The Sunday People, May 12, 2013
When the most notorious tabloid stories about benefits claimants feature ‘folk devils’ such as Mick Philpott, it's easy to assume that populist narratives on welfare are necessarily reactionary, not least because of the emphasis on the personal failings of individual claimants over the social and economic context. Certainly stories like Philpott's reinforce stereotypes about the feckless, fecund and profligate poor who have never worked, which are assumed to reflect public attitudes on welfare and underpin support for benefits cuts, even by left wing commentators and, less surprisingly perhaps, Labour politicians as well as Conservative. However, there has been populist opposition to austerity in the left-leaning tabloids, including substantial campaigns against the 'bedroom tax'. These stories, too, relied centrally on personal narratives of living on benefits.
In January 2013, the Daily and Sunday Mirror and Sunday People launched campaigns opposing cuts to housing benefit popularly known as the 'bedroom tax'; the policy imposes cuts to housing benefit for social housing tenants who are deemed to have one or more spare bedrooms. The term was even credited to the Mirror by the Oxford English Dictionary when it shortlisted it as one of its 'words of the year'; it would be some months later before the government would try to rebrand it 'the removal of the spare room subsidy' or 'under-occupancy penalty', such was their surprise at opposition to a benefit cut.
