Today some hold a view that the past's "deserving poor" have been replaced by families living in council houses equipped with flat-screen TVs, games consoles and regular holidays.
Speaking at the launch of the coalition's mid-term review, Mr Clegg said it was not helpful to "portray" proposed changes to the welfare system as pitting "the deservingpoor against the undeserving poor and the in-work against the out-of-work".
But this is also the chancellor who courts private financiers to build public infrastructure, who stuck to the Tories' tight spending plans in his first two years in office, and who fiddles and fusses with the tax and benefit systems to ensure money goes to the deserving, not the idle, poor.