Scroungers, spongers, parasite: these are just some of the terms that are often used to describe the most vulnerable in our society, whether they be sick, disabled, or unemployed. This discourse is propagated by the tabloid press, with scare stories spread and reinforced by social media. In his new book "Scroungers" (Zed), James Morrison, reader in journalism at Robert Gordon University and a former staff reporter, explores and analyses the way in which the poor are portrayed in print and online. Here, he discusses his arguments.
What drew you to this subject matter?
As a researcher, and also an ex-journalist, I’ve long been concerned about the simplistic and often demonising ways in which certain groups – immigrants, some minorities and people living on social security – are routinely represented in political discourse and the news media, especially newspapers, and how these myths and prejudices seep into people’s day-to-day conversations and assumptions. From around 2010 I became a much more research-active academic, as I studied for my PhD. My thesis focused on how children and young people are contradictorily framed in the media, and wider popular discourse, as both vulnerable and threatening, and it took me into the realms of moral panic theory and what other, more esteemed, academics define as the "sociology of hate". In analysing media texts and carrying out focus-groups with parents and grandparents, as well as interviewing journalists, I noted a strong "us and them" dimension to many present-day conceptions of "good" and "bad" children, which was even more social class-orientated than I’d expected. A key book I read around this time was Images of Welfare, by Peter Golding and Sue Middleton. Though published in 1982, and focusing squarely on media-political portrayals of benefit recipients rather than children and young people, it encapsulated much of what I was seeing, and used the moral panic paradigm to explore both the "here and now" of societal attitudes to poverty and the long-term evolution of historical distinctions between "deserving" and "undeserving poor". This left me determined to examine the stigmatisation of low-income households in more detail for my next big project. This was strengthened by my growing disgust at the way in which, around the same time, coalition ministers like George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith were gleefully resurrecting the concept of "scroungers" – reconceived as "shirkers" - to justify their welfare reform policies and ruthless benefit cuts - the impact of which we’re only finally recognising now, with the normalisation of food banks and resurgent street homelessness.
There’s also a more prosaic explanation for my interest in this subject. I have a fair bit of past experience of serious financial hardship associated with living on benefits. My father lost his job in his early 50s, when I was a teenager, and we spent a number of years on income support and other benefits, narrowly dodging having our home repossessed, as he struggled to find work in a deep recession. This was at a time when taking even a low-paid job would have led to the immediate loss of any state support, as there were no tax credits or minimum wage. Though he eventually found work, this was low-paid overnight shifts as a security guard – a world away from his old civil service job. He and my mum, who works in a care home, struggled for many more years. I remember being picked on at school because other kids knew we had no money and were on benefits. It’s hard to forget hearing your parents called names when you knew how hard they were trying to provide for you and your brother.
How would you define the “scroungers” of your title? Which groups come under this banner?
I chose the term "scroungers" for the title because, as the book’s analysis of newspaper coverage and social media posts confirms, it remains the default pejorative term for describing benefit recipients in today’s Britain. Whether people get support because they have a long-term health condition or disability or have lost their jobs, or are even in low-paid work, the revelation that they are "on benefits" seems to bring out our worst, most judgemental prejudices. The material I analysed shows that any or all of these disparate groups can be casually conflated under the banner – or, in recent years, cast as "shirkers" or "skivers". That said, in my media analysis, I do try to break down the articles that I would say adopt an anti-scrounger discourse into various sub-categories, to illustrate the fact there are different sub-groups – for instance, "benefit cheats" (people accused of faking illness to avoid work) and "benefit tourists", which of course is a category that allows the twin folk-devils of claimants and immigrants to be conveniently demonised together!
What impact does the popular portrayal of a stigmatised group have?
Potentially a very negative impact – and one that can fuel ignorance and prejudice in insidious ways. I am no psychologist, but there have been many persuasive media-sociological studies to demonstrate how continual repetition and reinforcement of stigmatising, othering language and imagery targeted at specific groups can help shape, or at least reinforce, negative popular perceptions. This is especially true, I’d argue, in relation to groups with whom most of us have little direct contact, but whom we recognise, or think we recognise, as we pass them in the street – groups to which I refer in the book as "familiar strangers". At its worst, blanket framing of a group in a particular way – by media and politicians, and in popular culture – can fuel contempt and, yes, hatred.
You write that the construction of scroungers in our society has been “deliberate and calculated”. Could you explain?
