Things Can Only Get Dickensian: An Analysis of Media Coverage of Britain’s Cost of Living Crisis

The period following the 2008 financial crisis saw the UK enter a period of austerity, exacerbated by the wide-ranging welfare spending cuts of consecutive Conservative governments. Nevertheless, when it appeared that the situation could not become more dire for struggling Britons, the country found itself in the grips of a cost of living crisis precipitated by several concurrent developments such as inflation, an energy crisis, and the fallout from Brexit. Using qualitative thematic analysis, this article examines coverage of the crisis by the British press by exploring how individual newspapers on both the political right and left have chosen to report on the indicators, causes, and victims. The aim is to establish whether the standard political leanings of the papers apply here, or whether the situation is so exceptional in its urgency that the usual stereotypes (strivers/scroungers, deserving/undeserving poor) have been abandoned for a more unified discourse.