by Owen Jones
They had created this impression through blatant manipulation of the facts. 'As with all these things, there are always some elements of truth in what is being said, but they are extrapolated for effect or exaggerated to create a better story from the media's point of view,' says Jeremy Dear, leader of the National Union of [ournalists, 'It was almost like-s-what would you expect of these people?' Newspapers had directed their fire at 'her [Karen Matthews's] background and who she is: her class, more than her as an individual'.
Above all, underlying the coverage was the idea that the old working class had given way to a feckless 'chav' rump. 'What was once a working class is now, in some places, an underclass,' wrote Melanie McDonagh in the independent. 'It is a decline that this unfortunate woman seems to embody. ,19This was after all at the heart of the caricature: that we are all middle class, apart from the chav remnants of a decaying working class.
The Shannon Matthews affair was just one particularly striking example of the media using an isolated case to reinforce the 'chav' caricature: feckless, feral, and undeserving. But it was far from the last. Now that the hall was rolling, the media enthusiastically seized on other cases to confirm this distorted portrayal.
The news in November 2008 that a London toddler, initially known only as 'Baby P', had died as a result of horrific abuse at the hands of his mother and her partner provided one such case. Beyond the uproar at the systemic failures of the local council's child -protection agencies, the spotlight again fell on people who lived outside the cosy confines of 'Middle England'. 'Many of them will have had mothers with offspring by several different males,' claimed Bruce Anderson in the Sunday Telegraph. 'In the African bush, male lions who seize control of the pride often resent and kill the cubs fathered bytheir predecessors. In the London jungle, similar behaviour is not unknown: The Baby P horror fuelled what the Shannon Matthews affair had sparked in earnest: an attempt to dehumanize people living in poor working-class communities.
The few journalists who refrained from swelling the tide of bile were right to complain of' cheap shots' at the working class. That is only half the story. Itis rare for the media's eye to fall on working -class people at all; when it does, itis almost always on outlandish individuals such as Karen Matthews, or Alfie Patten-a thirteen-year-old boy wrongly alleged to have fathered a child born in early 2009. Journalists seemed to compete over finding the most gruesome story that could be passed off as representative of what remained of working-class Britain. 'They will look at the worst estate they can find, and the worst examples they can find; objects Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee. 'They will point their camera at the worst possible workless dysfunctional family and say, "This is working-class life.'"
That's not to pretend there aren't people out there with deeply problematic lives, including callous individuals who inflict barbaric abuse on vulnerable children. The point is that they are a very small number of people, and far from representative. 'Freakish exceptions--such as people with ten children who have never had a job--are eagerly sought out and presented as typical,' believes independent journalist Johann Hari. 'There is a tiny proportion of highly problematic families who live chaotically and can't look after their children because they weren't cared for themselves. The number is hugely inflated to present them as paradigmatic of people from poor backgrounds.'
The media manipulation of the Shannon Matthews case was not itself the most worrying part of the story. Politicians recognize a bandwagon when they see one, and they hastily jumped on. Journalists' use of the Matthews case to caricature the supposed remnants of working-class Britain served a useful political purpose. Both the New Labour leader- ship and the Conservative Party were determined to radically cut the number of people receiving benefits. The media had helped to create the image of working-class areas degenerating into wholly unem- ployed communities full of feckless, work-shy, amoral, dirty, sexually debauched and even animal-like individuals. Conservative organs such as the Dairy Mail had used the fact that Karen Matthews did not have a job as a reason to attack the welfare state (a bit rich coming from a newspaper which is a fervent champion of 'stay-at-home' mothers)
The timing was perfect for politicians determined to give the welfare state a good kicking. Former Conservative leader lain Duncan Smith, in charge of hashing out Tory social policy and founder of the curiously misnamed Centre for Social Justice, argued that with the revelations of the Matthews saga 'it is as though a door on to another world has opened slightly and the rest of Britain can peer in.'22 You would think that millions of people were running around council estates, kidnapping their children in a crazed bid to cash in at the expense of the tabloid press. Itwas against this backdrop that the centre proposed that the ten million or so social housing tenants in Britain 'should be rewarded for decent behaviour by giving them a stake in their property'. This would help to break down the 'ghettos' of British council estates.Z3 Rewarded for decent behaviour. It's the sort of language used when dealing with prison inmates, children or pets. A huge portion of Britain's population
-aU of them working class=-was, in one feU swoop, implicated in Karen Matthews's actions.
