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not pissed out of our trees or high as a kite all the time, like they associate with council estates,’ local community leader Julie Bushby angrily berated journalists. ‘Ninety per cent of people here work. We’ve all taken money out of [our] own pockets for this.’ Aware of the contrasting response to the disappearance of the girl who had become affectionately known simply as ‘Maddie’, she added: ‘Two children have gone missing, that’s the point. Everyone feels the same when that happens: rich, pauper, whatever. Good luck to Kate McCann. It’s the kids we’re looking for, isn’t it? Not the mothers.’8
But, as it was to turn out, there was a big difference between the two cases. Unlike Madeleine McCann, Shannon was found alive on 14 March 2008. She had been kidnapped, tethered with a rope tied to a roof beam, hidden in a divan bed and drugged to keep her quiet. As far as the public was aware at that point, an estranged distant relative had snatched her. It was to be weeks before the true story emerged. Yet the knives were not out for the man believed to be the abductor, an eccentric loner who was the uncle of Karen Matthews’s partner. In the firing line were Karen Matthews and, more importantly, the class she was taken to represent.
With Shannon safe, it was no longer considered tasteless to openly lay into her community. The affair became a useful case study into Britain’s indulgence of an amoral class. ‘Her background, a scenario that encompasses the awful, dispiriting and undisciplined face of Britain, should be read as a lesson in failure,’ one columnist wrote in the Birmingham Mail. ‘Karen Matthews, 32 but looking 60, glib hair falling across a greasy face, is the product of a society which rewards fecklessness.’9
Here was an opportunity to score fresh political points. Melanie Phillips is one of Britain’s most notorious self-appointed moral arbiters and an aggressive champion of what she sees as traditional values. To her, the Shannon Matthews case was a gift, vindicating what she had been saying all along. Days after the girl was found, Phillips argued that the affair helped to ‘reveal the existence of an underclass which is a world apart from the lives that most of us lead and the attitudes and social conventions that most of us take for granted.’ In a hysterical tirade, the writer alleged that there were ‘whole communities where committed fathers are so rare that any child who actually has one risks being bullied’, and where ‘boys impregnate two, three, four girls with scarcely a second thought’.10 No evidence was given in support of these allegations.
In an increasingly poisonous atmosphere, some of the most extreme prejudices began to erupt into the open. In a debate on the case in March 2008, one Conservative councillor in Kent, John Ward, suggested that: ‘There is an increasingly strong case for compulsory sterilisation of all those who have had a second child—or third, or whatever—while living off state benefits.’ When challenged, Mr Ward was unrepentant about calling for the sterilization of ‘professional spongers’ who he claimed ‘breed for greed’.11 Sounds familiar? Local Labour councillor Glyn Griffiths thinks so, telling me it is ‘effectively Nazi eugenics’ which is ‘unacceptable in a Western democracy’.
But his horror was not shared by the dozens of Daily Mail readers who bombarded the newspaper with messages in support of the Tory councillor. ‘I fail to see the problem with his comments,’ wrote one, adding: ‘It is NOT a God-given right to mass-produce children.’ ‘What a great idea,’ wrote another well-wisher. ‘Let’s see if the politicians are bold enough to adopt it.’ More practical contributors suggested starting a petition in support, while another came up with the imaginative proposal to lace the entire water supply with an infertility drug and then offer an antidote only to ‘suitable’ parents. ‘No doubt the liberal lefties will be up in arms,’ added this perceptive contribution. ‘After all, they rely on the unemployed “chavs” to vote them into power.’ Yet another expressed their ‘100%’ agreement with Ward’s proposals: ‘The country is sinking under the weight of these sponging bludgers.’12
Of course, class prejudice isn’t always as crude as this. Unhinged though some of these comments are, they undoubtedly reflect an undercurrent of hatred in British society. But this was only the tip of the iceberg. When the dark truth of the Matthews affair came to light, open season was declared on working-class communities like Dewsbury Moor.
Over three weeks after her daughter had been found alive, Karen Matthews was dramatically arrested. In one of the most unimaginable crimes a mother could commit, she had kidnapped her own nine-year-old daughter to pocket the reward money, by then totalling £50,000. As if the case couldn’t get any more surreal, Craig Meehan was charged with possessing child porn. ‘Which one of you lot is going to be arrested next?’ mocked the crowd gathered to watch the friends and relatives of Matthews as she appeared in court.13
Yet there was much more to the strange case of Shannon Matthews than an abusive parent who went to extraordinary lengths to use her own daughter for financial gain. The episode was like a flare, momentarily lighting up a world of class and prejudice in modern Britain. Of course, media intrigue was more than justified by the unique horror of the case and the perverse manner in which Karen Matthews had deceived her community, the police and the nation as a whole. And yet, for a whole host of media commentators and politicians, this was far from an isolated case, involving a depraved individual who shared guilt only with those who were directly complicit. ‘The case seems to confirm many prejudices about the “underclass”,’ reflected one local newspaper.14 It was as though everyone in the country from a similar background was crammed into the dock alongside her.
Acting as the nation’s judges, juries and executioners, the tabloids turned on Dewsbury Moor. Local residents were fair game: after all, they had the audacity to live on the same street as Karen Matthews. The estate became a template for similar working-class communities up and down the country. ‘Estate is like a nastier Beirut’ was one thoughtful Sun headline. At first glance, this might appear rather tasteless. After all, Beirut was the epicentre of a particularly horrific civil war in which around a quarter of a million people died, reducing much of the city to rubble. But the Sun didn’t lack evidence for its assertion. ‘As the Press descended, people were pictured walking into the shops in their pyjamas up to MIDDAY … even in the rain.’ The estate ‘is a real-life version of the smash hit Channel 4 series Shameless,’ claimed this nuanced piece, referring to the hit show about the chaotic lives of a few families on a council estate in Manchester. Despite them having been tried and convicted by the Sun, the paper surprisingly found that ‘local families refuse to admit it’.15
Journalists had to be more than a little selective to create this caricature. They didn’t mention the fact that when the media became bored with some scruffy working-class girl vanishing ‘up north’, the local community had compensated by coming together to find her. Scores of volunteers had tramped from door to door with leaflets every night of her disappearance, often in pouring rain. They had booked coaches to take teams of people as far afield as Birmingham to hand out notices, while multilingual leaflets had been produced to cater for the area’s large Muslim population. Many of the local people were poor, but they delved deep into their pockets to give some of the little they had to help find Shannon.
‘I personally feel, and local councillors as a whole strongly feel, that the community demonstrated a unique strength,’ reflects local councillor Khizar Iqbal. ‘They all came together. Everyone was really concerned about the welfare of the child and wanted to see that child safe and well. I am very proud of the strength of community that was shown.’ But this sense of a tightly knit working-class community, with limited resources, united behind a common cause, never became part of the Shannon Matthews story. It just didn’t fit in with the Shameless image that the media was cultivating.
Nowhere in this coverage was the idea that someone could have the same background as Karen Matthews, or live on the same estate, without being horribly dysfunctional. ‘What I thought was marvellous was some of the people round [Karen Matthews],’ says former government minister Frank Field. ‘One of her friends, when it came out that she had done all of this, said that when she met her, she was going to give her a good slapping and then a hug. I think that, sadly, what the press haven’t done is answer more interesting questions: why is it that some of her neighbours are exemplary parents and why