We spoil’d the prior, friar, abbot, monk,

For playing upside down with Holy Writ;

Sell all thou hast and give it to the poor,

Take all they have and give it to thyself;

Then, after we have eased them of their coin,

It is our forest custom they should revel

Along with Robin.

The quote, which originally appeared in Act III of Tennyson’s play, would likely have led the reader to suppose that Milliken’s own poem was going to re-present the moral economy that is typically associated with the Robin Hood legend: social justice and redistribution. The first couple of lines, which echo the earlier Robin Hood poems, seem to promise a standard Robin Hood tale as well. After all, the ‘laylocks’ (an old northern country term for lilacs) are in bloom, which typically occurs in late April, so the reader is placed in a forest in the springtime.[23]

Yet readers were brought out of this reverie with a reminder that it is in fact the end of the tax year, and the shire’s officer ‘Makest last demaunde for taxes’. No one is spared from the sheriff’s requirement: both labourers and shopkeepers must give the officer of the shire all that he demands. But the shire’s officer in this case seems to be Robin himself, who represents Harcourt who is denounced as ‘the scourge of propertie’. It is Robin Hood Harcourt who appears next and commands his followers ‘buske ye, bowne ye’—words borrowed from ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’—to seek out ‘yond citizen plumpe’ who is travelling through the greenwood. The man who appears is a ‘merchaunte’ who is carrying gold and Robin demands money of him. The merchant, denounced as a ‘Mammonite’ by Robin Hood Harcourt, tells Robin that he has already given so much to the state and has little more to give as his ‘asking’ has already been so bad:

“Stand you still!” quoth bold Robin Hood,
     “Under this tree so greene;
And hande me straight that bagge of golde
     Whiche neath your cloke is seene!”

“Thou art a madman,” the Merchaunte said,
     “Woldest take my all for fee?
Seeing thy asking hath beene soe bad,
     Well graunted it shale not be.”

Sir Robin Hood Harcourt eventually overcomes the merchant but assures him that his taking of the gold is for ‘For the goode of thy poorer neighbours!’ After all, as Harcourt Hood reminds the merchant, ‘redistribution is not theft’ (and neither is it wrong to offer tax exemptions to the poor).

Milliken invites readers to reject, and mock, the traditional Robin Hood principle of stealing from the rich to give to the poor as Harcourt was attempting to do. The Victorian middle classes, as represented by the merchant, are nothing more than a ‘cash cow’ for the government when its ‘revenues be shorte and slacke, / And billes be large and longe’. Milliken’s joke depends upon a deliberate inversion: Robin Hood’s moral economy, traditionally associated with rough justice and relief of the poor, becomes absurd when translated into modern fiscal policy. The full-page illustration that accompanied this poem compounds this idea. The illustration shows a comic Robin Hood scene in a wooded setting. Sir William Harcourt is dressed as Robin Hood standing on the right and wears a feathered hat, short tunic, sword, and has a quiver of arrows on his back. In his hand he holds a small bag or pot labelled ‘TAXATION’. The figure on the left is “The Merchaunte”, presented as a wealthy medieval-style merchant on horseback. Sir Robin Hood Harcourt has stopped the merchant in the forest and justifying the extraction of money as charitable redistribution: “Nay, friend, ’tis no robbery! I do but ease you of this to relieve your poorer brethren!” In the image, then, the adage that ‘taxation is theft’ has come to life. The poem therefore anticipates, in embryonic form, later complaints about the ‘squeezed middle’: the notion that respectable, industrious, middling taxpayers are used as a fiscal reservoir for governments seeking to fund social obligations.[24]

Conclusion

Of course, whether readers agreed with Harcourt or with Milliken’s portrayal of him as Robin Hood we can never know. But in presenting Sir William Harcourt as a fiscal Robin Hood, Milliken’s ‘Bold Robin Hood’ does more than dress contemporary politics in medieval costume. It transforms the Robin Hood principle itself into an object of ridicule. The familiar moral economy of the outlaw tradition, in which wealth may be taken from the rich in order to relieve the poor, is here recast as coercion, cant, and fiscal opportunism. Harcourt’s graduated taxation becomes, in Punch’s hands, not an act of justice but a form of highway robbery. It is precisely this inversion that makes the poem significant.

‘Bold Robin Hood’ reveals how deeply embedded Robin Hood remained in late-Victorian political culture, and how readily the legend could be mobilised not only to endorse redistribution but to attack it. Milliken’s poem may sit outside the formal canon of Robin Hood balladry, but it belongs firmly within the broader history of the outlaw’s political afterlife: a moment in which Robin Hood’s moral economy was invoked only to be hollowed out, mocked, and turned against the poor in defence of property, respectability, and the anxieties of the taxed middle class.

Edwin James Milliken’s ‘Bold Robin Hood: A Fytte of Foreste Finaunce’, Punch, 5 May 1894

“We robbed the lawyer who went against the law;
We spared the craftsman, chapman, all that live
By their own hands, the labourer, the poor priest;
We spoil’d the prior, friar, abbot, monk,
For playing upside down with Holy Writ;
Sell all thou hast and give it to the poor,
Take all they have and give it to thyself;
Then, after we have eased them of their coin,
It is our forest custom they should revel
Along with Robin.”
—— Robin Hood in Tennyson’s “Foresters.”

When limes beene greene, and laylocks bloom,
     And the blackbirde pipet cleare,
Men wot right well ’tis nigh the ende
     Of the financial yeare.

Right then the shire’s officere
     Makest last demaunde for taxes,
And labourer or poor shopkeeper
     Must give him that he axees.

