Scroungers by James Morrison

Author:James Morrison [Morrison, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Language Arts & Disciplines, Journalism, Political Science, Public Policy, Social Services & Welfare, Political Process, Media & Internet, Media Studies, Education, Higher, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Poverty & Homelessness
ISBN: 9781786992161
Google: -7yrDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Published: 2019-02-15T05:13:42+00:00

POVERTY AS NATURE/NURTURE: THE ‘SOFT’ SCROUNGER FRAME

As mentioned earlier, a small minority of pro-hegemonic articles in all but two datasets (‘benefits’ and ‘jobless’) adopted ‘soft’, rather than ‘hard’, scrounger frames. Articles affirming an underlying scrounger discourse, while avoiding more vituperative rhetoric, tended to be those absolving claimants of (some) blame for their perceived behavioural or character flaws. Typically, though, such pieces still adopted regressive socio-political perspectives, in that they fell back on (widely discredited, though oft-revived) ideas about pathological poverty: the condescending suggestion that inherited genetic and/or behavioural flaws meant some people could not help being poor.

Perhaps the clearest example was a Times opinion piece by Jenni Russell (a long-time adherent of the ‘dependency culture’ school − e.g. Russell 2008), which championed Dr Adam Perkins, lecturer in the neurobiology of personality at King’s College London, following the cancellation of his scheduled speech at the London School of Economics to publicize his controversial book The Welfare Trait: How State Benefits Affect Personality. The book argues that ‘welfare-induced personality mis-development is a significant part of the problem’ and ‘each generation’ in receipt of benefits ‘has lower work motivation than the previous one’ (Palgrave Macmillan 2016). Russell summarized this as an argument that unemployed people ‘tend’ to be ‘more aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking’ than the ‘general population’, due to ‘a mixture of genetics and upbringing’, adding that ‘the antisocial ones’ produce ‘children whose personalities are likely to be damaged by growing up with chaotic, irresponsible parents’ (Russell 2016). In one sense, then, this (infantilizing) neurobiological take on the pathological poverty thesis did little more than dress up well-trodden conservative ideas casting deprivation as a fault of the welfare system itself, rather than structural factors. In another sense, though, Russell’s defence of Perkins’ readiness to ‘think the unthinkable’ on welfare (a phrase directly echoing a famous 1997 instruction from Tony Blair to Frank Field) revived the lazy imaginary of the scrounger; with talk of ‘workless households’ and ‘inadequate, self-centred parents’. It did so, though, while trying to perform a discursive back-flip: freeing these people from responsibility by blaming systemic failings that gave them ‘the opportunity and incentive to produce children ill-equipped for a fulfilling life’ (Russell 2016).

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