Abstract

‘Austerity’ Britain has proliferated all manner of retro fashions, dispositions and attitudes, none more so than the re-emergence of good old-fashioned ‘benefits bashing’, achieved through a heady mix of innovative ‘poverty porn’ broadcasting and Coalition rhetoric and policy. However, despite efforts to valiantly expose these dual drivers of ‘claimant class’ defamation, the contemporary ‘benefits scrounger’ has nevertheless come to embody a key problematic for contemporary resisters of inequality and stigmatisation and defenders of social security systems. Specifically, those of us interested in contesting class-based shaming and projects of devaluation are being confronted with a set of analytical and tactical challenges which bring us face to face with the registers of character and morality through which this shaming is organized. These are challenges, I want to argue here, that ‘we’ are in danger of failing.