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Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

Von Owen Jones

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Bewertung: 3 von 5 Sternen3/5 (75 Bewertungen)

Länge: 415 Seiten7 Stunden

Herausgeber:: Verso Books
Freigegeben:: May 22, 2012
ISBN:: 9781844678044
Format:: Buch

Beschreibung

In modern Britain, the working class has become an object of fear and ridicule. From Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard to the demonization of Jade Goody, media and politicians alike dismiss as feckless, criminalized and ignorant a vast, underprivileged swathe of society whose members have become stereotyped by one, hate-filled word: chavs.

In this acclaimed investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from “salt of the earth” to “scum of the earth.” Exposing the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, he portrays a far more complex reality. The chav stereotype, he argues, is used by governments as a convenient figleaf to avoid genuine engagement with social and economic problems and to justify widening inequality.

Based on a wealth of original research, Chavs is a damning indictment of the media and political establishment and an illuminating, disturbing portrait of inequality and class hatred in modern Britain. This updated edition includes a new chapter exploring the causes and consequences of the UK riots in the summer of 2011.

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Mit Lesen beginnen

Informationen über das Buch

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

Von Owen Jones

Bewertungen:

Bewertung: 3 von 5 Sternen3/5 (75 Bewertungen)

Länge: 415 Seiten7 Stunden

Beschreibung

Herausgeber:: Verso Books
Freigegeben:: May 22, 2012
ISBN:: 9781844678044
Format:: Buch

Über den Autor

Owen Jones

Author Owen Jones, from Barry, South Wales, came to writing novels relatively recently, although he has been writing all his adult life. He has lived and worked in several countries and travelled in many, many more.He speaks, or has spoken, seven languages fluently and is currently learning Thai, since he lives in Thailand with his Thai wife of ten years."It has never taken me long to learn a language," he says, "but Thai bears no relationship to any other language I have ever studied before."When asked about his style of writing, he said, "I'm a Celt, and we are Romantic. I believe in reincarnation and lots more besides in that vein. Those beliefs, like 'Do unto another...', and 'What goes round comes around', Fate and Karma are central to my life, so they are reflected in my work'.His first novel, 'Daddy's Hobby' from the series 'Behind The Smile: The Story of Lek, a Bar Girl in Pattaya' has been followed by four sequels, but his largest collection is 'The Megan Series', eighteen novellas on the psychic development of a young teenage girl, the subtitle of which, 'A Spirit Guide, A Ghost Tiger and One Scary Mother!' sums them up nicely.As Owen puts it:'Born in the Land of Song, living in the Land of Smiles'.

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Chavs - Owen Jones

A bold attempt to rewind political orthodoxies; to reintroduce class as a political variable … It moves in and out of postwar British history with great agility, weaving together complex questions of class, culture and identity with a lightness of touch. Jones torches the political class to great effect.’

Jon Cruddas, Independent

‘It is a timely book. The white working class seems to be the one group in society that it is still acceptable to sneer at, ridicule, even incite hatred against … Forensically … Jones seeks to explain how, thanks to politics, the working class has shifted from being regarded as the salt of the earth to the scum of the earth.’

Carol Midgley, Times

‘A lively, well-reasoned and informative counterblast to the notion that Britain is now more or less a classless society.’

Sean O’Hagan, Observer

‘Impassioned and thought-provoking … I genuinely hope his voice is heard.’

Claire Black, Scotland on Sunday

‘A trenchant exposure of our new class hatred and what lies behind it.’

John Carey, author of The Intellectuals and the Masses

‘The stereotyping and hatred of the working class in Britain, documented so clearly by Owen Jones in this important book, should cause all to flinch … the stigmatization of the working class is a serious barrier to social justice and progressive change.’

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, authors of The Spirit Level

‘A fascinating piece of social reportage and insight, there are echoes of George Orwell’s brilliant non-fiction in Chavs’.

Doug Johnstone, Big Issue in Scotland

‘Chavs is persuasively argued, and packed full of good reporting and useful information … [Jones] makes an important contribution to a revivified debate about class.’

