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Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi
© Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi 2008
Karen Matthews, the mother of Shannon whose 24 day disappearance was the subject of a massive police investigation in April of this year, is just the most recent prominent example of the media's characterisation of an 'undeserving poor' as a significant social problem. Matthews' seven children by five fathers, her track record of serial relationships, her dependence on benefits and poor parenting skills seemed to sum up the 'chav' lifestyle already firmly entrenched in popular journalism and tabloid television more generally. It was observed that Matthews, in contrast to her parents and her sister, who maintained large families within stable long-term relationships and continuous employment, had slipped down and away from solid working class structures into the realm of the disrespectable 'underclass' (McDonagh 2008). The economics of so-called underclass living was sketched out in accounts of Matthews' income and expenditure. Readers learnt how much her boyfriend earned working at Morrisons, what she received in benefits and that she spent money on junk food instead of nappies for her children. And the case against her was strengthened by the revelations that the family owned three home computers and even a widescreen television. As journalist Melanie McDonagh (2008) wryly notes, ' In our inverted scale of material values, the absence of a widescreen TV would be a surer indication of respectability'. In short and in popular parlance the Matthews family were viewed as simply the 'wrong kind of family' (Mooney 2008).
In the Matthews case the current insult term 'chav' was yoked together with older equally ripe epithets such as benefit fiddler, on/off single mum, unrespectable and underclass. The labels cautiously used by McDonagh and less so by many others, are both of the moment and also recall an earlier political climate when the lexicon of class difference was used in public discourse without compunction as a pragmatic language with which to express social difference, the economics of class status and, in some ideologies, the 'problem' of the 'undeserving poor'. The journalistic shorthand of benefit scrounging and misdirected consumption deployed in the coverage of the Matthews case is effortlessly understood by readers because it is securely located within a broader discursive frame in which one classed category above all others persists from an earlier political period - that of the undeserving, feckless and/or downright disorganised poor - as played out with varying degrees of mockery, sympathy and complexity in drama, comedy, documentary, journalism and reality television . This time-hardened category is stereotypically associated with the 'dependencies' of a faltering welfare state and is personified in the single Mum, the benefit-rich council estate family, the habitual criminal or the unemployed teenage delinquent; all frequently referenced through notions of fecklessness, indisciplinarity, dependency and moral as well as financial incontinence.
What is less easily understood is why these images are so extensive, so strongly embedded in the culture, so consequential to media pundits and so relatively uncontested. Why is the rhetoric of the undeserving poor not only permissible but persistent and, most importantly, why is it impervious to the lived experiences of the socially excluded? Like ghosts from an earlier era these crudely drawn figures inconveniently haunt the present, chipping away at the notion of the classless progressive society, making social divisions manifest. It has been suggested by Imogen Tyler (2008: 18) that the high level of fascination and repulsion directed at these classed figures may actually be symptomatic of 'heightened class antagonism that marks a new episode in the dirty ontology of class struggle in Britain' and that the cumulative effect of these images moves to silence the voices of those who are already disenfranchised. It is certainly the case that 'underclass' figures are frequently ascribed a lesser value, marked as waste, as 'unmodern', as bigoted, as unproductive and as socially peripheral (Skeggs 2004). Their very centrality in media culture then becomes a greater conundrum and prompts us to ask not only at whose cost these images are circulated but with what other consequences for the ways in which we understand social difference and the possibility of collective social progress.
These questions are still relatively unfashionable. Sheila Rowbotham and Hugh Beynon (2001: 3-5) have observed that since the mid 1980s any discussion of working class experience in particular had become 'peculiarly unmentionable, politically and theoretically'. Since the 1980s the terminology of class has been mostly cast off in political discourse and much of the activism that underpinned it has also been subsumed into other kinds of campaigning and alliances. For ordinary people class loyalty and affiliations no longer seemed to make sense due primarily to the rise of Thatcherism with its attendant disruption of class-based solidarities and its exhilarating promotion of social mobility and consumer aspirations. The televisions and home computers which all social groups hope and even expect to own (but which only some deserve to own) are part and parcel of a broader cultural shift in which consumer goods and brand names become not only the badges of the good life but also the symbols of the good society in which social distinctions are eroded or at least masked over. Inevitably, these and other factors have fed a growing confusion around the value and relevance of class-based identifications and consequently an outright rejection of working-class identification altogether by significant numbers of subjects of opinion polls, focus groups and social research.
