"‘Shameless Mick’, the Daily Mail and the right wing ideological assault on the welfare state"...
Transcript of "‘Shameless Mick’, the Daily Mail and the right wing ideological assault on the welfare state"...
‘Shameless Mick’, the Daily Mail and the right wing ideological assault on the
welfare state Paddy Hoey
April 2013
PoliDcally moDvated media cult of ‘Shameless’ Mick PhilpoF
• “shows the pervasiveness of evil born out of welfare dependency.”
• “liJed the lid on the bleak and oJen grotesque world of the welfare benefit scroungers -‐ of whom there are not dozens, not hundreds, but tens of thousands in our country.”
• Shameless Mick was media cult in himself, created by frequent stories and TV shows – Daily Mirror – ITV/ Jeremy Kyle – (but not Anne Widdicombe)
It’s all about class, stupid “The reason Vicky Pollard caught the public imaginaDon is that she embodies with such fearful accuracy of several of the great scourges of contemporary Britain: aggressive all-‐female gangs of embiFered, hormonal, drunken teenagers, gymslip mums who choose to get pregnant as a career opDon; pasty faced, lard guFed slappers who’ll drop their knickers in a blink of an eye… these people do exist and are every bit as ripe and as just a target for social saDre as were, say, the raddled working-‐class drunks sent up by Hogarth in Gin Lane.” James Delingpole, the Times, 13 April, 2006,
Why Shameless Britain? • Shameless Britain becomes Daily Mail shorthand for the
deficiencies of modern Britain ‘gripped by welfare dependency’ in 2008
• Shannon MaFhews in April 2008 • “Feckless fathers, drug abuse, teenage pregnancies name
any contemporary social ill and Shameless shows it; not as a vision of a living hell, but as a two-‐fingers-‐up to authority scally romp in which the moral of the story is the morals don’t really maFer.
• Shannon MaFhews family: “could come from Central CasDng for Shameless Britain.”
• Allison Pearson, ‘Shameless Britain isn’t a comedy – it’s a tragedy”, Daily Mail. 9 April, 2008.
Shameless Britain: Broken Britain • “GheFoes of worklessness, as many as 84% of people on welfare.”
• “DevastaDng reports paint a terrifying picture of the true extent of ‘Shameless Britain’, in which millions grow up in a culture of dependency where work does not pay. The government will… lay out new plans to tackle this welfare dependency launching a crackdown on benefit scroungers.
• “The shocking report by the right-‐wing think-‐tank Centre for Policy Studies.”
• Daniel MarDn, ‘Britain is branded the jobless capital of Europe’, Daily Mail, 11 October, 2010
Right wing think tanks and compassionate conservaDsm
“We have managed to create a block of people in Britain who do not add anything to the greatness of this country.” (not talking about most MPs)
Iain Duncan Smith, the Sun, 12 August 2010 • Labour had also announced “blitz on benefit scroungers” in right wing press in 2008
“The paper whose tone and agenda is closest to 1960s/70s-‐style moral panic is probably the Daily Mail. During the Thatcher years, the Daily Mail pracDsed and perfected the characterisDcs of hegemony, in a way that was in uncanny harmony with Thatcherism.”
(McRobbie, Thornton, 1995: 569) • Moral voice of the new middle class and old lower middle class
• Its own style of in-‐house morality (Ibid)
Daily Mail: voice of common sense
Shameless Britain: Broken Britain
• Shameless Britain adjunct element of Daily Mail’s aFack on the legacy of failed leJ project: – Macro issues: Diminished sovereignty: EU – Micro issues: MulDculturalism & immigraDon – Benefits v Welfare; Welfare State – Non selecDve educaDon
• Policies of leJ wing Marxist intelligentsia – Apotheosis in aFack on Ralph Miliband
PoliDcal & economic background • Neo-‐con and neo-‐liberal projects that began with Reagan and Thatcher
• Triumph of conservaDve America, Contract with America, designed by Newt Gingrich
• Among other things, reappraised deserving and undeserving poor
• Paved the way for economic liberalizaDon of the ‘welfare’ sector
• The Big Society
PhilpoF: media power/ media ideology
• Opportunist use of episodes of criminality or social turmoil to advance ideological agenda
• How? • Non-‐Public Service BroadcasDng sector dominated by right wing voices – Murdoch/ DMG/ Telegraph sDll dominant online environment, despite declines in print circulaDons
– Growth of influence of the commentariat/ blogotariat: Young, Delingpole, McKenzie, Phillips, Starkey
MediaDon & mediaDzaDon • PoliDcians respond by appealing to the crowded, centre right ground – UKIP effect?
• MediaDon & mediaDzaDon: when media is central, dominant force in flow of informaDon between poliDcs and public
• MediaDzaDon/ media logic: stories packaged to fit media agenda – e.g. Hazel Blears
Why Shameless? • Easy encapsulaDon of working/ underclass life few middle classes have any experience of
• Kevin Maguire: Dewsbury of Shannon MaFhews or Derby of Mick PhilpoF is as alien as Kandahar is for middle/ metropolitan class
• Even the Shameless reference was lost on Mail readers: MarDn piece had to explain what Shameless was
Problems of using Shameless • Creeber (2009) points to the problems of press using Shameless as quasi-‐realisDc
• ‘AnD-‐social realism’ – kicks against the realism of its creator Paul AbboF’s other work and that of his contemporaries, Jimmy McGovern
• Frank Gallagher should not be seen as either a reliable narrator or authenDc
• ConDnually highlights ‘a lack of authorial ‘truth’.’ • In this case, it is not enDrely in the manner of Hogarth’s social saDres
Working class and hegemony
• DemonizaDon of working class, especially when erroneously predicated, represents the class dislocaDon of those producing MSM products – MSM is increasingly middle class in complexion
• Journalism, “is increasingly dominated by a privately-‐schooled, Oxbridge-‐educated elite and… it is becoming difficult for those from other backgrounds to get a foothold, according to the educaDonal charity that carried out the survey.”
Owen Gibson, the Guardian, 15 June, 2006
“People raised on benefits never really make it all the way to here – to London. To this London – Media London. To the place where power is. Those giro cheques, and the social circles, don’t stretch this far. Those people don’t get to commission documentaries, or make dramas, or write columns or books about their lives, speak on Newsnight or tell jokes on Have I Got News For You. They do not get to speak. You just see them in crowd shots instead, as a mass shouDng on the terraces or queuing in the Boxing day sales at Next.” Caitlin Moran, the Times, 21 January, 2014
“The truth is the PhilpoFs say nothing about anyone, except for themselves, just as serial murderer GP Harold Shipman said nothing about middle class professionals.” Owen Jones, the Independent, 3 April 2013
Paul AbboF: it’s social racism • UlDmately in a Dme when racism and homophobia are outwardly unaceptable, shameless has become an acceptable means of demonizing less fortunate.
• “Shameless is one of those words that’s sDll acceptable… You can't say pikey, hoody has had its day. Shameless is not offensive. It’s a lazy piece of referencing by the MPs to refer to the underclass.”