Lynsey Hanley, author of Estates: An Intimate History

‘Jones’s analysis of the condition of the working class is very astute … A book like this is very much needed for the American scene, where the illusion is similarly perpetuated by the Democrats that the middle class is all that matters, that everyone can aspire to join the middle class or is already part of it.’

Huffington Post

‘A blinding read.’

Suzanne Moore, Guardian

‘[A] thought-provoking examination of a relatively new yet widespread derogatory characterization of the working class in Britain … edifying and disquieting in equal measure.’

Publishers Weekly

‘A fiery reminder of how the system has failed the poor.’

Peter Hoskin, Daily Beast

‘Seen in the light of the riots and the worldwide Occupy protests, his lucid analysis of a divided society appears uncannily prescient.’

Matthew Higgs, Artforum

‘A passionate and well-documented denunciation of the upper-class contempt for the proles that has recently become so visible in the British class system.’

Eric Hobsbawm, Guardian Books of the Year

‘Mr. Jones’s book is a cleareyed examination of the British class system, and it poses this brutal question: How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable? His timely answers combine wit, left-wing politics and outrage.’

Dwight Garner, New York Times

CHAVS

The Demonization of

the Working Class

OWEN JONES

This updated edition first published by Verso 2012

First published by Verso 2011

www.owenjones.org

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

eISBN (978-1-84467-804-4)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Fournier by MJ Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

Preface

Introduction

1. The Strange Case of Shannon Matthews

2. Class Warriors

3. Politicians vs Chavs

4. A Class in the Stocks

5. ‘We’re all middle class now’

6. A Rigged Society

7. Broken Britain

8. Backlash

Conclusion: A New Class Politics?

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

Preface to the New Edition

Nobody expected Chavs to attract half as much attention as it did. And if it had been released even three or four years ago, I doubt that it would have done so well. But the book’s impact had less to do with the provocative title and everything to do with the fact that class is back with a vengeance.

During the boom period it was possible to at least pretend class was no more—that ‘we’re all middle class now’, as politicians and media pundits put it. As chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown had pronounced the end of ‘boom and bust’, and it seemed as though a future of rising living standards beckoned for all. At a time of economic chaos, this period looks like a golden age—even if we now know our sense of prosperity was built on sand. Yes, it was true that real wages stagnated for the bottom half and declined for the bottom third from 2004 onwards—that is, four years before the economic collapse began. But the availability of cheap credit helped paper over Britain’s growing class divisions, which, despite the hubris of the political and media elite, were as entrenched as ever.

Chavs was my contribution to ending the conspiracy of silence over class. But, unexpectedly, it pushed at an open door. Economic crisis helped to refocus attention on the unjust distribution of wealth and power in society. Throughout 2011, living standards for the average Briton were declining at the fastest rate since the 1920s. The Child Poverty Action Group warned that poor families faced a ‘triple whammy’ of benefit, support and service cuts, stating that the coalition government’s ‘legacy threatens to be the worst poverty record of any government for a generation’.¹

But it remained boom time for the people at the top. In 2011, boardroom pay for Britain’s top one hundred companies soared by 49 per cent; the previous year, it had shot up by 55 per cent.² The wealth of the richest 1,000 Britons, meanwhile, increased by a fifth, after leaping by 30 per cent—the biggest increase ever recorded—in 2010. Shortly after arriving in office, the Conservatives’ austerity Chancellor George Osborne had claimed ‘we’re all in this together’. As the statement veered between ludicrous and offensive, few were now making the case that class division no longer mattered in Britain

Although I wanted to encourage a broad debate about class, the title I chose proved contentious. For some critics, the book failed to acknowledge that the object of demonization was an identifiable subgroup of undesirables—a workless Burberry-wearing underclass—rather than the working class as a whole. Sometimes, said these critics, I got bogged down in discussing the origins and definition of the term ‘chav’. Given that I had plastered the word across the book’s cover, it would have been brash to refuse to engage in such a debate. But the book wasn’t simply about the word. It aimed to challenge the myth that ‘we’re all middle class now’: that most of the old working class had been ‘aspirational’ and joined ‘Middle Britain’ (whatever that was), leaving behind a feckless, problematic rump. This was often racialized and described as the ‘white working class’. ‘Chavs’ was the term— encompassing a whole range of pejorative connotations—that best summed up this caricature.

