Some of the media coverage has been akin to the discovery of a strange sub-species living in the sewers.

The sprawling family tree, accusations of benefit fraud, the family members' physical appearance - these have been used to symbolise all that is wrong with the working class.

Margaret Watson's excellent article in the Reporter on April 11 was a salutary corrective to the notion that the Matthews family are somehow representative of Dewsbury.

But by becoming the object of national scrutiny, the family has reminded us of how a lot of people in the country live.

Take this, from the Daily Mail, in an article exposing the Matthews family tree: "What emerges is a fascinating, if bleak, pattern of gradual social disintegration. It surely resonates with what is happening in many other Northern, white, lower working-class communities."

The eye snags on that "Northern". I can feel my hackles rise, and before I know it I'm retorting that it's not only the North that has problems with "disintegration" - what about these gangs of kids shooting each other in London?

But local pride is futile if all it means is pointing out that bad stuff happens elsewhere too.

Deprivation and dependency culture contribute to a grim cycle of social ills - crime, teenage pregnancy, prostitution and drugs - which ultimately affects us all. You can insulate yourself all you like from the underclass - until it comes at you with a knife demanding your wallet.

It is an unfortunate feature of our current political scene that large sections of the population have ceased to matter politically, as Labour and the Tories jostle over a narrow patch of centre ground.

Only a man content in the knowledge that chavs don't vote could have said, as John Prescott did, that we're all middle-class now.
I can't decide if the Matthews affair has been a good or a bad thing for the white working class.

It's given us an excuse to indulge our passion for snobbery. (Google "Shannon Matthews Chavs" and you get 30,200 hits). But it's a good thing because their exposure will make it harder for politicians and the media to pretend such people don't exist.

Many commentators have said the Matthews family is an indictment of a government that has neglected the working class. But the media can be just as guilty, and not only the tabloids. The so-called left-wing intelligentsia can be astonishingly forgetful of how the other half lives.
The Guardian, paper of choice for the educated leftie, featured on its website a recent column that could be summarised thus: "My husband and I have professional careers and yet, after the mortgage on our London home and the school fees, we don't have much left to spend on luxuries. Boo-hoo! Maybe I should have been a city trader ...")

We can peer into the lives of the poor with schadenfreude and tell ourselves that they deserve no better. We can vote selfishly and deny our common humanity with those who struggle at the bottom of the heap.
Or we can acknowledge that we all live in the same world, are of the same species, and can choose to have a social conscience.
awolstenholme@ywng.co.uk