To the Conservatives, Karen Matthews had become a convenient political prop. The Tory leader, David Cameron, himself used the affair to call for a drastic overhaul of the welfare state. 'The verdict last week on Karen Matthews and her vile accomplice is also a verdict on our broken society,' he argued in the Daily Mail.'If only this was a oneoff story.' As part of the reforms offered in response, Cameron pledged to 'end the something-for-nothing culture. If you don't take a reasonable offer of a job, you will lose benefits. No ifs, no buts.,24Here itwas again: a link between Karen Matthews and much larger groups of working-class people. Itwas a clever political tactic. If the wider British public were ledtobelieve that people who shared her background were capable of the same monstrous behaviour, they would be more likelyto support policies directed against them.
Tory proposals even contemplated investigating the home lives of the long-term unemployed. Conservative work and pensions spokesperson Chris Grayling justified the plans by arguing that although the Matthews case 'was a horrendous extreme ... it raises the curtain on a way of life in some of our most deprived estates, of entire households who have not had any productive life for generations. It's a world that really, really has to change. ,25
If these senior politicians were to be believed, Karen Matthews had demonstrated that there was a great layer of people below middle-class society whose warped lifestyles were effectively subsidized by the welfare state. 'The attribution of this to the welfare state is just bizarre, ' comments Johann Hari. 'It's an inversion of the argument used against the welfare state in the late nineteenth century that the poor were inherently morally indigent and fraudulent, so there was no point giving them help.'
of course, it is ludicrous to argue that a chronically dysfunctional individual like Karen Matthews was representative of working-class benefit recipients or council tenants, let alone the wider community. Those politicians who argued that she was failed to mention the horror felt by the community at her daughter's disappearance, and the way they united with such determination to find her.
Both journalists and politicians had used the reprehensible actions of one woman to demonize working-class people. Yet why did they consider the case to be such an insight into what life was like for so many communities outside the middle-class world? They claimed that the whole affair was a revealing snapshot of British society: and, in some ways, they had a point. But the case said a lot more about the people reporting itthan about those they were targeting.
Imagine you're a journalist from a middle-class background. You grow up in a nice middle-class town or suburb. You go to a private school and make friends with people from the same background. You end up at a good university with an overwhelmingly middle-class intake. When you finally land a job in the media, you once again find yourself surrounded by people who were shaped by more or less the same circumst
ances. How are you going to have the faintest clue about people who live in a place like Dewsbury Moor?
The Mirror's Kevin Maguire has no doubt that the background of media hacks has more than a little to do with the way they report on communities like Dewsbury Moor. 'Ithink it's bound to. You won't empathize or sympathize or understand and you might only bump into these people when they sell you a coffee or clean your house.' Increasingly, the lives of journalists have become divorced from those of the rest of us. '1 can't think of a national newspaper editor with school-age kids who has them in a state school,' he reflects. 'On top of that, most journalists at those levels are given private medical insurance. So you're kind of taken out of everyday life.'
Kevin Maguire is one of a tiny handful of senior journalists from working-class backgrounds. You will struggle to find anyone writing or broadcasting news who grew up somewhere even remotely like the Dewsbury Moor estate. Over half of the top hundred journalists were educated at a private school, a figure that is even higher than itwas two decades ago. Instark contrast, only one in fourteen children in Britain share this background.
