Public Affairs

Scroungers: the false stereotype

Jim Larkin clipped ICTU’s John O’Farrell critiques the narrative put forward by the Coalition Government and conservative newspapers.

It was just a throwaway line in a half-hearted editorial about care homes in the Daily Express. It was so casual that it didn’t register until a day or so later: “… instead of handing out millions to lazy scroungers we should …”.

Everybody knows that fraud is rampant and that the real problem is that benefits are too generous and that welfare creates dependency – and that the reforms championed by the coalition in Westminster (and half of the coalition in Stormont) are ultimately necessary for the health of the economy as much as the morality of the claimants.

A YouGov survey of the public’s perception on welfare found a startling level of ignorance, such as the belief that 41 per cent of the total welfare budget goes to the unemployed (reality: 3 per cent) and that fraud accounts for 27 per cent of the same budget (reality: 0.7 per cent).

Where did this come from? One answer is in the result of a Lexis Nexis search for the number of times the word “scrounger” has been used in the UK’s national newspapers, which showed a huge spike since 2010.

The Tory press has fed its readers a diet of horror stories of ungrateful and undeserving claimants, and the huge televisions they watch have been spewing a diet of frauds and freaks, creating an entire new genre: poverty porn. Hatred of the poor is now legitimised, on morning and evening TV, on radio phone-ins, on social media and on the streets, where people with obvious disabilities have been verbally and physically attacked.

The irony is that which divides New Tories from their former comrades in UKIP. Nigel Farage has had to spend much of his Euro election campaign denouncing his own members for saying and writing racist or homophobic or sexist remarks that were common currency 20 years ago.

However, demonise the poor and the consequences are electoral success. Welfare reforms and punishing the poor are at the core of the Tory election strategy for 2015. Central to that is the manipulation of statistics and emotions. In March, the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee denounced Iain Duncan Smith, the Department for Work and Pensions press office and Tory central office for manipulating official statistics in order to show that the reforms were necessary and working.

Allied in this endeavour is the Tory press. I thought that the nadir had been reached when the Daily Mail and George Osborne colluded in portraying as “a vile product of Welfare UK” the murderous actions of Mick Philpott, who killed six of his own children while claiming benefits. I was wrong.

In April, after some mild criticism from church leaders and the Trussell Trust, the Mail on Sunday sent a crack team of investigative reporters to blow the lid on … food banks. Apparently, the big softies don’t run severe checks on people looking for three days’ supply of beans and pasta, and so any scrounger can take advantage of their kind hearts.

Happily, enough members of the public were enraged at this sordid bullying to swell the coffers of food banks such as the Trussell Trust with online donations.

But the master narrative is holding firm. Scroungers rip off the hardworking and even leech off charities. The common trope from Tory ministers is that people go to food banks for free food so they can spend their ill-gotten benefits on bad stuff like beer, Sky TV and drugs. Junior Minister and rising star Esther McVey said as much to the Scottish Government, while insisting that that there was “no robust evidence linking food bank usage to welfare reform”.

Shortly after, it was revealed that Ms McVey had accepted a £10,000 donation from Henry Angest, boss of the company that owns Everyday Loans, which charges 80 per cent APR to its clients. One presumes that there is no robust evidence linking poor people to payday loan companies, or that anyone ever borrows cash to pay for food for their family.

Show More
Back to top button