Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

by Owen Jones

There are those who advocate scrapping the ‘triple lock’ that secures generous annual increases in pensions and using the savings to invest in young people. But young people are themselves aspirational pensioners. Stripping back entitlements for older people leaves the young with the worst of all worlds: insecurity not just in youth but in retirement, too.

How did this generational divide become so entrenched to the extent it has severely disrupted class politics? A million pensioners were lifted out of poverty by New Labour in the noughties, and their living standards have been protected by the triple lock, increasing and already very high levels of homeownership, and booming house prices thanks in part to post-crash quantitative easing.9 Older Britons are the most socially conservative on issues such as immigration, Islam, LGBTQ rights and feminism. Younger Britons, meanwhile, have suffered one of the worst wage squeezes in the industrialised world, as well as collapsing levels of home ownership combined with a depletion of social housing, driving them into an unregulated and rip-off private rented sector.10 They are saddled with debt for daring to aspire to a university education which benefits all of society; services they rely on have been decimated; and cuts to social security have hammered low-paid young workers. They have the most progressive social norms of any generation, articles of faith they quite understandably believe are under attack. It is this divide in economic security and social values that surely explains the political chasm separating the generations.

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. Yet this group took a disproportionate amount of the blame for the welfare crisis.

But the expansion of low-paid work in Britain has driven a rise in social security spending: indeed, tax credit expenditure rose during the first Conservative term beyond initial estimates because so many were forced to take up low-paid jobs.25 The Tory argument was that work was the route out of poverty, but with more than 5 million British workers paid less than a living wage and with most people in poverty in work, this was nonsensical.

As the book points out, what could be described as the working class has never been homogeneous. It includes people for whom life is very difficult, who are struggling for a secure, let alone comfortable, existence; and it includes people for whom life is OK, but could be so much better, and who face rising insecurity and fears about the future of their children. For those of us who aspire to transform society, we must build a coalition including both groups: for both low-income and middle-income, for those languishing in poverty and for those working in an office on £28,000 a year, for those who call themselves ‘working class’ and those who self-identify as ‘middle class’.

It’s an experience we’ve all had. You’re among a group of friends or acquaintances when suddenly someone says something that shocks you: an aside or a flippant comment made in poor taste. But the most disquieting part isn’t the remark itself. It’s the fact that no one else seems the slightest bit taken aback. You look around in vain, hoping for even a flicker of concern or the hint of a cringe.

And yet it wasn’t even what was said that disturbed me the most. It was who said it, and who shared in the laughter. Everyone sitting around that table had a well-paid, professional job. Whether they admitted it or not, they owed their success, above all, to their backgrounds. All grew up in comfortable middle-class homes, generally out in the leafy suburbs. Some were educated in expensive private schools. Most had studied at universities like Oxford, LSE or Bristol. The chances of someone from a working-class background ending up like them were, to say the least, remote. Here I was, witnessing a phenomenon that goes back hundreds of years: the wealthy mocking the less well-off. And it got me thinking. How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable? Privately educated, multi-millionaire comedians dress up as chavs for our amusement in popular sitcoms such as Little Britain. Our newspapers eagerly hunt down horror stories about ‘life among the chavs’ and pass them off as representative of working-class communities. Internet sites such as ‘ChavScum’ brim with venom directed at the chav caricature. It seems as though working-class people are the one group in society that you can say practically anything about.

Demonizing people at the bottom has been a convenient way of justifying an unequal society throughout the ages. After all, in the abstract it would seem irrational that through an accident of birth, some should rise to the top while others remain trapped at the bottom. But what if you are on top because you deserve to be? What if people at the bottom are there because of a lack of skill, talent and determination?

Social problems like poverty and unemployment were once understood as injustices that sprang from flaws within capitalism which, at the very least, had to be addressed. Yet today they have become understood as the consequences of personal behaviour, individual defects and even choice.

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’.

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Conservative organs such as the Daily Mail had used the fact that Karen Matthews did not have a job as a reason to attack the welfare state (a bit rich coming from a newspaper which is a fervent champion of ‘stay-at-home’ mothers).21

Over half of the top hundred journalists were educated at a private school, a figure that is even higher than it was two decades ago. In stark contrast, only one in fourteen children in Britain share this background.26

Welfare fraud is estimated to cost the Treasury around £1 billion a year. But, as detailed investigations by chartered accountant Richard Murphy have found, £70 billion is lost through tax evasion every year—that is, seventy times more.

