Framing the Philpotts: Anti-welfarism and the British newspaper reporting of the Derby house fire verdict

Abstract

This article analyses the newspaper reporting of the Mick Philpott manslaughter verdict of 2013. Philpott is an unemployed British man who in May 2012 set fire to his house, accidentally killing six children. This article argues that the Philpott verdict provided a valuable propaganda opportunity for British politicians and elements of the British media to link the crime to ‘welfare reform’ at a time when the coalition government had begun to target welfare benefits for cuts. In particular, it is argued that the demonization of Philpott as a member of the white British underclass converged with an intensification of conservative and anti-welfarist arguments about the United Kingdom’s benefits system, reviving and reinforcing the Victorian concept of the ‘undeserving poor’ and the related notion that benefits are a reward for good behaviour rather than a right. Examining articles from national newspapers published in the days following the announcement of a guilty verdict in the trial, this article analyses the discursive framing of the stories in order to discover what kind of ideological messages were at work in the reporting of the Philpott verdict and what sorts of differences existed between these messages. The article concludes with an attempt to set this analysis in a wider socio-political context, considering how the press’s perspectives on the story relate to the ideological (re)framing of public discussion about welfare ‘benefits’ and claimants in the United Kingdom today.

‘Moving life stories tell us just why politics matters’: Personal narratives in tabloid anti-austerity campaigns

“…A particularly prominent case occurred during the sample period when Mick Philpott, father of 17 children, was found guilty of manslaughter of six of them in a failed plot to appear to save the children from a house fire, frame his former lover and regain custody. He was notoriously described in a Daily Mail front page headline as the "Vile Product of Welfare UK" (2nd April 2013) though this framing was resisted by the Mirror as well as the liberal broadsheets (Harper 2014). Dominant assessments of public opinion, therefore, assumed people to be unconcerned about those less well-off, but especially resentful of those perceived as undeservedly having more.…”

“…Benefits claimants are one such group routinely othered in popular news discourse, stereotyped as lazy or hampered by dependency, profligate and having excessive children (Hancock, 2004;Harper, 2014;Lens, 2002), so we would expect to see particular efforts to present them as sympathetic in campaigns against benefit cuts. However, in their construction as 'good victims', conventional judgements about the 'undeserving poor' may remain unchallenged, and in fact a focus on their personal characteristics and behaviour could obscure the structural social and economic constraints on their agency.…”

“…The dominant political orientation of that outrage is 'reactionary popular' (Sparks, 1992: 41) or 'right-wing populism' (Hallin and Mancini, 2004: 211) that tends to blame social problems on folk devils such as benefits 'scroungers', which could construct, or at least reinforce, a populist imagined community (Conboy, 2006). However, there are also left-leaning, Labour party-supporting tabloids, which stake a similar claim to speak for the ordinary citizen but avoid demeaning benefits claimants in the same way (Harper, 2014). This article will examine the use of personal narratives in two campaigns against a controversial welfare reform popularly known as the 'bedroom tax' that ran in the Daily Mirror and Sunday People over the course of 2013, to evaluate whether they succeeded in translating the individual narratives of suffering into political advocacy.…”