Scroungers Moral Panics and Media Myths

“Scrounger-bashing” as national pastime: the prevalence and ferocity of anti-welfare ideology on niche-interest online forums

“…In combination with the thread's title, the unspoken discursive cues underpinning this comment primed fellow posters, conspiratorially, for a TV spectacle with whose semiotic composition, and underlying discourse, they were assumed to already be familiarnot least from other poverty porn programmes. But it implicitly went beyond this, too: to reaffirm the unquestionable "commonsense" accuracy of scrounger discourse at a time when the 'shirker' panic was close to its peak (Morrison 2019). Similarly, at the end of this initial session the poster who was to become the thread's second "anchor" signed off with a cheery, "That hour just flew by.…”

“…Other than "bogus" asylum-seekers and "feral" youths, perhaps the UK's most persistent tabloid "folk-devil" (Cohen 1972) is the welfare "scrounger" (Golding and Middleton 1982;Morrison 2019). A mainstay of everything from red-top headlines to television talk-shows, party conference speeches to official policy documents, this odious archetype has become the go-to latter-day iteration of a centuries-old archetype: the "undeserving poor".…”

“…Studies tracing the historical recurrence of "the scrounger" in popular discourses have shown how, from a pragmatic perspective, they offer an ideal symbolic and policy target at times of economic stress (e.g. Golding and Middleton 1982;Morrison 2019). For ministers determined to cut government spending, what better place to start than by reducing the cost of the social security safety-net, and what stronger justification for this than the claim (or suggestion) that many of its beneficiaries are undeserving non-contributors (e.g.…”

“…To neoliberal governments with no principled attachment to welfare states, for example, the asserted "need" to cut public spending during economic "crises" can be used to mask ideologically driven antipathies towards state-funded social protection while legitimising openly declared policy ambitions to promote normative ideologies of self-reliance and conditional or contributory welfare. Moreover, the mobilisation of "scrounger discourses" (Van Der Bom et al 2018;Morrison 2019;Paterson & Gregory 2019) can also serve an even more pernicious ideological purpose: governmental justifications for "welfare reform" have often been accompanied by (and formed part of) efforts to symbolically displace blame for the crises themselves, for the "necessity" to cut, onto the non-contributors whose indolence has supposedly caused or exacerbated them (as evidenced in, for example, Golding and Middleton 1982, 233;Morrison 2019, 160-1).…”

“…As several studies have since demonstrated (e.g. Wiggan 2012;Morrison 2019), the discourse of "shirkerphobia" promoted by the Coalition and amplified across the mainstream press (ibid: 20) became pervasive. In popular culture, it spawned a whole sub-genre of "poverty porn" television reality shows (e.g.…”