But if the vocabulary of class in social and political analysis has lost much of its attraction, if class-based alliances make less strategic sense and if the benefits of class self-identification have diminished there is, nonetheless, at least one social category that persists relatively unchallenged: that is the 'underclass'. A key year in the re-fashioning of notions of the underclass is, of course, 1997 which saw New Labour come to power and with it a re-articulation of a vision of a British meritocracy in which equality of opportunity and the energy of a new national mood would re-charge the Conservative notion of the classless society. The Conservative emphasis on responsible individualism, consumerism and self-improvement was reconfigured in the self-consciously meritocratic ideology of New Labour in which social mobility based on talent not privilege was regarded as 'the best index of overall social health' (Dench 2006:8). New Labour's interventionist meritocracy focused on the 'state management of personal social capital', the political exploitation of the concept of meritocracy and the ongoing sponsorship of public social mobility (Dench: 11). In Geoff Dench's words, 'The open model of meritocracy has shifted into an imperative form' (p12) and those who fail to be directed by it may fall by the wayside. Under New Labour then the socially excluded became the object of a double discourse which sought to 'attack' dependency (above all through a return to paid work) and also attributed that dependency to embedded moral deficiencies in the very culture of the socially excluded (Levitas 1998, see also Fairclough 2000:57, Morris 1994, Skeggs 2004:85-89).
If New Labour extended the promotion of social mobility, it also reinforced the notion that success takes place in the public domain and that its visibility should be the measure of its realization. In other words, the signifiers of success were inextricably bound up with public display of power, consumer affluence, or entrepreneurial achievement (Dench 2006:12-13). The visibility of affluence became the measure of successful social citizenship. Indeed recent ESRC research found that when people make social comparisons they do so explicitly in terms of the markers of lifestyle success, especially in the 'visible trappings' of consumerism, housing and postcodes. Researchers found scant evidence of 'sentiments of solidarity' but rather a scale of social comparison with others measured in terms of 'individual career trajectories' and 'consumption choices' (Pahl 2007: 76). In this climate, those that can not or will not participate, or whose personal values and measures of self-esteem are rooted in the private, the domestic or in the local domains must find themselves labelled unmotivated, un-ambitious, underachieving and even morally suspect.
Since the 1990s, lifestyle and reality TV programming underscored this broader ethos of personal success in the public realm and via a new cult of professionalised domesticity in which even family life must be seen to be well managed. Property, personal finance and makeover shows normalised the implicitly middle class processes of self-improvement required to brand oneself in the spheres of work and personal identity (Ouellette and Hay, 2008). At the same time, reality crime genres, sensational observational documentaries and the deployment of carefully edited CCTV footage have underscored the characterisation of the unruly poor; offering contemporary Hogarthian caricatures of drunken youths, irresponsible mothers and foul-mouthed hooligans. These last are the images that continue to find a place on widescreen TVs across the nation as well as in the press. Images of the 'socially marginalised' appear in abundance and, according to some commentators, their numbers have swelled to 'time bomb' proportions to form a 'class of über-chavs' encompassing everyone from those fallen on hard times to 'antisocial neighbours from hell' (Winnett 2005). Their media visibility implies that these figures are meaningful beyond their obvious functions as objects of fun and scapegoating and as salutary exhibits of spectacular failure. We suggest that their disproportionate presence, the punitive rhetoric attached to them and their ruthless media exposure acts to reinforce already naturalised middle class entitlement and its discursive yoking with current notions of social progress. As negative traits such as intolerance, racism, sexism, excessive consumption, inflexibility, idleness and selfishness become ever more closely coupled with the 'undeserving poor' above all others, the socially mobile and culturally integrated majority are free to move on unfettered and with their own values unexamined.
Heather Nunn is Reader in Media and Cultural Studies and co-director of the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Culture at Roehampton University.
Anita Biressi is Reader in Media Cultures at Roehampton University. Anita and Heather are currently researching a book provisionally entitled Class Redux.
References
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Fairclough, N. (2000) New Labour, New Language? London: Routledge.
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McDonagh, M. (2008) 'Five fathers, one mother and a muddled family saga'', in the Independent on Sunday, 13 April: 47.
Mooney, B. (2008) 'What these two couples tell us about the value of the family (and the sneering Left that loves to attack it)', in the Daily Mail, 17 April: 51.
Morris, L. (1994) Dangerous Classes: The Underclass and Social Citizenship, London: Routledge.
Murray, C. (1989) 'The emerging British underclass', in R. Lister (ed.) (1996) Charles Murray and the Underclass: The Developing Debate, London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit/The Sunday Times: 23-53.
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Ouellette, L. and Hay, J. (2008) Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-welfare Citizenship, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Pahl, R. (2007) 'Growing inequality: do people know what's going on?', in J. Clake (ed) Britain in 2008: The State of the Nation, Swindon: ESRC.
Rowbotham, S. and Beynon, H. (eds.) (2001) Looking at Class: Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain, London: Rivers Oram Press.
Skeggs, B. (1997) Formations of Class and Gender, London: Sage.
Skeggs, B. (2004) Class, Self, Culture, London: Routledge.
Tyler, I. (2008) '"Chav Mum, Chav Scum": class disgust in contemporary Britain', in Feminist media Studies, 8:1: 17-34.
Winnett, R. (205) 'Focus: Meet the "Neets": a new underclass' in the Sunday Times 27 March at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article438356.ece accessed 1 May 2008. .
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