Marcus Rashford’s campaign a few months ago to extend access to free school meals to children living in poverty throughout lockdown was widely lauded in the press – but not universally so. Ex-SWP member and convicted domestic abuser Rod Liddle, writing in the Spectator, recently used the campaign as another excuse to have a wild jab at the ‘culture of poverty’. For Liddle, it was not an ever-widening chasm of inequality that made some families unable to afford to feed their children. It’s the spending habits of the poor, who are now ‘more spendthrift, selfish and irresponsible’ than ever before.

Such crass generalisations are nothing new of course, and the particular tropes seem to roll back around with wearying regularity. In an interview for the Guardian podcast on her project to chart the rising and declining political fortunes of Leigh, a so-called Red Wall town near Wigan that flipped from Labour to Conservative at the last general election, Helen Pidd discusses some of the conversations she’s had with locals. Once again, Pidd says, Rashford’s campaign came up, but even this didn’t seem to be swinging voters away from the Tories. Most, she says, were ambivalent about it, instead saying things like: ‘Well I do see parents near where I live, and they go to the food bank but they’ve got a massive telly.’

TV ownership is one of the defining tropes of such moralising about the spendthrift nature of the working class, but it wasn’t always this way. In its infancy, television was a middle-class and strictly London phenomenon. The BBC’s first broadcasts in the 1930s came out from its base in Alexandra Palace; with the signal stretching little further than 40 miles from its North London hub, and with sets both cumbersome and expensive, it’s little wonder that TV ownership didn’t spread far. By the 1950s, though, TVs had become a mass commodity, and with the breaking of the BBC’s monopoly of the airwaves with the introduction of ITV in 1955, the snobbery we now so often see regarding television began to suffuse the nascent medium.

By 1950 the poet T. S. Eliot was already lamenting the ‘television habit’ in a letter to the Times, and such fears continued to be spread throughout the next few decades. Despite the Reithian remit of the BBC, with its commitment to highbrow public service broadcasting, by the time that TV ownership started to become more affordable, many in the cultural establishment were expressing grave fears about its malign influence on the masses.

It was in 1976 that we can see the first clear signs of the moral panic about working-class TV buying. In that year, as Joe Moran documents in his brilliant history of Britain’s TV habits Armchair Nation, right-wing Tory MP Iain Sproat led a campaign against ‘dole scroungers’, where the TV became a central symbol. Despite nearly 97 percent of the population by then owning a television set, the Guardian quoted the MP for South Aberdeen railing against such ‘persistently feckless’ scroungers who spent their social security cheques ‘in betting shops, bingo halls or on colour television sets’, rather than putting it to more productive use.

As it was for colour TV then, so it is for the flat-screen today. By the early 2000s, the moral crusaders were charging against the eating habits of Britain’s poor, with the TV chef Jamie Oliver bemoaning those parents who stuffed their children full of cheesy chips while sat in front of a ‘massive fucking TV’. Such moralism could even be seen within the benefit system itself. In a recent set of interviews conducted with workers at several branches of JobCentre Plus across the UK, sociologists Jamie Redman and Del Roy Fletcher from Sheffield Hallam University found that many of those entrusted to manage the benefit system held pejorative and stereotypical views about the working class. As one manager said:

‘Nowadays when you go a customer’s house, they all have the big TV. I know it’s a stereotypical thing to say, but they do. Because that’s what they do all day. They sit all day and they put Jeremy Kyle on.’

What is it about buying a TV that angers so many people? By 2019, over 95 percent of British households owned a TV, and I would imagine that very few of those used the long-obsolete cathode ray technology – that is, they’ll have flat screens. Yet owning a flat-screen television, and the effects of watching it, have become central to two different cultural wars being fought out around class and poverty. Not only is TV defined against properly meaningful cultural activity—if you’re watching TV then you can’t be reading a book, say, or listening to classical music—but it’s also a sign that the working class are, much like children, simply unable to make proper decisions for themselves.

Why, cry so many public moralists, do people continue to spend money on TVs when they should be feeding their kids? In this cry television becomes both a symbol of the sterility of the working class, their minds apparently dulled by endless repeats and reality TV, and also of their irresponsibility. Yet the relative affordability of TV sets was brought back to me recently when a friend’s home was burgled, and despite them making off with sunglasses and a Dyson fan, the TV remained were it had always been. You can purchase a new flat-screen TV from Argos for a little over £100, and 55″ smart TVs are for sale, on hire purchase, for less than £15 a month. And for your money you get access to a huge range of cultural and entertainment programming.

What such thinking does though is to blame the poor themselves for their own poverty. There is also something slightly retro about the chiding of strivers versus scroungers. Such rhetoric reached its peak during the Cameron years, with then chancellor George Osborne contrasting the hardworking shift-working with their neighbour ‘sleeping off a life on benefits’. As last year’s British Social Attitudes Survey showed, the effects of the pandemic have further softened people’s attitudes towards those on benefits. Now, for the first time since the mid-1990s, more people disagree than agree with the statement that ‘if welfare benefits weren’t so generous, people would learn to stand on their own two feet.’

What focusing on the consumption habits of the working class—and chiding them for having invariably making the wrong ones—did was allow the conditions that produced the gaping chasm of inequality over the past 30 years to remain untouched. It’s still to be seen whether the public’s softening attitude to benefit claimants will bring forth new forms of solidarity, but one thing is clear: by individualising the way we talk about poverty, all we do is let the real culprits off the hook.