Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

by Owen Jones

The cruel irony is that poor people who live in communities like Dewsbury Moor actually pay more in tax as a proportion of their wage packets than many of the rich journalists and politicians who attack them.

Things have certainly changed compared to thirty years ago, when a staggering 20 per cent of the richest tenth of the population lived in social housing.

The Gini coefficient—used to measure overall income inequality in Britain—was rated as 26 in 1979. Today it has risen to 39.

In the first Budget, top bracket taxes of 83 per cent on earned income and 98 per cent on unearned income were slashed to 60 per cent, and corporation tax went from 52 to 35 per cent. In 1988 the then-chancellor Nigel Lawson went even further: the top rate of tax was reduced to 40 per cent. Geoffrey Howe is unrepentant about what he calls ‘changing the tax structure to make it incentivized and not obstructive of enterprise’. Yet the reality of this part of Thatcher’s class war is that it shifted the tax burden from the rich to everybody else. ‘Whether or not it had the right impact on distribution of wealth or income, I can’t tell,’ Howe says. ‘But it certainly did liberalize, enhance the chances of making money, saving money, expanding business

At the 1981 Conservative Party Conference, Norman Tebbit famously said that his father ‘got on his bike and looked for work, and he went on looking until he found it’. Now that industrial Britain was in meltdown, this was what the swelling ranks of the unemployed were supposed to do. ‘Get on your bike’ became a national cliché, summing up Thatcherism in a nutshell: that the unemployed (among others) must take personal responsibility for the problems that the government had foisted upon them.

Glasgow has twice as many people out of work as the national average. More than half of the city’s children live in poverty. The city tops Scottish league tables for drug addiction, overcrowded housing and pensioner poverty. Life expectancy in Glasgow’s Calton neighbourhood is fifty-four years—well over thirty years less than men in London’s Kensington and Chelsea district, and lower than in the Gaza Strip.

‘My father was a stockbroker, my grandfather was a stockbroker, my great-grandfather was a stockbroker,’ as he once boasted to a gathering of City types.

Footballers were generally boys plucked from the club’s local area. Unlike the spoiled plutocrats that some Premier League players have become, for much of the twentieth century ‘footballers were often worse off than the crowds watching them from the terraces on a Saturday,’ as footballer Stuart Imlach’s son has written. Back in the early 1950s, there was a maximum salary for players of just £14 a week during the season—not very much over the average manual wage—and only one in five players were lucky enough to earn that. Players lived in ‘tied cottages’—houses owned by clubs from which they could be evicted at any moment. Little wonder one footballer, speaking at the 1955 Trades Union Congress, complained that ‘the conditions of the professional footballer’s employment are akin to slavery.’53 Football has gone from one extreme to another. The cold winds of free-market economics had largely been kept out of the football world during the 1980s. In the 1990s, they hit with a vengeance. In 1992, the twenty-two clubs of the old First Division broke away to establish the Premier League, freeing them from the requirement to share revenues with clubs in the rest of the League. Part of the new commercial ethos was to keep many working-class people out of the stadium. In its Blueprint for the Future of Football, the Football Association argued that the game must attract ‘more affluent middle-class consumers’.54 When the old terraces were abolished after the Hillsborough Disaster, t...

‘I think culture reflects politics,’ says Ken Loach. ‘There was a major shift … during the Thatcher years. … It was the era of “loads of money”, it was the era of “look after number one”, all the jewellery, the City Boys with their red braces—it was a worship of capital.’ This vanquishing of working-class Britain had inevitable cultural consequences.

A median-income household receives just £21,000. This is the exact midpoint, meaning that half the population earns less. Here is the real Middle Britain,

Having the luck to be born into a comfortable background has a huge impact. A 2005 study showed that a five-year-old whose parents earn more than £67,500 has reading skills four months more advanced than those of her peers in families with combined incomes of between £15,000 and £30,000. For those in households getting between £2,500 and £15,000, the difference is more than five months.

The aspiration thing is bullshit, it really is. You can only ever really aspire to something if you know it and understand it.’

Parliamentary interns provide 18,000 hours of free labour a week, saving MPs £5 million a year in labour costs. According to the parliamentary researchers’ union Unite, less than one in every hundred interns receives the minimum wage, and almost half do not even get expenses.

Being born into a prosperous middle-class family typically endows you with a safety net for life. If you are not naturally very bright, you are still likely to go far and, at the very least, will never experience poverty as an adult. A good education compounded by your parents’ ‘cultural capital’, financial support and networks will always see you through. If you are a bright child born into a working-class family, you do not have any of these things. The odds are that you will not be better off than your parents. Britain’s class system is like an invisible prison.

A common misconception is that the number of people on benefits is a static figure. In reality, many claimants are moving in and out of poorly paid insecure work.

Poverty is generally defined as households with less than 60 per cent of the nation’s median income after housing costs are deducted. Less than five million people lived in poverty on the eve of the Thatcher counter-revolution, or less than one in ten of the population. Today, poverty affects 13.5 million people, or more than one in five. If you are a single adult without children, that means living on less than £115 a week after housing costs are deducted. For a couple with two young children, it is less than £279 a week. There are only four EU countries with higher rates of poverty.

The minimum wage is a case in point. When it was introduced in 1999—in the teeth of Tory and business opposition—it made a genuine difference to hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers. After all, it was perfectly legal, not so long ago, to pay a worker £1.50 an hour.

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a salary of £14,400 is the minimum a single person needs for an acceptable standard of living (never mind if you have kids). If you work a thirty-five-hour week, that works out as £7.93 an hour, or over £2 an hour more than the minimum wage.

According to Citizens Advice, around £6.2 billion of tax credits go unpaid every year—with up to £10.5 billion of means-tested benefits in total unclaimed. This includes four out of every five low-paid workers without children, who are missing out on tax credits worth at least £38 a week. This ‘benefit evasion’ dwarfs the amount lost through benefit fraud—a fact that is completely absent in the debate around cracking down on so-called welfare scroungers.

all, not for nothing is it often suggested that ‘chav’ is an acronym for ‘Council Housed And Violent

BNP as hinging their strategy on ‘change versus enduring inequalities, and they racialize it’. All issues, whether housing or jobs, are approached in terms of race. ‘It allows people to render intelligible the changes around them, in terms of their own insecurities, material insecurities as well as cultural ones.’ Yes, it is a narrative based on myths. After all, only one in twenty social houses goes to a foreign national. But, with the government refusing to build homes and large numbers of foreign-looking people arriving in certain communities, the BNP’s narrative just seems to make sense to a lot of people.

when asked what her greatest achievement was, Margaret Thatcher answered without hesitation: ‘Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.’

Yet as a government of millionaires led by an Old Etonian prepares to further demolish the living standards of millions of working-class people, the time has rarely been so ripe for a new wave of class politics.