Shortly after Chavs was published, a study by polling organization BritainThinks revealed just how demonized working-class identity had become. As Chavs pointed out, 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. Undoubtedly the contrasting results had much to do with the fact that, while only one ‘working-class’ category was offered, there were three ‘middle-class’ options to choose from (lower, middle and upper). But there was a more profound and disturbing explanation. According to BritainThinks’s Deborah Mattinson, a former pollster for Gordon Brown:

There was a strong feeling in the focus groups that the noble tradition of a respectable and diligent working class was over. For the first time, I saw the ‘working-class’ tag used as a slur, equated with other class-based insults such as ‘chav’. I asked focus group members to make collages using newspaper and magazine clippings to show what the working class was. Many chose deeply unattractive images: flashy excess, cosmetic surgery gone wrong, tacky designer clothes, booze, drugs and overeating.

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. As Deborah Mattinson put it: ‘being middle class is about being, well, a bit classy’. The working-class label was no longer something people felt that they could wear with pride. Far from it: it had effectively become synonymous with ‘chav’.³

The minority that did describe themselves as working class struggled to come up with positive contemporary images to express their own identity. Focus group participants suggested the 1960s as the heyday of working-class Britain. When asked to define what it meant to be working class, a common theme was it ‘tends to just mean being poor’.⁴

The BritainThinks studies identified some of the consequences of the social and political forces that Chavs had tried to identify. First, the Thatcherite assault on many of the pillars of working-class Britain, from trade unions to traditional industries. Secondly, a political consensus established by Thatcherism: that we should all aspire to be middle class, and that being working class was no longer something to be proud of. Thirdly, the almost complete absence of accurate representations of working-class people in the media, on TV, and in the political world, in favour of grotesque ‘chav’ caricatures.

The term ‘chav’ is used by different groups of people throughout British society. Practically nobody, except in jest, self-identifies as a chav. The term is almost always an insult imposed on individuals against their consent, but its exact meaning changes depending on who is wielding it, and the context in which it is used.

That said, as I have shown in the book, the term is undeniably used in a classist fashion.

Take ChavTowns, a pretty nauseating website which—I’m proud to say—has added my name to its roll call of villains. ChavTowns ridicules entire communities. As it happens, my own hometown of Stockport gets a bit of a battering at the hands of anonymous individuals brimming with undiluted class hatred: ‘To be fair, Stockport has some very wealthy areas. Unfortunately, it has more than its fair share of scummy ones too,’ says one. Another moans that ‘I have to admit I feel ashamed to have to write Stockport on my address, despite being from one of its much, much nicer suburbs (yes they do exist).’ Yet another post, written by someone describing themselves as living in the ‘charming village of Cheadle Hulme’, savages people living on Stockport’s council estates.

But that’s not to say this demonization is straightforward. 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.’

Chav-bashing can often come from working-class people as an expression of frustration at anti-social elements within their own communities. Chavs attempted to put anti-social behaviour in a social and economic context: it was more likely to happen in communities with high levels of poverty and unemployment. But it’s also true that the impact of anti-social behaviour and crime are class issues. Both are statistically more likely to affect working-class people than middle-class people. Those on the receiving end often—unsurprisingly—have little sympathy for the perpetrators, particularly if they share a similar set of difficult economic circumstances but do not themselves resort to antisocial behaviour.

It’s also not the case that hostility to supposed ‘benefit cheats’ is the sole preserve of middle-class Daily Mail readers—the net-curtaintwitching types who rant about gays and Gypsies. If you are someone scraping by in a low-paid job, the feeling that there are people down the street living it up at your expense may well infuriate you more than anything else. It’s an age-old example of the ‘poor against the poor’, and right-wing politicians and journalists exploit such sentiments ruthlessly. Extreme examples of ‘benefit fraudsters’ are hunted down with relish by the tabloids, and are passed off, not as isolated examples, but as representative of an endemic and far bigger problem. The ‘scrounger’ has become the public face of the unemployed in Britain.