More than anything, it is this ignorance of working-class life that explains how Karen Matthews became a template for people living in working-class communities. 'Perhaps it's because we're all middle class that we tut at the tragic transition of aspirational working classtofeckless, feral underclass, and sneer at the brainless blobs of lard who spend their days on leatherette sofas in front of plasma TV s, chewing the deep-fried cud over Jeremy Kyle,' speculated commentator Christina Patterson, we've got a word for them too; "Chavs"
One effect of this is a belief that society has become dominated by a large middle class, increasingly subject to further internal hierarchies, with the rest consisting of a working class that has degenerated into the 'chav' caricature. Johann Hari often asked other media people what they thought the median income in Britain was. The reply was always dramatically above the actual figure. One senior editor estimated itat £80,000. This absurd figure is nearly four times higher than the true amount of £21,000. 'Of course if you never leave Zone One, if you've never met anyone from an estate, never been toone, then you live in a world offeverish fantasy.' Unlike many of his colleagues, Hari thought that itwas nonsense to think of Karen Matthews as anything other than a 'pitiable freak' .
The journalists who reported on the Shannon Matthews affair are almost all from the same background, and hopelessly out of touch with ordinary life. So how has this happened? The reality is that it is more and more difficult for people from working-class backgrounds to get their foot in the door of newspapers or broadcasters. Ifmore people in the media had grown up in communities like Dewsbury Moor, we might expect coverage to be more balanced when dealing with these issues. The odds of that happening as things stand are somewhere approaching nil. NU] leader Jeremy Dear thinks the reason for this is simple. Increasingly, wannabe journalists have to pay for their own training, which usually means having at least one degree. That leaves a huge amount of debt on their shoulders when starting out in a profession with notoriously low wages for junior staff. 'The only people who can do that are those with financial support; he says. 'That is, those whose parents can support them, which means the nature of those going into journalism has changed dramatically.'
The problem is not just the shortage of working-class people in journalism. Most newspapers discarded the old labour correspondents as trade union power declined precipitously. Local government journalists, who at least gave some account of ordinary life across the country, have also vanished. Over the past few years, regional newspapers, which traditionally reported on daily life in local communities, have either dosed down or faced severe cuts. With the lives of ordinary people purged from the media, extreme cases such as Karen Matthews practically had a monopoly on the reporting of working-class life.
'working-dass people have completely ceased to exist as far as the media, popular culture and politicians are concerned,' argues Polly Toynbee. 'All that exists are nice middle-class people-nice people who own their own home, who the Daily Maillike. Then there are very bad people. You don't get much popular imagery of ordinary people of a neutral, let alone a positive kind:
We've seen that prominent politicians manipulated the media-driven frenzy to make political points. Like those who write and broadcast our news, the corridors of political power are dominated by people from one particular background. 'The House of Commons isn't representative, it doesn't reflect the country as a whole,' says Kevin Maguire. 'It's over-representative oflawyers, fessions, lecturers in particular journalists-as-politicians, various pro... there are few people who worked in call centres, or been in factories, or been council officials lower down.'
It's true to say that MPs aren't exactly representative of the sort of people who live on most of our streets. Those sitting on Parliament's green benches are over four times more likely to have gone to private school than the rest of us. Among Conservative MPs, a startling three out of every five have attended a private school.28 A good chunk of the political elite were schooled at the prestigious Eton College alone, includingTory leader David Cameron and nineteen other Conservative MPs.
There was once a tradition, particularly on the Labour benches, of MPs who had started off working in factories and mines. Those days are long gone. The number of politicians from those backgrounds is small, and shrinks with every election. Fewer than one in twenty MPs started out as manual workers, a number that has halved since 1987, despite the fact that that was a Conservative-dominated Parliament. On the other hand, a startling two-thirds had a professional job or worked in business before arriving in Parliament. Back in 1996, Labour's then deputy leader John Prescott echoed the Blairite mantra to claim that 'we're all middle-class now', a remark that would perhaps be more fitting if he had been talking about his fellow politicians.
