Group case study - Bailey May

Moral Panic – Financial Crisis

The Financial Crisis of 2008-2009 was a huge break down in the banking systems and economies across the world which caused extremely hard times for people of all socio-economic backgrounds but those his hardest were the poorest of our society.

Why was it a Moral Panic?

The Finical crisis was classified as a moral panic due to it affecting every single person in the UK as our society and country is run the system Capitalism and relies entirely on money to able to maintain a stable economy. Therefore, when this financial crisis hit it got huge media coverage for many months has it’s such an important issue in this country that it needed to be covered for the public to know how serious an issue this was will affect them.

This was portrayed through the contemporary newspaper articles which conveyed a sense of emergency and panic, for example The Telegraph said on March 2008 ‘UK facing the worst finical crisis ‘in decades’’, The Daily Mail stated in October 2008 ‘Worst Financial Crisis in human history: Bank bosses warns as pound suffers biggest fall for 37 years’ and The Guardian told ‘2008 exploded into a global financial earthquake’.  All these articles are using very pessimistic vocabulary that have connotations with doomsdayism which instantly hits people at a moral level to the dangerous leverage this crisis had over the UK and the people in it, especially the working class.

How did it affect the working class?

This is a prime example of Marxism and Hegemony as the crisis was caused by the people with power of the economy which were the bankers and investors.  They were involved in taking people’s money and investing that money in the economy on risky investments that may make huge amounts of money for the country or cause financial meltdown as it did in 2008.

The video below will explain this in fuller detail:

Now it terms of how this affected working class people, their money was left in the hands of their banks and bankers and had no say nor power in how the banks would invest that money so they were pretty much powerless. As a result of the wrong doing of wealthy powerful figures that created the crash, it made it extremely hard for low income people to maintain their lifestyle as prices rose to compensate for everyone not having a lot of money and due to business taking a huge blow due to the crisis they had to make thousands of workers redundant, therefore unemployment levels rose and most of those people were working class.

As a consequence of so many working class people being unemployed it has led to social unrest amongst society and predominantly with working class people as they had their lives made oppressed and significantly more challenging  by people who valued their hard earned money as a risky investment opportunity that may or may not pay off. Therefore, due to this crisis and hierarchy of society, there have been several moral panics that have stemmed from the 2008 financial crisis such as the rise of the ‘ASBO’ culture and more emphasis on people who are considered ‘chavs’ with disgruntled youths who lives have put on the breadline of poverty due to the crisis. 

One moral panic that was partly linked to the financial crisis was the 2011 Tottenham riots, even though it was a march for a man who was shot, some of the frustration and anger displayed in the riots is down to the poor living conditions and low employment of young people in that area caused by the previous financial crisis that has caused these people to have no jobs or obvious opportunity to better themselves.  

Varying media coverage

Something interesting to highlight is how the media has covered the financial crisis compared to that of the Tottenham riots and other panics. For example, when the working class youth hit the headlines for something there is always a negative stigma behind it with the media discriminating them all as ‘chavs’ while not knowing or taking into account their upbringing or real reasons to why they have performed in a disorderly manner. For example The Telegraph published an article titled ‘Britain has produced unteachable uber-chavs’ and later goes onto saying that ‘They are not doing anything productive and are costing the taxpayers a fortune’ and doesn’t give a subjective argument which means the reader is left to think the people who happen to fit the stereotype of the ‘uber-chav’ are doing this because they can. However, compared to an article published by The economist in 2013 that reflects on the crisis the towards people is very different with it saying ‘Central bankers and other regulators bear responsibility too, for mishandling the crisis, for failing to keep economic imbalances in check and for failing to exercise proper oversight of financial institutions.’

When compared to one another, we can see distinct difference in the tone and attitude towards each people, with The Economist’s article subtly pointing out how the bankers and regulators made a mistake that is all their fault and cost the public unfathomable amounts of money. But when it comes to the unprivileged youth they are branded aggressively as ‘uber-chavs’ and who actually only cost the taxpayer £5.95 a day which equals £2171 a year that a taxpayers money gets spent on welfare. Whereas to bail out that banks it cost as stated an article by The Guardian ‘the scale of the support currently provided to the UK banks has fallen from a peak £995bn t00 £512bn’ showing how mainstream has manipulated the public into thinking it’s the working class that cause they finical moral panics, when actually it’s the people in power who are responsible and they us vulnerable, voiceless people as scapegoats.