The whole idea of deserving and undeserving poor stretches back to the poor laws before the foundation of the welfare state in the UK, the boards of guardians in the old parish system used to determine who was deserving and undeserving and even those deserving of "poor relief" could expect a pretty punitive version of welfare, ie spend time on a treadmill, unpicking massive pieces of rope only to reassemble them, given a box much like a coffin to sleep in which was deliberately too narrow or too short, often both, so as to prevent their taking up the relief of poverty for very long in any case.
A lot of it was in reaction to the Speelhamland system, which was a kind of universal benefit, which early propagandists suggested just made its recipients idlers and rioters who spent time drinking gin all day and ate their children and all sorts of BS.
Its a idea I despise, along with "less eligibility", "the poor are too many", "perishers" and "vagrancy", the immigration of its day (across parish boundaries) all those mindsets allowed the Irish famine to happen and fostered absentee land lordism, in time they translated into the later "useless eaters" idea that the Nazis used to popularize euthanasia, abortion, eventually genocide. I think every few years it gets revived or reborn, the so called "welfare queen" idea or the "breeders" idea are versions of it.