That’s not to say there isn’t a widespread understanding about the causes behind the increase in long-term unemployment. As one working-class self-identifier put it in the BritainThinks study, ‘We’ve now got this benefit generation which started when Thatcher closed all of the industries.’ Chavs attempted to present a corrective to these exaggerated tales of benefit fraud. 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. Meanwhile, the idea that there are plenty of jobs if only people could be bothered to drag themselves down to the Jobcentre is risible. All the evidence shows that most unemployed people desperately want work: they can’t find any. At the end of 2011, the Daily Telegraph reported that there were twenty-three jobseekers in the UK chasing every job vacancy. For every retail job, there were forty-two applications; in customer services, it was forty-six.⁵ In some communities, the picture is even bleaker. In Hull, there are 18,795 jobseekers chasing 318 jobs. There are simply not enough jobs to go round. But with this reality largely banished from our newspapers and TV screens, and with tax-avoiding businesspeople a distant, abstract concept for most, it is a challenging case to make.

The demonization of working-class people also stems from insecurity, or ‘social distancing’ from those in superficially similar circumstances. BritainThinks revealed that those belonging to groups most likely to be stigmatized as chavs can often be among the most vociferous in their chav-bashing. One long-term incapacity benefit claimant denounced chavs who were supposedly milking the system; so did two unemployed teenage mothers. This isn’t classist contempt: it comes from a fear of being lumped in with a demonized grouping. Here is one ugly consequence of persistent attacks on the unemployed and teenage mothers: prejudice can even be voiced by those who are themselves targeted.

In large part, the demonization of the working class is the legacy of a concerted effort to shift public attitudes, which began under Thatcher, continued with New Labour and has gained further momentum under the coalition. 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.

The latest Social Attitudes Survey, published at the end of 2011, shows just how successful this project has been. Even as economic crisis swelled the ranks of the unemployed and poor, attitudes towards them hardened. With nearly 2.7 million people out of work, over half of those surveyed believed that unemployment benefits were too high and were deterring people from getting a job. Of course, few would have known from reading newspapers or watching TV that the Jobseekers’ Allowance was worth just £67.50—and even less for those under the age of twenty-six. Another 63 per cent believed that a factor driving child poverty was parents ‘who don’t want to work’. Depressing stuff, but not surprising given the Thatcherite onslaught, New Labour’s refusal to challenge Conservative dogma on social problems, and the airbrushing in the media concealing the reality of poverty and unemployment.

And of course, such attitudes have political consequences. If you think poverty and unemployment are personal failings rather than social problems, then why have a welfare state at all? The Social Attitudes Survey revealed that support for the redistribution of wealth had fallen to just a third; towards the end of Margaret Thatcher’s reign in 1989, it was over half. 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.

Another criticism facing Chavs was that it glorified a golden age that never existed, presenting a rose-tinted view of an industrial world that was finished off by the Thatcherite experiment. But I do not believe that this was the argument presented in the book. As Chavs emphasized, industrial work was often backbreaking and dirty. Women were often excluded from these jobs; and when they were not, they did not have the same status as men. There were countless other problems that a dewy-eyed portrait of the industrial past written by an author in his mid-twenties would fail to address.

My point, however, was a different one: that the vacuum left by the massive disappearance in industrial work was often not filled properly, leaving entire communities bereft of secure, well-regarded work. Service-sector jobs are on the whole cleaner, less physically arduous, and are better at including women (even if they are still disproportionately concentrated in the lowest paid and most insecure work). But such work is often less well paid, lacks the same prestige, and is more likely to be hire-and-fire. Call centres and supermarkets do not form the basis of communities in the same way that the mine, factory, or dock did. I was not, though, calling for young men to be sent down the pits again. Just because I was arguing that what replaced these industries was in some important ways worse doesn’t mean that I advocated a return to a vanished world.