If these MPs do have an understanding of life in places like Dewsbury Moor, one wonders where they got it. 'The people who came here previously had been involved in many campaigns, had been involved in fighting for their communities, had been involved perhaps in sacrificing significant amounts personally to be involved in politics and to try and change the world,' argues Labour backbencher Katy Clark. 'That perhaps is far less true now.' Unlike senior Conservative MPs, she did not see Karen Matthews as representative of a wider group of people. 'I think Karen Matthews represented Karen Matthews.'
Just because a politician has a privileged background, itdoesn't necessarily follow that they will lack sympathy for those who are less fortunate. Nonetheless, the odds of them understanding the realities of working-class communities are, unavoidably, considerably lower.
After all, how could someone like Prime Minister David Cameron even begin to understand a community like Dewsbury Moor? Even by the standards of most Conservative MPs, he's not exactly the sort of bloke you'd bump into in your local pub. He counts King William IV as an ancestor, his dad is a wealthy stockbroker, and his family have been making a killing in finance for decades. His wife, a senior director of one luxury goods business and owner of another, is the daughter of a major landowner and happens to be a descendant of King Charles II.
Now, it's true that as Leader of the Opposition Cameron famously hit back at those who challenged his privileged upbringing with the quip: 'It's not where you're from, it's where you're going.'29 All well and good, but doesn't where he's going have an awful lot to do with where he's ftom? His belief that the Karen Matthews case is broadly representative makes sense when you look at his feelings towards people who share her background. When his messy daughter once emerged at a social gathering in his £2million N otting Hill home, he reportedly groaned: 'You look like you've fallen out of a council £1at.'31)He's also admitted to regularly watching the TV comedy Shameless, which, as we've seen, has been compared to Dewsbury Moor by the tabloid press." 'A lot of working-class people laugh at Shameless,' Kevin Maguire notes, 'but I sort of think they're laughing at itslightly differently than
Cameron, who probably sees it as a drama-documentary.'
One of the Conservatives' few working-class MPs, Junior Transport Minister Mike Penning, admits that the lack of politicians from workingclass backgrounds impinges on their ability to relate to people in communities like Dewsbury Moor. 'It's physically impossible for someone to have an understanding of and empathy with the problems that some are having: say, for instance, at the moment, there's a lot of people being made redundant. You don't know what that's like unless you've been made redundant.' Part of the problem, he argues, was the difficulties getting into the political world. 'It is without doubt, no matter what political party you come from, extortionately difficult to get into this great House unless you have some kind ofleg-up the greasy pole.'
The fact that the British elite is stacked full of people from middleand upper-middle-class backgrounds helps to explain a certain double standard at work. Crimes committed by the poor will be seen as an indictment of anyone from a similar background. The same cannot be said for crimes where a middle-class individual is culpable. The massmurdering GP Harold Shipman might have gone down as a monster, but did anyone argue that his case shone a light on life in middle-class Britain? Where were the outraged tabloid headlines and politicians' sound-bites about middle-class communities that 'really, really have to change'?
And although cases such as the disappearance of Shannon Matthews are used as launch pads for attacks on so-called spongers, the wealthy do not receive anywhere near the same level of attention from the media or politicians. Welfare fraud is estimated to cost the Treasury around £1 billion a year. But, as detailed investigations by chartered accountant Richard Murphy have found, £70 billion is lost through tax evasion every year-that is, seventy times more. If anything, 'welfare evasion' is more of a problem, with billions of pounds worth of tax credits left unclaimed every year. The cruel irony is that poor people who live in communities like Dewsbury Moor actually pay more in tax as a proportion of their wage packets than many of the rich journalists and politicians who attack them. But where is the outcry over middleclass spongers? Given the media's distorted coverage, it's hardly surprising that people significantly underestimate the cost of taxavoidance and overestimate the cost of benefit fraud.