Scroungers

Moral Panics and Media Myths

James Morrison

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781786992147
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786992161
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Higher Education
• Index: Social Sciences

Scroungers, spongers, parasites …

These are just are some of the terms that are typically used, with increasing frequency, to describe the most vulnerable in our society, whether they be the sick, the disabled, or the unemployed. Long a popular scapegoat for all manner of social ills, under austerity we've seen hostility towards benefit claimants reach new levels of hysteria, with the 'undeserving poor' blamed for everything from crime to even rising levels of child abuse.

While the tabloid press has played its role in fuelling this hysteria, the proliferation of social media has added a disturbing new dimension to this process, spreading and reinforcing scare stories, while normalising the perception of poverty as a form of 'deviancy' that runs contrary to the neoliberal agenda. Provocative and illuminating, Scroungers explores and analyses the ways in which the poor are portrayed both in print and online, placing these attitudes in a wider breakdown of social trust and community cohesion.

CHAPTER 1

MORAL PANICS, SCAPEGOATING AND THE PERSISTENCE OF PAUPER FOLK-DEVILS

If the poor are always with us, so too are the prejudices, preconceptions and panics that consistently typify the way societies conceptualize them. ‘How to deal with the poor’, as Golding and Middleton (1982: 6) put it, ‘has always been the central policy issue for the state, and before the state for the church and feudal authorities’. This was as much the case for early kings and ecclesiasts calibrating the balance between control and compassion as it is for latter-day politicians and bureaucrats obsessing over distinctions between rights and responsibilities and optimum levels for pitching social protection.

While this book’s purview primarily concerns the question of how we think and talk about poverty in today’s Britain, there is considerable evidence (patchy in places, firmer in others) to suggest that persistent distinctions between the more and less ‘deserving’ – long emblematic of British discourses around ‘the poor’ – have close comparisons, even parallels, elsewhere. They can be glimpsed in the slow-burn migration of ‘underclass’ rhetoric in the late twentieth century from the United States (via Britain) to Germany, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua and even India (Mann 1994). More recently, they have leeched their way further abroad, thanks to an ever more globalized public sphere, entering the cultural vocabularies of societies that used to have little truck with stigmatizing those living in poverty. Such lexical incursions include the appropriation and reinvention of the arcane term ‘bludger’, nineteenth century British slang for pimp (Oxford Dictionaries 2017a), as an Antipodean variant of ‘scrounger’. This development is especially incongruous in Australia, where historical resistance to recognizing the existence of an underclass used to fascinate academics, who blamed it on everything from blue-collar inverted snobbery and ‘suspicion of “tall poppies” and social climbing’ (Turner, quoted in Mann 1994: 91) to ancestral memories of ‘the stain’ of deportation as a ‘dangerous class’ that must be ‘kept thousands of miles away for fear it would contaminate the morals of those around them’ (Mann 1994: 91).

Why, then, have these intergenerational, and increasingly international, discursive distinctions between people thrust into poverty through no fault of their own and those judged to have brought their misfortunes on themselves repeatedly resurfaced through time? How have ideas about ‘deserving’ versus ‘undeserving’ poverty evolved down the centuries, and what aspects of them have proved most resilient and enduring? What forces have conspired at specific points in history to send simmering suspicions of less productive, less able, less contributing familiar strangers in our midst boiling over into full-blown moral panics about ‘the residuum’, ‘scroungers’, ‘shirkers’ and any number of other stigmatizing shorthand terms for the unemployed, disabled and destitute? Are there particular confluences of factors that render such discourses salient at analogous points in time: crystallizing moments conducive to scandalizing public opinion about morally deviant enemies within and mobilizing support for scapegoating measures designed to distract from the underlying causes of society’s ills? In short, there are lessons to be learnt from our past about the roots of today’s ideology of deservingness and its nature; what it shows us about the ways such discourses have been contested historically; and how this knowledge might be harnessed to confront and overcome contemporary scrounger myths.

This chapter begins the process of addressing the above questions, by unpacking a series of related ambivalences about ‘the poor’ that have manifested themselves through time. On our way, we will encounter a colourful cast of characters: from the ‘mobile poor’ and ‘sturdy beggars’ of Medieval folklore to the ‘idlers’, ‘vagabonds’ and ‘problem families’ of later epochs. These culturally constructed anti-citizens were the abject figures and familiar strangers of their day: recognizable (if fanciful) archetypes who provided convenient scapegoats for, or freak-show exemplars of, invariably more complex social problems. In considering these contextually specific manifestations of recurring oppositions, the chapter offers a broad interpretive framework for the rest of the book, in which our focus switches to polarities that characterize conceptions of poverty today.