It was also suggested that I had a very one-dimensional view of the working class: that what I was actually talking about was a male, white working class. But in fact many of the key examples of demonized figures portrayed as representative of larger groups of people were women—Karen Matthews, Jade Goody and Vicky Pollard, for example. Indeed, class hatred and misogyny often overlap. I also wanted to emphasize the explosion of women in the workforce in the last few decades: indeed, they now account for over half of all workers— though of course it must be pointed out that women have always worked, as well as doing much of the unpaid housework men traditionally refused to do. ‘A low-paid, part-time, female shelf-stacker’ was one of my suggestions for a symbol of the modern working class. We cannot understand class without gender; but that works the other way, too. Women’s liberation must address class: but the retreat from class has often stripped it from the agenda here as everywhere else.

Chavs was sometimes referred to as a book solely about the white working class. One of the purposes of the book was to take on this narrow, exclusive image of the working class. Though chavs are often regarded as ‘white working-class’ figures, it should be noted the book was intentionally titled ‘the demonization of the working class’ rather than ‘the white working class’. After long arguing ‘we’re all middle class’, the media and politicians started talking about the working class again, but in a racialized form. The problems of the ‘white working class’ were ascribed to their whiteness, rather than their class. But Chavs argued against this false portrait. Indeed, working-class communities and workplaces are more likely to be ethnically diverse than their middle-class counterparts. Problems faced by working-class people who are white—like the housing crisis, the lack of good jobs, poor rights at work, declining living standards, safe communities—are to do with class, not race. These are problems shared by working-class people of all ethnic backgrounds.

Where race does come into it is the fact that working-class people from ethnic minority backgrounds suffer from other forms of oppression and exploitation. The majority of British Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, for example, live in poverty, while black people are far more likely to be stopped by the police. Although it is important to address issues common to all working-class people, it would be wrong to ignore the extra oppression suffered by minority groups.

One of the main reasons that politicians and media commentators started talking about the ‘white working class’ was the emergence of far-right populism, as most prominently expressed by the British National Party. But Chavs argued that such movements were, above all, driven by social and economic insecurities. This, of course, does not mean outright racist bigotry isn’t part of the story, too. Despite the great strides made by the struggles against racism in post-war Britain, prejudice, bigotry and discrimination remain massive problems at every level of society.

Some felt that, in exploring an interesting premise, I had got distracted by an outdated grudge against Thatcherism. As Philip Hensher put it in the Spectator, ‘The spread of contempt for the urban working classes is an important subject, but here it got lost under a welter of old-school moans about Mrs Thatcher, as if anyone still cared.’ I would hardly wish to hide my deeply held antipathy towards Thatcherism, and Chavs can hardly be accused of doing so. But the book is, inescapably, about the legacy of the Thatcherite 1980s. I do not believe it is possible to divorce class contempt from broader social and political trends. One of the book’s key arguments was that this new classism had everything to do with an offensive against working-class Britain, including unions, industries, housing, communities and values. We still live in the Britain that Thatcherism built: a critique of it can hardly be dismissed as ‘old-school moans’.

It was also suggested by some that the book suffered from a lack of theoretical explanation. I make no apologies for this. Although in recent years the idea of class has not been the subject of much discussion among academics and leftists, literature still exists on the subject. Unfortunately, it remains largely unread outside small circles of specialists. One of the purposes of Chavs is to present ideas about class to a wider audience; it also aims to promote left-wing ideas at a time when the left is very weak. That’s why it was written in a way that was intended to be readable—I hope it succeeded in this.

All these criticisms, indeed, were part of a wider debate. Getting people to talk about class—whether they disagreed with me or not— was exactly what I had intended. But the debate took an unexpected turn a couple of months after the book was published. For a few days in August 2011, it looked as though England was staring into an abyss of social chaos—and the demonization I had written about flourished like never before.

