it. Some journalists went as far as to suggest that people in these sorts of communities were somehow less than human. Take Carole Malone: a highly paid columnist and TV pundit who regularly indulges in angry rants against whoever has miffed her that week. Despite her wealth, she felt qualified to pass judgement on people living on council estates because she used to live ‘next’ to one. It was, she claimed, ‘much like the one in Dewsbury Moor. It was full of people like Karen Matthews. People who’d never had jobs, never wanted one, people who expected the state to fund every illegitimate child they had—not to mention their drink, drug and smoking habits.’ Their ‘houses looked like pigsties—dog crap on the floor (trust me, I’ve seen it), putrid carpets, piles of clothes and unwashed dishes everywhere.’
In case her attempt to strip these working-class communities of their humanity was too subtle for the reader, Malone spelt it out in black and white. Matthews, Meehan and Donovan, she declared, ‘belonged to that sub (human) class that now exists in the murkiest, darkest corners of this country’. They were ‘good-for-nothing scroungers who have no morals, no compassion, no sense of responsibility and who are incapable of feeling love or guilt.’16 According to Malone these communities were filthy, subhuman and devoid of the basic emotions. They were crawling with the type of person who would stage the kidnapping of their own daughter for cash, or—as the Daily Mail put it more succinctly—the ‘feral underclass’.17
Imagine that Carole Malone had been talking about people who were black, or Jewish, or even Scottish. There would have been the most almighty uproar, and rightly so. Malone’s career would be over and the Sun would be facing legal action for printing material that incited hatred. But there was no outcry and no angry demands for her sacking. Why? Because the communities she was attacking are regarded as fair game. ‘There is an ugly trend of bashing the less privileged developing in this country and I don’t like it at all,’ pleaded Daily Star columnist Joe Mott at the height of the hysteria over Karen Matthews. ‘Let’s stop using the situation as an excuse to take cheap shots at the working class.’18 His was a lonely voice. As far as his fellow journalists were concerned, Karen Matthews wasn’t a one-off. Britain was teeming with people like her.
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 Journalists. ‘It was almost like—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.’19 This 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 ball 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 by their predecessors. In the London jungle, similar behaviour is not unknown.’20 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. It is rare for the media’s eye to fall on working-class people at all; when it does, it is 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 leadership 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 unemployed communities full of feckless, work-shy, amoral, dirty, sexually debauched and even animal-like individuals. Conservative organs such as the Daily 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).21
The timing was perfect for politicians determined to give the welfare state a good kicking. Former Conservative leader Iain 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. It was 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.23 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—all of them working class—was, in one fell 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 one-off 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.’24 Here it was again: a link between Karen Matthews and much larger groups of working-class people. It was a clever political tactic. If the wider British public were led to believe that people who shared her background were capable of the same monstrous behaviour, they would be more likely to support policies directed against them.
Tory