‘VOLUNTARY’ VERSUS ‘INVOLUNTARY POVERTY’

According to a long historical tradition, people living in poverty were once treated with unbridled charity. Though stripped of dignity and agency and infantilized by their reliance on ‘the comprehensive ecclesiastical altruism of feudal religious charity, alms-giving and monastic hospitality’ (Golding & Middleton 1982: 7), early Medieval paupers could at least rest safe in the knowledge that no one had yet devised a rationale to blame them for their own plight. Indeed, considerable academic literature, including empirical studies of parish records (McIntosh 2011), supports the notion that early Christian attitudes towards the poor displayed a degree of non-judgemental (if patronizing) benevolence that would shame later turns towards more selective, sometimes punitive, welfare regimes. Driven by unswervingly literal interpretations of the gospels, early ‘canon law’ generally emphasized ‘the innocence of poverty’, avoiding any ‘easy equation between destitution and moral inadequacy’ (Tierney 1959: 11–12). Such compassion was intimately bound up with other doctrinal virtues upheld not just by Christianity but also other religions, often related as much to the faithful’s (self-interested) pursuit of godliness as their determination to deliver the needy from want. ‘Pious endowments’, ‘good works’ and other conspicuous displays of beneficence offered routes to spiritual salvation (by way of worldly renown), for both early Christians and Muslims (Jones 1980), while monastic teaching venerated those who voluntarily eschewed worldly possessions. This was the basis for the ‘Rule’ set down in AD 520 by St Benedict (Artz 1953: 185), requiring his monastic order to uphold a ‘tria substantialis of obedience, celibacy, and poverty’ (Butler 1919, cited in White 1971: 15). And compassion towards the poor was not confined to the Church: as historian Marjorie McIntosh’s meticulous compilation of a database of 1,005 alms-houses and hospitals established between 1350 and 1599 illustrates, early forms of organized poor relief were as likely to emanate from philanthropists espousing continental-style ‘civic humanism’ or its ‘Christian or Northern’ variant, who held that ‘well-ordered’ states had ‘responsibilities’ to ‘promote the wellbeing of the entire community’ (McIntosh 2011: 21).

Yet only the most superficial reading of history could deny that, even in the early centuries of Christianity, there were exceptions to such unalloyed charity. By the later Medieval period, a combination of conflicted ideologies and increasingly urgent economic pressures had led to a marked retrenchment in the culture of giving. A ‘more likely’ story, as Golding and Middleton (1982: 7) argue, is that medievalist Brian Tierney (1959: 11–12) was right to offer a revisionist view of the early Church’s position as one which had long scorned ‘voluntary poverty’ (at least by anyone other than monks) as an ‘identifiable malaise’, with ‘idleness’ pointedly ‘condemned’. If correct, this judgement casts doubt on suggestions there was ever widespread belief that poverty ‘equated with virtue’ (Tierney 1959: 11–12).

In England, the decades encompassing the Black Death and the reign of Elizabeth I respectively have long been identified as periods during which economic imperatives, driven first by crisis, then incipient capitalist ideology, swept aside any lingering precedents favouring unconditional altruism. Golding and Middleton (1982: 8) chart the reconceptualization of the (able-bodied) poor as a potential economic asset in the fourteenth century, singling out the 1349–57 Statute of Labourers and ensuing ‘vagrancy laws’ criminalizing ‘the mobile poor’ (itinerant vagabonds) as measures designed to contain and exploit them to address a ‘crisis in the feudal economy’. By commodifying hobos (albeit for reasons more pragmatic than purely ideological), successive laws legitimized using their forced labour to help address a dire situation in which food production no longer met ‘the subsistence needs of the peasants’, let alone ‘surplus needs of the land owners’ − especially during a plague that ultimately decimated half the population (Golding & Middleton 1982: 8). Yet however effective conscripting the poor might have been in the short term, disruption wrought by the Black Death would have long-lasting consequences both for agricultural output and associated issues around the maintenance of both ‘work discipline’ and ‘social order’ among those ‘outside the labour force’: non-serfs or (in today’s terms) the unemployed (Golding & Middleton 1982: 8). The epidemic’s aftermath, argues McIntosh (2011: 17), saw an exodus from many manors of peasants seeking ‘better opportunities elsewhere’, in turn undermining landowners’ control over their ‘remaining tenants’, who might ‘gradually acquire more property’ and become parish leaders. This incipient social mobility conspired with such acute labour shortages that it empowered unbonded workers-for-hire ‘who chose not to work regularly’ to ‘find enough casual employment to get by’ (an early twist on today’s feted flexible labour markets). the later, explosive, rejection of feudalism symbolized by 1381’s Peasants’ Revolt, meanwhile, ‘heightened fear’ among elites that ‘all forms of hierarchy were at risk’ (McIntosh 2011: 17).

The time was ripe for concerted efforts to harden hearts and minds against the poor, especially those who threatened ‘the maintenance of work discipline’ and ‘good order of the work force’ (Golding & Middleton 1982: 6–7). ‘These two central issues’, as Golding and Middleton (1982: 6–7) observed, would ‘weave their way through the centuries of society’s dealings with poverty’, with the othering and vilification of paupers who ‘exploit systems of income maintenance or subsistence provided by society for an impoverished minority’ (forerunners of today’s ‘shirkers’ and fraudsters) central to defining the acceptable limits of compassion. Thus, as early as 1349 an ordinance condemned to prison any ‘“reaper, mower, or other servant”’ who left employment ‘before the end of the term of service agreed upon’ (Middleton 1997: 227), and by 1357 the then Archbishop of Armagh was preaching that beggars and others reliant on poor relief should be ‘hated by their neighbours’, based on God’s teachings about the ‘merits of labour’ and legitimate wealth accumulation (cited in McIntosh 2011: 17). At a time when the labouring poor were battling bubonic plague and ever more parlous living and working conditions, it is easy to understand how such scapegoating rhetoric, directed at those judged to be shirking their duty to contribute to the common weal, touched raw nerves. Building on this theme of non-labouring poor, successive early vagrancy acts passed between 1349 and 1388 to conscript vagabonds would pave the way for the construction of ‘a pre-industrial, propertyless [sic] and disciplined working class’ heralding the ‘much tighter controls of later decades’ (Golding & Middleton 1982: 9).

