Anti-Polish Migrant Moral Panic in the UK: Rethinking Employment Insecurities and Moral Regulation

Abstract

This article examines British societal reactions to Polish migrant workers using a framework that combines recent developments of the moral panic concept informed by the sociology of moral regulation and risk governance studies. Given the multi-mediated nature of contemporary moral panics and in contrast to conventional analysis focusing on newspaper coverage this article is based on Polish migrants' self-reported experiences. Moral panic claims-making about Polish workers 'taking British jobs' and 'abusing British social benefi ts' are perceived by the respondents themselves. Our analysis is in line with Sean Hier's conceptualisations of the interplay between individualised risk management and moral panic claims-making, which are manifestations of confl ictual sites of the contemporary neo-liberal project of prudentialism. The article argues that the anti-Polish migrant campaign in Britain after 2004, which dramatised Polish migrants as 'stealing the jobs' of the native population, cannot be properly analysed as an irrational ethnic bias or an elite-engineering panic but is rather an expression of the destabilising effects of employment insecurities within Western risk societies.

BBC’s Documentary “Stadiums of Hate” and Manufacturing of the News: Case Study in Moral Panics and Media Manipulation

“…They concerned the threats stemming from the massive inflow of migrants from this part of the Europe after the accession to the EU. These concerned the expected growth in crime (Mawby & Gisby, 2009) and the weakening position of native British people on a labor market (Fitzgerald & Smoczynski, 2015). These episodes, as the majority of moral panics, were orchestrated and steered by tabloid press.…”

Brexit and the working class on Teesside: Moving beyond reductionism

“…Similarly, Bergmann (2018) argues UKIP’s ‘Breaking Point’ (p. 130) poster permeated fear and panic among the citizenry. Importantly, Fitzgerald and Smoczyński (2015) offer more nuance, claiming hostilities ought to be analysed alongside labour market insecurity, competition and the 2008 financial crisis. Relatedly, they assert that society has profoundly changed since the moral panic’s original conceptualisation.…”

Central and Eastern European Accession: Changing Perspectives on Migrant Workers

“…However, MacKenzie and Forde (2009) criticised the stereotyping of such attitudes, highlighting how the ‘good’ worker was often associated with minimal terms and conditions, that is high levels of exploitation. Whilst investigating how Poles were obtaining employment in the north east and north west food processing 5 and construction sectors, we identified this phenomenon (Fitzgerald, 2007b). Here we found that when trade unions or inspectorates tried to intervene to alleviate issues of exploitation, employers tended to respond by moving migrant workers to other sites, exchanging them for other groups.…”