The immediate backdrop to my research was the ongoing austerity years and, specifically, the determination of first the coalition then David Cameron’s short-lived Conservative-only government to cut billions of pounds from what they dubbed the "welfare budget". In truth this was a social security budget, the bulk of which is paid to older people, through pensions, Cold Weather Payments etc. In the various policy documents, political speeches and reported quotes from ministers that I analysed I found evidence of a discourse of blame and stigmatisation directed at benefit claimants – particularly the unemployed – that I’d describe as deliberate and calculated. Pat phrases like "something for nothing" were repeatedly trotted out to characterise such people, in opposition to "hard-working households". Osborne gave the most explicit vent to this with a malicious Tory conference speech in which he pitted the "early morning shift-worker" against the neighbour supposedly "sleeping off a life on benefits". Ministers may have been careful not to directly use words like "scroungers" – though Cameron certainly used the term "shirkers", at least once, at Prime Minister’s Questions – but the framing was definitely there. It’s a little coincidental, don’t you think, to be so relentlessly mobilising these tropes in public debate at a time when you are simultaneously trying to build public support for huge cuts to benefits, such as the household benefit cap, year-on-year freezes and the bedroom tax – under the all-excusing smoke-screen of "welfare reform"?
What purpose does it serve to stigmatise “the poor”? For who?
The coalition argued, as have the Tories since, that austerity was a necessary, pragmatic project, not an ideological one: that it was about cutting the deficit and "living within our means", rather than targeting the poor or other vulnerable groups. Based on this priority alone, ministers have sought to justify their assault on social security purely on the basis that it costs more than other areas of government. Yet, in targeting it, they explicitly and repeatedly singled out the unemployed and a supposed wider rump of people content to play the system, by feigning disability – the "work-shy" – as both synonymous with the term "welfare" and the biggest exploiters of state largesse. Stigmatising the poor, assisted by a largely uncritical and complicit media, can therefore be a useful propaganda tool in trying to justify and win active support for the uncaring and punitive policies we’ve seen pursued in recent years.
Are Britain’s newspapers dominated by a particular political perspective? What impact does that have on wider discourse?
Yes, British newspapers overall are undoubtedly skewed towards "small-c", if not "big-C", conservativism. In the nationals’ case, we know most papers – The Times, Sun, Mail and Telegraph titles – have avowedly right-wing, free-market owners, from Rupert Murdoch to Lord Rothermere to the Barclay Brothers. While owners consistently claim to leave editorial control to their editors, and editors loyally profess to be left to set their own news agendas, big media groups are preoccupied with pushing narratives that, at best, engage and enrage audiences to boost profits and, at worst, bolster a disturbingly unequal status quo, in order to win favours from government. There’s a huge amount of media research supporting these arguments, and the more time I spend analysing today’s media discourses the more concerned I become about how entrenched these perspectives seem to be.
What effect has the age of social media had on the way we talk about stigmatised groups?
This is very significant. On the positive side, it was heartening, in some tweets and comment posts I analysed, to see signs of what would once have been defined as "the audience" fighting back against the tide of stigmatisation emanating from the mainstream media and politicians. Sadly, though, the bulk of social media reactions and conversations I looked at endorsed, even consolidated, the way benefit claimants were framed in the discourses to which they were responding. To this extent, my findings seem to reflect the more dispiriting ones that have emerged from other research into online echo-chambers, and the ways in which social media can both amplify the impact of stigmatising media-political discourses themselves and, more disturbingly, influence how many of us talk – and think – about these subjects. The ongoing furore over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party shows us this, and my research into online discourse about "the poor" demonstrates much the same thing.
At its best, social media offers us the potential to have a say in these issues – and to challenge the way "dominant discourses" are framed – but, at its worst, Twitter and the online commentariat can be brutal and bullying: the baying of the mob rather than the wisdom of the crowd.
Do you see the characterisation of “scroungers” changing?
I am hopeful – despite everything else I’ve said. Even in the smallest, most tokenistic, recent political gestures we’ve seen the beginnings of a softening of discourse and, more importantly, behaviour towards benefit recipients. That said, it is quite something when Amber Rudd’s belated admission that the soaring demand for food banks is in any way connected to her government’s litany of brutalising welfare policies is seen as a positive - let alone a meaningfully progressive step. Even amid the depressing popular discourse I identify in my book, which largely focuses on the last full year to date at the time (2016), countervailing voices were starting to assert themselves, in newspapers, their below-the-line comments and wider social media. I think it helped that this was the year of I, Daniel Blake; the resignation of IDS, the architect of Universal Credit (supposedly in protest at further benefit cuts); and, oddly enough, the Brexit vote – around which attention shifted away from welfare, even if only to allow a scrounger-obsessed media to turn its fire on another target: immigrants. That switching the blame game from one othered group to another counts as progress is, of course, perverse. All this said, though, I’ve seen some cause for optimism in recent public attitudes surveys – and the very fact the media is finally noting the shameful spectacle of multiplying rough-sleepers and food banks. It’s all of this, I’d argue, that’s moved the hand of government in recent policy announcements – and its admissions of past policy impacts. Even if for the wrong reasons, then, the tide might be turning.
