“Scrounger-bashing” as national pastime: the prevalence and ferocity of anti-welfare ideology on niche-interest online forums

摘要

Recent research has noted the persistence of a long continuum of “anti-welfare” discourses that are increasingly embedded in the UK news media, political communication, and popular culture (e.g. Golding and Middleton . . Oxford: Mark Robertson; Jensen . “Welfare Commonsense, Poverty Porn and Doxosophy.” 19 (3): 277–283; Morrison 2019. . 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”: promoting an ideology of “work” in symbolic opposition to supposed cultures of “worklessness”. But, while “scroungerphobia” (Deacon . “The Scrounging Controversy: Public Attitudes Towards the Unemployed in Contemporary Britain.” 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. . “‘It’s not the Fact They Claim Benefits but Their Useless, Lazy, Drug Taking Lifestyles we Despise’: Analysing Audience Responses to Benefits Street Using Live Tweets.” 21: 36–45; Morrison 2019. . London: Zed Books; Paterson ). 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 It draws on previously unpublished findings from an analysis of welfare-related conversations in these and other spaces at the height of a recent moral panic over “scroungers”: the period from 2013-2016, when Conservative-led governments strove to legitimise sweeping benefit cuts and punitive “welfare reform”.