“Buske ye, bowne ye, my merry men all!”
     Quoth Robin, “and goe your wayes.
But I’ll go seeke yond citizen plumpe,
     In greenwood where he strays.”

And when he came to the merry greenwood,
     Bold Robin was aware
Of a Marchaunte rich, who forth y-rode
     All on a palfrey fayre.

“Stand you still!” quoth bold Robin Hood,
     “Under this tree so greene;
And hande me straight that bagge of golde
     Whiche neath your cloke is seene!”

“Thou art a madman,” the Merchaunte said,
     “Woldest take my all for fee?
Seeing thy asking hath beene soe bad,
     Well graunted it shale not be.”

Then Robin bent up his long bende-bowe,
     And fettled him for to shoote;
And the Merchaunte dragged forth a bagge of golde,
     Shaking from head to foote.

“Woe worth thee, woe worth thee, thou wicked knave,
     That ought to hang on a tree!
For now this day thou arte my bale,
     My boote when thou shold be.”

“I am wilfull of my way,” quo’ Robin,
     “As all good Chauncellors be;
But tell me, thou man of wealth and pride,
     Why I should favour thee!”

“Without such covetous carles as thou
     The greene earth shold be Heaven.
Helle were it but for Robin Hood
     To pulle things straighte and even.

“My dwelling is in this wood,” sayes Robin.
     “By thee I set right nought.
I am Robin Hood, all of Malkwood fayre,
     And to mulct thee I long have sought.”

“There thou speakest soothe,” the Merchaunte cried,
     “Thou scourge of Propertie!
But the thing thou dubbest ‘Graduation,’
     Is highway robberie!”

“Robberie?” quoth bold Robin Hood.
     “Nay, that’s a slanderous statement.
Redistribution it is not Theft,
     Nor Exemption, nor Abatement.

“I robbe thee not, thou Mammonite!
     The aim of all my labours
Is—to ease thee of superfluous wealth
     For the goode of thy poorer neighbours!”

“Oh, when revenues be shorte and slacke,
     And billes be large and longe,
’Tis merrye musing in the New Forest,
     How to mulct the riche and stronge!”

[1] ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 21 April 1894, p. 1.

[2] According to the National Archives’ Old Currency Converter, this amount in 2020 would be £7,832,262,079.40.

[3] Records of the parliamentary speeches and debates pertaining to this issue can be found in the following place: Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, April-June 1894, and Printed Copies of Budget Speeches, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Harcourt 194.

[4] An Act to amend the Law relating to Trades Unions (1871). 34 & 35 Victoria, c. 31

[5] Patrick Jackson, Harcourt and Son: A Political Biography of Sir William Harcourt, 1827–1904 ((Madison:  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), p. 27. See also Ian Machin, ‘Harcourt, Sir William’, Journal of Liberal History https://liberalhistory.org.uk/history/harcourt-sir-william/ [accessed 11 April 2026].

[6] Alfred George Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1923), II, p. 285.

[7] William Ewart Gladstone, Autobiographica, ed. by John Brooke and Mary Sorenson, The Prime Ministers’ Papers, vol. I (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1971), pp. 165–66.

[8] John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera. As it is Acted at the Theatre Royal in Lincolns-Inn Fields, 3^rd edn (London: John Watts, 1729), p. 1.

[9] ‘Bravery: The Characteristic of an Englishman’, The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, 8 (1738), p. 300.

[10] ‘Alderman Robin Hood, M.P.’, Punch, 19 March (1881), p. 122.

[11] Tom Taylor, ‘The Knaves in Lincoln-Green’, Punch, 28 February 1863, p. 89

[12] Stephen Basdeo, ‘The Changing Faces of Robin Hood, c.1700–c.1900: Rethinking Gentrification in the Post-Medieval Tradition’, (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leeds, 2017), p. 58.

[13] Percival Leigh, ‘The Railway Robin Hood and Little John’, Punch, 26 September 1868, p. 129.

[14] Richard Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851 (Ohio State University Press, 1997), p. 17.

[15] Thomas Hood, ‘The Song of the Shirt (Punch, 16 December 1843)’, in Adventures in English Literature, ed. by R.B. Inglis (Toronto: W. J. Gage, 1952), pp. 436–7.

[16] John Tenniel, ‘Dizzy wins with Reform Bill’, Punch, 25 May 1867, p. 3.

[17] Edwin James Milliken, ‘Bold Robin Hood: A Fytte of Forest Finaunce’, Punch, 5 May 1894, p. 210.

[18] M.H. Spielman, The History of Punch (London: Cassell, 1895), p. 379.

[19] ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’, in Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, 2 vols (London: T. Egerton and J. Johnson, 1795), I, p. 115.

[20] Stephen Basdeo, ‘Victorian-Era Robin Hood Conferences’, Reynolds’s News and Miscellany, 12 December 2021, https://reynolds-news.com/2021/12/12/victorian-robin-hood-conferences-stephen-basdeo/ [accessed 25 April 2026].

[21] Spielman, The History of Punch, p. 379.

[22] John Lee, ‘King Demos and His Laureate: Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” Transatlanticism, and the Newspaper Poem’, Media History, 20 (2014), pp. 51–66 (p. 63).

[23] ‘When Do Lilacs Bloom and How Long Do They Last?’ Biology Insights, 17 January 2026, https://biologyinsights.com/when-do-lilacs-bloom-and-how-long-do-they-last/ [accessed 25 April 2026].

[24] Stewart Lansley, ‘The ‘squeezed middle’ and the ‘poor’, PSE: Poverty and Social Exclusion: Defining, measuring, and tackling poverty, 18 January 2011, https://www.poverty.ac.uk/articles-inequality-income-distribution-economic-policy-living-standards [accessed 25 April 2024].