Between Horizontal Bridging and Vertical Governance: Pro-Beneficiary Movements in New Labour Britain

This chapter focuses on the mobilisation of two national movements in Britain, and in particular, on the web of ties forged by ‘altruist’ organisations that act ‘on behalf’ of the poor and weak. Research on mobilisation on behalf of the poor and weak has so far relied on relatively few empirical accounts that are informed by original comparative data (Giugni and Passy, 2001), and has received limited attention by scholars of social movements, where the tendency is to focus on collective action when the beneficiary of the political goal does not differ from the constituency group that mobilises. I start with the investigation of the main pro-beneficiary actors in two key fields of exclusion, namely, asylum and unemployment, and then analyse their horizontal networks amongst themselves and with civil society organisations in the public domain, and their vertical networks with policy-makers and institutional actors in the policy domain.