Below the line: Constructing a 'permanent underclass' in YouTube comments

Abstract

Using a critical discourse studies approach, here I analyse YouTube comments attached to an episode of Benefits Street, a Channel 4 documentary series about welfare recipients. Having qualitatively analysed over 3,000 comments, I argue that commenters use vari-directional double-voicing (Bakhtin, 1984) and enregistered emblems (Agha, 2007) to co-construct a stereotypical, embodied, and othered (Spivak, 1985) ‘underclass’ figure. This character is cast as permanently unemployed. Conceptions of a ‘permanent underclass’ are inaccurate, but also harmful, as they can lead British voters to back policies of austerity, which are not in most people’s interests (Hills, 2017). In 2012, the first reference to ‘strivers’ vs. ‘skivers’ emerged in political and media rhetoric. This ‘immensely powerful binary’ sets two essentialized social groups against each other: workers who ‘pay into the system’, and idlers who ‘take from the system’ (Jensen, 2014, p. 3). This dichotomy allows governments to conflate the interests of workers in insecure, low-paid employment with those of elites, as they are both ‘strivers’, contributing to society. Such rhetoric uses ‘the interests of tax-payers’ (Winlow & Hall, 2013, p. 102) to mobilise public support for neoliberal cuts to the welfare budget, supposedly to eliminate the draining of resources by the ‘skivers’, or the ‘permanent underclass.’ I argue that this is one reason why commenters who self-identify as ‘working class’ use their comments not to resist, but to impose elite hegemonic class discourses. Long-term unemployment in the UK is around half that of the EU. Despite this, British people are twice as likely as other Europeans to agree that benefits make people ‘lazy’ (Hills, 2017). Jensen & Tyler (2015, p. 1) call for more research which examines everyday ‘mechanisms of consent’ that help form anti-welfare attitudes. By analysing social class discourses found in YouTube comments, this paper takes a modest step in that direction.