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everyone must have known that ‘chav’ is an insulting word exclusively directed against people who are working class. The ‘joke’ could easily have been rephrased as: ‘It’s sad that Woolworth’s is closing. Where will the ghastly lower classes buy their Christmas presents?’
‘Forget stealing candy from a baby. We’ll teach you how to take a Bacardi off a hoodie and turn a grunt into a whine. Welcome to Chav Fighting, a place where the punch bags gather dust and the world is put to rights.’ The leaflets were even more candid. ‘Why hone your skills on punch bags and planks of wood when you can deck some Chavs … a world where Bacardi Breezers are your sword and ASBOs are your trophy.’
Margaret Thatcher’s assumption of power in 1979 marked the beginning of an all-out assault on the pillars of working-class Britain.
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.
Imagine you’re a journalist from a middle-class background. You grow up in a nice middle-class town or suburb. You go to a private school and make friends with people from the same background. You end up at a good university with an overwhelmingly middle-class intake. When you finally land a job in the media, you once again find yourself surrounded by people who were shaped by more or less the same circumstances. How are you going to have the faintest clue about people who live in a place like Dewsbury Moor?
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.
MPs aren’t exactly representative of the sort of people who live on most of our streets.
When Thatcher came to power in 1979, over seven million of us earned a living in manufacturing. Thirty years later, this was true for less than half as many, a mere 2.83 million—not least because factories had relocated to developing countries where workers cost less.
Before 1914, if you were staunchly Church of England (once derided as the ‘Tory Party at prayer’) you were pretty likely to vote Conservative.
Thatcher had not the slightest ambition to get rid of social classes, she just didn’t want us to perceive that we belonged to one. ‘It’s not the existence of classes that threatens the unity of the nation, but the existence of class feeling,’
Thatcherism fought the most aggressive class war in British history: by battering the trade unions into the ground, shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to the working class and the poor, and stripping businesses of state regulations.
Thatcher wanted to end the class war—but on the terms of the upper crust of British society.
The first to face Thatcher’s iron fist were the steel-workers in 1980, who lost a thirteen-week strike battle and would pay the price with thousands of jobs.
But all the laws and set-piece battles combined did not have the same crushing effect as another of Thatcher’s weapons: Britain’s ever-growing dole queues.
They had the capacity to single-handedly bring the country to a standstill by cutting off its energy supply, as they had demonstrated in the 1970s. If you could see off the miners, what other group of workers could stop you?
There no longer seemed anything to celebrate about being working class. But Thatcherism promised an alternative. Leave the working class behind, it said, and come join the property-owning middle classes instead. Those who failed to do so would have no place in the new Britain.
According to Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant and leading tax specialist, ‘Thatcher shifted the burden of taxation from those who were best off in society to those who were least well off in society.
The number of registered drug addicts soared under Tory rule: from less than 3,000 in 1980 to 43,000 by 1996.
To the tune of a song by Gilbert and Sullivan, he sang: ‘I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list of young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list.’
It had got to the point where government ministers were singing songs on public platforms to taunt poor people who were utterly voiceless. This was Thatcherism at its basest.
Thatcherism aimed to separate the working-class communities most ravaged by the excesses of Thatcherism from everybody else.
Glasgow has twice as many people out of work as the national average.
‘David Cameron tells the fat and the poor: take responsibility,’ as The Times put it. ‘Fat or poor? It’s probably your own fault, Cameron declares,’
