James Morrison - Scroungers

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Morrison is a Reader in Journalism in the School of Creative and Cultural Business at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. He specializes in moral panics and media-political discourses around stigmatized groups, including benefit claimants, immigrants and teenagers, and how the public responds and contributes to these narratives through interpersonal communication and social media. Before becoming an academic, he was a full-time journalist, working for a succession of newspapers, including The Independent on Sunday , before going freelance. He has since written for numerous papers and magazines, including Guardian Society , The Times , Telegraph Magazine and The Ecologist . He is a senior examiner and member of the National Council for the Training of Journalists Public Affairs Board and the author of Essential Public Affairs for Journalists . Other recent academic publications include the monograph Familiar Strangers, Juvenile Panic and the British Press: The Decline of Social Trust and articles in Digital Journalism and the Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies .

Scroungers: Moral Panics and Media Myths was first published in 2019 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK

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Copyright James Morrison 2019

The right of James Morrison to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

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Index: James Morrison

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78699-214-7 hb

ISBN 978-1-78699-213-0 pb

ISBN 978-1-78699-215-4 pdf

ISBN 978-1-78699-216-1 epub

ISBN 978-1-78699-217-8 mobi

I am heavily indebted to Professor Peter Golding and Sue Middleton for Images of Welfare , their ground-breaking, multifaceted anatomy of an earlier scrounger panic, against which all other works on this subject should be judged. As Peter observed in a recent email exchange, the enduring relevance of the scrounger folk-devil is enough to leave one perennially depressed (though that is not my aim!). Thanks are also due for the sage advice and feedback I received from other academics (and editors) in relation to the various conference papers, articles and proposal drafts involved in this books gestation. Chief among these have been my editor at Zed Books, Ken Barlow; my erstwhile PhD supervisor, Professor James Curran, at Goldsmiths; Dr Justin Schlosberg, at Birkbeck; Jakob Horstmann, at Transcript Verlag; Professor Chas Critcher, at Sheffield Hallam; Dr Stuart Waiton, at Abertay; Professor Bob Franklin, at Cardiff; Staffordshire Universitys inestimable, irrepressible Professor Mick Temple; and Samira Ahmed (surely Britains most cerebral journalist).

I also want to thank the family, friends and colleagues who have encouraged and emboldened me by repeatedly reassuring me that this was a project (and cause) worth pursuing despite all the competing commitments and pressures that consistently threatened to derail it. Of friends and colleagues, my thanks go out especially to my political soulmate and fellow traveller, Justin McKeating, and to Dr Fiona Smith and Dr Elizabeth Tait at Robert Gordon University. Endless thanks, also, to my beautiful wife, Annalise, and three children, who have tolerated my working holidays (and evenings and weekends) over the past two years. I also owe everything to my father, Andrew, who endured years of involuntary unemployment and poverty during the 1980s, and my late mother, Helen, who stood at his side throughout, loving and resolute to the end. Above all, though, I want to thank my brother, Alan Morrison: a gifted and passionate poet, polemicist and campaigner who, aside from his inspiring verse and calls to arms in defence of the Welfare State, has had more experience than most of the unforgiving harshness of 21st century social (in)security. In summing up the disturbing levels of satisfaction the Great British public is assumed to derive from todays media diet of poverty porn and shirker-bashing news stories, the wording of his recent poem St. Jude and the Welfare Jew could hardly be more apt: