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'Scrounger-Bashing' As National Pastime: the Prevalence and Ferocity of Anti-Welfare Ideology on Niche-Interest Online Forums

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'Scrounger-Bashing' As National Pastime: the Prevalence and Ferocity of Anti-Welfare Ideology on Niche-Interest Online Forums MORRISON, J. 2021. 'Scrounger-bashing' as national pastime: the prevalence and ferocity of anti-welfare ideology on niche-interest online forums. Social semiotics [online], 31(3): political ideology in everyday social media use, pages 383-401. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2021.1930859 'Scrounger-bashing' as national pastime: the prevalence and ferocity of anti-welfare ideology on niche-interest online forums. MORRISON, J. 2021 This document was downloaded from https://openair.rgu.ac.uk Social Semiotics ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csos20 “Scrounger-bashing” as national pastime: the prevalence and ferocity of anti-welfare ideology on niche-interest online forums James Morrison To cite this article: James Morrison (2021) “Scrounger-bashing” as national pastime: the prevalence and ferocity of anti-welfare ideology on niche-interest online forums, Social Semiotics, 31:3, 383-401, DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2021.1930859 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2021.1930859 © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 14 Jun 2021. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 58 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=csos20 SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 2021, VOL. 31, NO. 3, 383–401 https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2021.1930859 “Scrounger-bashing” as national pastime: the prevalence and ferocity of anti-welfare ideology on niche-interest online forums James Morrison School of Creative and Cultural Business, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Recent research has noted the persistence of a long continuum of Scrounger; welfare; benefits; “anti-welfare” discourses that are increasingly embedded in the UK discourse; forum; comment news media, political communication, and popular culture (e.g. Golding and Middleton 1982. Images of Welfare: Press and Public Attitudes to Poverty. Oxford: Mark Robertson; Jensen 2014. “Welfare Commonsense, Poverty Porn and Doxosophy.” Sociological Research Online 19 (3): 277–283; Morrison 2019. Scroungers: Moral Panics and Media Myths. London: Zed Books). Historical distinctions between the “deserving” and “undeserving poor” have been sharpened by successive governments in the service of varying shades of neoliberal governance. While Margaret Thatcher castigated “shirkers” in fostering an ideology of economic self-reliance, both New Labour and the Coalition obsessed over “welfare reform”:promotingan ideology of “work” in symbolic opposition to supposed cultures of “worklessness”.But,while“scroungerphobia” (Deacon 1978. “The Scrounging Controversy: Public Attitudes Towards the Unemployed in Contemporary Britain.” Social Policy and Administration 12 (2): 120–135) is now a widely recognised sociological phenomenon, scholarly attention to the concept has largely been reserved for its manifestation in tabloid newspapers, political rhetoric and, latterly, “poverty porn” television. Even recent work considering the public’s contribution to scrounger discourse(s) on social media focuses on mainstream platforms, such as Twitter and newspaper comment threads (e.g. Van Der Bom et al. 2018. “‘It’snottheFactTheyClaim Benefits but Their Useless, Lazy, Drug Taking Lifestyles we Despise’: Analysing Audience Responses to Benefits Street Using Live Tweets.” Discourse, Context & Media 21: 36–45; Morrison 2019. Scroungers: Moral Panics and Media Myths. London: Zed Books; Paterson 2020). This paper begins to address this oversight, by examining how normative anti-welfare discourses infiltrate everyday communication in more disparate online communities – including niche consumer forums. It draws on previously unpublished findings from an analysis of welfare-related conversations in these and other spaces at the height of a recent moral panic over “scroungers”:theperiod from 2013-2016, when Conservative-led governments strove to legitimise sweeping benefit cuts and punitive “welfare reform”. CONTACT James Morrison [email protected] © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 384 J. MORRISON 1. Introduction 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”. Conceived of as feckless, lazy and behaviourally maladjusted, the essence of “the scrounger’s” durability is that he/she serves a significant, highly malleable political func- tion – one with both pragmatic and ideological dimensions. As with the similarly mythic concept of exploitative mass immigration, the spectre of pervasive “scrounging” tends to resurface most prominently at times of (real or confected) “crisis” (Hall et al. 1978): when politicians (and the media) are searching for simple answers and/or ways of displacing blame for complex societal problems. Studies tracing the historical recur- rence of “the scrounger” in popular discourses have shown how, from a pragmatic per- spective, 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 govern- ment 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. Fraser, quoted in Golding and Middleton 1982, 3; Osborne, quoted in Morrison 2019, 24)? But such instru- mentalist drivers often intersect with ones rooted in ideology – and, even when this is not the case, can have significant ideological consequences for a society. To neoliberal govern- ments 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 con- tributory welfare. Moreover, the mobilisation of “scrounger discourses” (Van Der Bom et al. 2018; Morrison 2019; Paterson & Gregory 2019) can also serve an even more perni- cious 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 indo- lence has supposedly caused or exacerbated them (as evidenced in, for example, Golding and Middleton 1982, 233; Morrison 2019, 160–1). This paper focuses on the ways in which scrounger discourses can become so normal- ised, even ubiquitous, during periods of perceived or actual crisis that they infiltrate mul- tiple and varied aspects of social life – moving beyond news media and popular entertainment to the ways in which publics routinely discuss and process their percep- tions of poverty and the benefits system; in particular, through online interactions. In doing so, it draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “doxa” (1999), as adapted by Tracey Jensen to problematise the ways in which neoliberal states have constructed discourses of “welfare commonsense” that paint the “social world”, with all its inequities and norma- tive imaginaries around “deserving” and “undeserving” poverty, as “self-evident and requiring no interpretation” (Jensen 2014, 277). However, in contrast to similar studies, which have generally focused on surveys (e.g. Taylor-Gooby and Taylor 2015), face-to- SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 385 face dialogue (Valentine and Harris 2014), newspaper comment threads or self-supporting social media such as Twitter (Morrison 2018 and 2019; Van Der Bom et al. 2018), the specific purview here is the encroachment of taken-for-granted scrounger discourse(s) into conversations between community members in “the third space” of “non-political” websites “where political talk emerges” (Wright 2012, 5). In this case, the chosen focus is inter-user dialogue on a purposefully unsystematic selection of niche-interest web forums the subjects of which have little or no obvious relevance to issues around welfare. The samples analysed are drawn from discussion threads published on these forums at the height of the UK’s most recent outbreak of “scroungerphobia” (Deacon 1978) or (as it was then) “shirkerphobia” (Morrison 2019, 20): the period of sustained fiscal “austerity” implemented by the 2010–2016 Conservative-led governments of David Cameron. 2. From “scroungerphobia” to “shirkerphobia”: scrounger panics In their seminal 1982 study Images of Welfare, Golding and Middleton revived Stanley Cohen’sdefinition of the “moral panic”–the process by which “a condition, episode, person or group of persons
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