Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

by Owen Jones

During one of the great economic traumas of modern British history, the fortunes of the wealthiest 1,000 Britons more than doubled.

Workers suffered the longest fall in pay packets since the 1870s.

most of the money within the welfare budget goes on pensioners who have paid in all their lives; and, indeed, the government was quick to assure voters that their pensions and entitlements would be protected. In contrast, the amount spent on unemployed people—which is what the electorate was encouraged to understand by ‘welfare’—is only a relatively small fraction of social security spending.

Low-paid workers faced having their in-work benefits slashed and were getting wages that could in no way sustain a comfortable existence. But when they should have directed their ire at the government or their employers, they were encouraged to resent the unemployed people supposedly living it up at their expense.

According to the government’s own estimates, around 0.7 per cent of social security spending is lost to benefit fraud.

For example, an initial cap of £26,000 was imposed on the amount that could be claimed, in line with supposed average household income. This in itself was a myth, because the average working family with an income of £26,000 could themselves claim several thousand pounds’ worth of additional in-work benefits: after all, millions of employed people qualify for benefits.

those living in overcrowded homes, or trapped on a 5-million-strong social housing waiting list, were encouraged to resent disabled people with a little extra living space rather than attack the government for failing to build enough houses.

The mental health charity Scope, for example, found that two-thirds of disabled people reported abuse in September 2011, a jump from 41 per cent just a few months before.

Cuts to tax credits would leave over 3 million working families poorer by an average of around £1,350 a year; millions of other working families would lose out, too.

If the Conservatives wished to decrease spending on tax credits and other in-work benefits without reducing the incomes of working people, they simply needed to raise wages.

But many resent the insecurity: they often lack paid sick leave and maternity leave; the tax credits many receive are being cut; they find getting loans from banks difficult; they are frequently turned down for mortgages; they spend too much time chasing invoices for work they have completed; they are punished by inadequate infrastructure, like Britain’s poor Wi-Fi network; and so on.

create thriving renewable energy and hi-tech industries, creating skilled secure jobs; public investment banks to help rebalance the economy; democratizing the economy; a just tax system; making the case for trade unions in raising both wages and productivity:

most polls have consistently shown between 50 and 55 per cent stubbornly self-identifying as working class, despite the ‘we’re all middle class’ mantra being drummed into us. But BritainThinks revealed that 71 per cent self-identified as middle class, with just 24 per cent opting for working class.

Members of one focus group self-identified as middle class; another opted for working class. Their backgrounds, jobs and incomes were almost exactly the same. The difference was that the ‘middle-class’ self-identifiers were trying to distance themselves from an unappealing identity in favour of one with a strikingly positive image.

In her review of Chavs, Lynsey Hanley—author of the brilliant Estates: An Intimate History—argued that class hatred wasn’t simply ‘a one-way street’, but a ‘collusive, often subtle, process which demeans everyone. In fact a great deal of chav-bashing goes on within working-class neighbourhoods, partly because of the age-old divide between those who aim for “respectability” and those who disdain it.’

Such fraud, indeed, represents less than 1 per cent of total welfare spending, and up to 60 times less than tax avoidance at the other end of the economic spectrum.

Poverty and unemployment were no longer to be seen as social problems, but more to do with individual moral failings. Anyone could make it if they tried hard enough, or so the myth went. If people were poor, it was because they were lazy, spendthrift or lacked aspiration.

Demonization serves a useful purpose in a divided society like our own, because it promotes the idea that inequality is rational: it is simply an expression of differing talent and ability. Those at the bottom are supposedly there because they are stupid, lazy or otherwise morally questionable. Demonization is the ideological backbone of an unequal society.