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As the undeserving poor become ever more closely associated with negative characteristics, the well-adjusted majority can continue to enjoy the benefits of 'meritocracy' with easy minds.
Long before she was found guilty of criminal behaviour, press coverage of Karen Matthews (recently sentenced to prison for her role in the kidnap of her daughter Shannon) was a prominent example of the media's obsession with the 'undeserving poor' as a significant social problem. Even during the period when she was still regarded as a victim, her seven children by five fathers, track record of serial relationships, dependence on benefits, and poor parenting skills, seemed to sum up the 'chav' lifestyle already firmly established in popular journalism and tabloid television. It was observed that Matthews, in contrast to her parents and her sister, who maintained large families within stable long-term relationships and continuous employment, had slipped down and away from solid working-class structures into the realm of the disrespectable 'underclass'. The Daily Mail even produced an illustrated family tree for Matthews and her partner Craig Meehan, which depicted in graphic form the family's slippage from working-class respectability. In addition to births, marriages and deaths, attention was drawn in red print to criminal convictions, unemployed status and children living away from their mothers. The Mail's researchers traced the family back through many generations in an attempt to illustrate the family's fall from social grace.
The economics of 'underclass' living was sketched out in accounts of Matthews's income and expenditure. The interested public could learn how much Meehan earned working at the fish counter at Morrisons, what Matthews was paid in benefits each week, and that she spent money on crisps, sweets and fizzy drinks instead of nappies for her children. And the case against her was strengthened by the revelations that the family owned three home computers and even a widescreen television. As journalist Melanie McDonagh wryly noted, ' In our inverted scale of material values, the absence of a widescreen TV would be a surer indication of respectability'.1 Matthews was already judged culpable - as a greedy and overly reproductive drain on public resources - at a time when there was no hint of any linkage to her daughter's disappearance.2
In the coverage of the case the...