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 it than 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 circumstances. 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. ‘I think 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. ‘I 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 it was two decades ago. In stark contrast, only one in fourteen children in Britain share this background.26
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 class to feckless, feral underclass, and sneer at the brainless blobs of lard who spend their days on leatherette sofas in front of plasma TVs, chewing the deep-fried cud over Jeremy Kyle,’ speculated commentator Christina Patterson. ‘We’ve got a word for them too: “Chavs”.’27
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 it at £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 to one, then you live in a world of feverish fantasy.’ Unlike many of his colleagues, Hari thought that it was 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. If more 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. NUJ 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 closed 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-class 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 Mail like. 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 of lawyers, journalists-as-politicians, various professions, lecturers in particular … 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, including Tory 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