Of the various antecedents of the ‘undeserving’ poor discursively constructed through the propaganda pincer-movement of state regulation and Christian sermon, no figure was more emblematic of hardening attitudes towards paupers than the ‘idle’ or ‘sturdy beggar’. Though physically able, this itinerant phantom, first identified in the 1388 Statute of Cambridge (Middleton 1997: 208), spent his life wandering between parishes, scavenging from those who toiled for a living. He therefore epitomized morally repellent malingering, starkly opposed to the idealized virtues of the similar ‘discursive invention’ who was his antithesis: the ‘worker’ or ‘good subject’ defined in the 1349 Ordinance and refined and embellished throughout the 1350s and 1360s (Middleton 1997: 230). This legalistic distinction between ‘good’ and (by implication) ‘bad’ subjects represents one of the first symbolic expressions of elite-directed disdain towards the able-bodied unemployed. It is easy to see the legacy of this tradition in contemporary discourses about scroungers and shirkers: idle recipients of state ‘handouts’ who could work but don’t; wastrels content to remain ‘voluntarily’ poor by refusing to provide for themselves. Indeed, the sturdy beggar construct is more pernicious than this, foreshadowing wider vistas of suspicion about the deservingness of everyone from rough-sleepers to Romani ‘gypsies’ to severely disabled claimants that today we subject to disability ‘hate crime’ (Disability News Service 2017) or force to prove their incapacity in fitness-for-work tests. Once ‘rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars had entered the scene’, to quote Golding and Middleton (1982: 9), they would ‘personify wilful poverty for decades, indeed centuries’.

In weeding out from the property-less mass sub-classes of malingerers against whom public support could be mobilized to impose punishment and servitude, fourteenth century elites arguably conspired to engineer Britain’s first moral panic against scroungers. Widely defined as ‘a threat or supposed threat from deviants or “folk-devils”’ (Goode & Ben-Yehuda 2009: 2), the late sociologist Stanley Cohen’s (1972: 50) definition of the ‘moral panic’ conceived it as a hegemonic tool used by a dominant ‘control culture’ to (re)assert social order by constructing plausible (if largely fictive) bogeymen on to whom deviant characteristics could be projected, often to deflect blame or attention from more complex social problems. What more clearly defined control culture could there be than that which prevailed in a deeply religious Medieval age when most of the populace were illiterate and definitions of acceptable moral boundaries were comprehensively dictated by clergy and Crown?

Talk of panics aside, if the 14th century did witness a decisive break with more charitable attitudes towards poverty, this was at least partly spurred by perceived economic necessity: something elites could assert (if only as a pretext) given the manifest devastation wrought by the Black Death. That the ensuing agrarian crisis gave them an excuse to dispense with charity and contain and commodify the previously mobile poor demonstrates how even such calamitous acts of God could be transformed into fortuitous ideological tools to drive political and economic reform. Is it so far-fetched to draw analogies between the opportunistic actions of an already insecure feudal elite in exploiting the effects of this plague on food production, environment and public health to assert the immutability of the status quo − and the duty of good subjects (the ‘hardworking families’ of their day) to fall into line − and the similarly repressive actions that typified responses from neoliberal elites to more recent crises, such as the 2007–8 crash? In the event, the post-Black Death period ushered in a centuries-long continuum of measures to degrade and persecute the poor, though it would take ‘a further shift of gear into full-blown mercantilism’ to ‘sharpen more clearly the discrimination between “god’s poor and the devil’s”’ − the ‘poor and the paupers’ − which was to form ‘the crux of later legislation’ (Golding & Middleton 1982: 9).

The process of embedding distinctions between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poverty (based, principally, on people’s willingness to work) unfolded rapidly during British history’s second decisive break with the supposed unconditional charity of the earlier Christian period: that accompanying the sustained economi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of acronyms and abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Scroungerphobia revisited: shirker-bashing and feral freak-shows
• 1. Moral panics, scapegoating and the persistence of pauper folk-devils
• 2. Problem families and ‘the workless’: the rhetorical roots of shirkerphobia
• 3. Framing the poor: images of welfare and poverty in today’s press
• 4. Deliberating deservingness: the public’s role in constructing scroungers
• 5. Incidental scroungers: normalizing anti-welfarism in wider press narratives
• Conclusion: From division to unity: a manifesto for rebuilding trust
• Appendix 1: Framing analysis methodology
• Appendix 2: Sentiment analysis methodology
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About Zed