o t e m o H e m o C y h t a C m o r F
t S s t fi e Ben Rachel Broady looks at how the poor have become demonised by the media
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hen Mick and Mairead Philpott, with their friend Paul Mosley, were found guilty of the manslaughter of six children after setting fire to a Derby council house police described their act as ‘stupid’, ‘shameful’, ‘tragic’. After the sentence was passed the Daily Mail headline, however, cried: ‘Vile Product of Welfare UK’ in what was described by the New Statesman as an “incendiary oversimplification of a complex tragedy”. Within days there were reports of the case inspiring a need for benefit reform and the agenda was set; lighting up the bottom of the internet like a pinball machine, ensuring people took sides not just against those convicted but against all those in receipt of benefits.
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Even Chancellor George Osborne stepped in, saying: “I think there is a question for governments and for society about the welfare state and the taxpayers who pay for the welfare state subsidising lifestyles like that.” The Philpotts came to justify welfare reform and to define the problem with people on benefits. Prior to his conviction, Mick Philpott had appeared on The Jeremy Kyle show and on Ann Widdecombe Versus the Benefits Culture, both in 2007, as he was lined up as the go-to representative of the underclass for a media hungry to portray such stories. Before the Philpott tragedy in 2013, there was already an increase in political debates about benefit claimants, with Osborne’s 2010 Spending Review Statement outlining “plans to step up the fight to catch benefit cheats” and this was against a background of Murdoch’s media outing of ‘scroungers’, ‘swindlers’ and ‘lazy benefit cheats’, climaxing with The Sun’s Beat the Cheat campaign. Meanwhile the Daily Star named and shamed ‘Britain’s six biggest benefits scroungers’ and the Daily Express reported