…one of the worlds is preaching a Class War, and the other vigorously practising it. —George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

But a cursory look at its history uncloaks a party that has always defended ‘privileged interests’, particularly against the threat posed by working-class Britons. Throughout the nineteenth century the Tories were fervent opponents of allowing any but the richest to vote. When the 1831 Reform Bill was presented to Parliament, proposing to extend suffrage to as many as one out of every five adult males, the Tory reaction was hysterical. One Tory MP sensationally alleged that the Bill represented ‘a revolution that will overturn all the natural influence of rank and property.’

‘The Conservatives can’t talk of class war. They started it.’1 When trade unions launched a general strike in 1926, the Tory government warned of red revolution and mobilized the armed forces. After the strike was broken, senior conservative and irreconcilable class warrior Arthur Balfour boasted: ‘The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.’ As part of this lesson, mass picketing and any strikes launched in support of other workers were banned, and union links with Labour were weakened. The working class was put back in its box.

Tony Benn was a minister in the Labour Cabinet during the Winter of Discontent. ‘It was a conflict, an economic conflict between working people on the one hand and their employers on the other, and the government supported the employers, in effect,’ he recalls. ‘And it led to a great deal of disillusionment.’

Rising demand for housing pushed prices up, encouraging disastrous house-price bubbles. Housing became increasingly unaffordable for huge swathes of the population. Millions of people were condemned to languish for years on council housing waiting lists. Little wonder that the number of homeless Britons soared by 38 per cent between 1984 and 1989 alone.12

As Howe puts it, the Conservatives had ‘to find the resources with which to reduce the burden of direct taxes’. So they put up VAT, a tax on consumer goods. The poorer you are, the more of your income goes on VAT. But it was springtime for the rich. By the end of the Tories’ reign, in 1996, the richest 10 per cent of families with three children were over £21,000 a year richer on average than when Thatcher had come to power.13 The wealthiest decile’s incomes shot up by 65 per cent for each married couple. Their taxes went from over half to just above a third of their income.14 Film director Stephen Frears remembers when Lawson cut the top rate to 40 per cent. ‘It was as if Lord Lawson knocked on my door and said, “Well, we’ll give you a cheque for fifty grand!”’ For everyone else, taxes went from 31.1 per cent of their income in 1979 to 37.7 per cent by the end of 1996, courtesy of the ‘party of low taxes’. The real income of the poorest tenth collapsed by nearly a fifth after housing costs.15 The slice of the nation’s wealth they owned nearly halved.16 A family with three children in the bottom 10 per cent of the population was £625 a year poorer in 1996 than when Thatcher arrived in No. 10. There were five million people in poverty in 1979; by 1992, the number was closer to fourteen million. And while the top 1 per cent saw income growth of just under 4 per cent a year under the Conservatives, if you were on a median income it went up by an average of only 1.6 per cent.17

only a decade or so, Thatcherism had completely changed how class was seen. The wealthy were adulated. All were now encouraged to scramble up the social ladder, and be defined by how much they owned. Those who were poor or unemployed had no one to blame but themselves. The traditional pillars of working-class Britain had been smashed to the ground. To be working class was no longer something to be proud of, never mind to celebrate. Old working-class values, like solidarity, were replaced by dog-eat-dog individualism. No longer could working-class people count on politicians to fight their corner. The new Briton created by Thatcherism was a property-owning, middle-class individual who looked after themselves, their family and no one else. Aspiration meant yearning for a bigger car or a bigger house. As miners’ leader Chris Kitchen put it: ‘Forget the community spirit and all that. If you can’t make a profit, then it has to be stopped. That’s always what Thatcher’s ethos was about.’

What struck me was his willingness to make an intellectual argument in defence of inequality.

It would be nice to dismiss chav-hate as a fringe psychosis confined to ranting right-wing columnists. But there is a type of chav-hate that has become a ‘liberal bigotry’. Liberal bigots justify their prejudice against a group of people on the grounds of their own supposed bigotry. The racialization of working-class people as ‘white’ has convinced some that they can hate chavs and remain progressive-minded. They justify their hatred of white working-class people by focusing on their supposed racism and failure to assimilate into multicultural society. ‘It’s one of the ways people have made their snobbery socially acceptable,’

By defining the white working class in terms of ethnicity rather than social class, liberal chav-haters ascribe their problems to cultural rather than economic factors. It is the way they live that is the problem, not the unjust way society is structured. If white working-class people are oppressed, it is the result of their own fecklessness. While a liberal chav-hater will accept that massive discrimination against ethnic minority groups explains issues like unemployment and poverty and even violence, they do not believe white working-class people have such excuses.

You could be forgiven for thinking that there is an identity crisis going on. Multi-millionaire businessman Mohamed Al Fayed once described himself as working class. I have heard of stockbrokers with telephone number salaries who ask with faux puzzlement: ‘I work, don’t I? So why aren’t I working class?’

Nearly two-thirds of the nation’s wealth went on wages back in 1973. Today, it’s only a little over half.

Stagnating wages and low-paid service sector jobs played their part in the economic crisis. To maintain their spending power, workers began to borrow. In 1980 the ratio between debt and income was 45. By 1997 it had doubled, before reaching an astonishing 157.4 on the eve of the credit crunch in 2007.

There is an insidious side to the pretence that class no longer exists in modern Britain. Rarely a day goes by without some politician or commentator paying homage to ‘meritocracy’, or the idea that anyone with talent and drive can make it big in modern Britain. The tragic irony is that the myth of the classless society gained ground just as society became more rigged in favour of the middle class. Britain remains as divided by class as it ever was.

‘University, to be honest, was kind of where posh people go! It wasn’t a case of aspiration; it was almost, “you know your place”. That’s what posh people do; it’s just not an option. It’s just not what we do, it’s just not on the radar. The aspiration thing is bullshit, it really is. You can only ever really aspire to something if you know it and understand it.’

The problem is that parents and children who are cynical about education have something of a point. More and more university graduates are forced to take relatively humble jobs—never mind those teenagers who stay on to do A-levels and leave it at that. Newcastle supermarket worker Mary Cunningham told me about the growing numbers of graduates working on the checkout. ‘There’s people who’ve gone to university, got their degrees, and can’t find anything else,’ she says.

With so many advantages from birth, it is no wonder that the middle classes go on to dominate top universities. According to a report by the Office for Fair Access, intelligent children from England’s richest fifth are seven times more likely to go to university than intelligent children from the poorest 40 per cent. This is up from six times as likely in the mid 1990s. As you move up the rankings toward Oxbridge at the summit, the imbalance grows. In 2002–03, 5.4 per cent of Cambridge and 5.8 per cent of Oxford students came from ‘low participation neighbourhoods’. By 2008–09, it had fallen back to 3.7 and 2.7 per cent respectively.13 Or consider the fact that, in the academic year 2006–07, only forty-five children claiming free school meals made it to Oxbridge—out of around 6,000 successful applicants.14

Of course, protesting that benefit fraud is exaggerated does not mean denying its occurrence. But it is often need, rather than dishonesty, that drives it. For example, a compelling study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that many claimants taking undeclared cash-in-hand jobs did so to pay for food or heating, or pay back debt. ‘People in deprived areas are resorting to informal work because they are trying to support, feed and clothe their families,’

When looking at the impact of immigration on jobs and wages, it has been increasingly fashionable among politicians and the media to contrast the hard-working immigrant to the layabout Brit. But it’s not, of course, a fair comparison. After all, immigrants will have travelled hundreds or thousands of miles from poorer countries with the express intention of finding work. It is this that endows them with the qualities that employers find so desirable.

Another fashionable idea among these class warriors is that people at the bottom deserve their lot in life. It was not for the government to redress inequalities, because the conditions of the poor would only improve if they changed their behaviour. As the Independent editorial went on to acknowledge, ethnic minorities and women still faced discrimination, ‘but the country’s biggest social blight today is an entrenched group of families and individuals at the bottom of the social pile who are failing to participate in the economic opportunities available in modern Britain.’1 The conclusion was clear. If these people want to get on, they can—but they are failing to do so. The brutal truth was that those at the bottom only had themselves to blame.

It would be tempting to make all sorts of doom-laden, apocalyptic predictions about what will happen if such a movement fails to get off the ground, and warn darkly of riots and revolutions. The reality is just downright depressing. The working class will remain weak and voiceless. They will still be the butt of jokes at middle-class dinner parties, detested in angry right-wing newspaper columns, and ridiculed in TV sitcoms. Entire communities will remain without secure, well-paid work, and the people that comprise them will continue to be demonized for it. Living standards will go on stagnating and declining, even while the richest rake it in like never before. Ever fewer working-class people will bother to vote. Right-wing populism will tap into growing disillusionment and fury at the manner in which working-class people have become so despised. Mainstream politicians will continue to focus their energies on satisfying the demands of a small, wealthy elite, while growing ever more indifferent to the needs of an increasingly apathetic working class. Politics will revert to what it was in the nineteenth century: essentially, a family argument between competing wealthy factions.