August is normally the height of Britain’s silly season. With Parliament in recess, news channels end up featuring extra helpings of fatuous celebrity gossip, when not speculating about one or other embattled party leader’s future or covering stories about talented animals. But 2011 was quite unlike normal years. In a year of upheaval, silly season was cancelled—and communities across England were overwhelmed with rioting, looting and arson.

The unrest began after the police shot dead twenty-nine-year-old Mark Duggan in the London borough of Tottenham on 6 August 2011. Duggan was black, and in Tottenham the relationship between the local black community and the police has a fraught history. In 1985, after Cynthia Jarrett—also black—died during a police raid of her house, Tottenham exploded in the riots that took their name from the estate on which they focused, Broadwater Farm. A policeman, PC Keith Blakelock, was killed during the unrest: it was the first death of a police officer during a riot for over 150 years. Though relations have improved since 1985, many in Tottenham—particularly young black men—harbour resentments against the police, who they feel harass them. Indeed, a black person is thirty times more likely than a white person to be stopped and searched under Section 60 by the police in England and Wales.⁶ The police kept Duggan’s body from his family for thirty-six hours. Initial reports from the Independent Police Complaints Commission that he had fired on the police were widely disbelieved and later discredited. On the afternoon of Saturday, 6 August, hundreds gathered in a peaceful protest outside Tottenham Police Station, but within hours the mood had turned ugly. People across the UK awoke the following morning to blanket media coverage of mayhem and smoking rubble on Tottenham High Street.

What happened next was for most an entirely unexpected and terrifying disruption to normality. By Monday, the riots had spread to my own London Borough, Hackney. It was my birthday and, with celebratory drinks cut short as nervous friends fled home, I cycled past boarded-up shops on Kingsland Road that were being defended by groups of Turkish men. From Barnet in the north to Croydon in the south, London’s shops were looted and burned; crowds of rioters rampaged through the streets. On Monday and Tuesday, unrest spread to other English cities: Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Nottingham There was a sense, even among more rational observers, that the country was descending into chaos. ‘Not since the blitz during World War II have so many fires raged in London so intensely at one time,’ claimed Time magazine.⁷

Amid the chaos, commentators looked at Chavs in a new light. Partly, I suppose, because the word ‘chav’ was being bandied around to describe the rioters, particularly on Twitter and Facebook. Fran Healey, lead singer of Scottish soft-rock band Travis, described the unrest as the ‘Chav Spring’ in a Tweet, referencing the Arab Spring. Fitness chain GymBox—which appears in Chavs as the promoter of a ‘Chav Fighting’ class—announced that it would be shutting early due to the ‘chav infestation’.

But, above all, a link was made with Chavs because the riots shone a light on Britain’s fractured, divided society. I was one of the few commentators during that turbulent week asked to challenge the dominant narrative that this was mindless criminality, end of story. Challenging this consensus, especially at the time, was not popular. People felt terrorized in their communities and Britain was in the throes of an angry backlash. Two days into the riots, nine-tenths of those polled supported the use of water cannon; two-thirds wanted the army sent in; and a third supported using live ammunition on rioters. Attempts to understand what was happening were seen as attempts to justify it. There was little appetite for social and economic explanations for the disorder sweeping English cities. People just wanted to feel safe and for those responsible to be punished.

Inadvertently, I found myself at the centre of one of the ugliest episodes of the backlash. Along with author Dreda Say Mitchell, I was put up against Tudor historian David Starkey on the BBC’s current affairs programme Newsnight. In a now infamous intervention, Starkey began by quoting Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which warned that immigration into Britain would plunge the country into violent chaos. Powell was—as Starkey accepted—wrong in his prediction that it would bring inter-communal violence. Instead, what Starkey called ‘black culture’ had turned white people into rioting thugs. ‘The whites’, he pronounced, ‘have become black.’

Attempting to scapegoat black people for the rioting, Starkey used a tortured argument to navigate around the fact that most rioters were not black. His increasingly baffling—but clearly carefully planned— rant took an even more alarming turn when he argued that if someone were to hear prominent black Labour MP David Lammy without seeing him, they would conclude he was white. Almost paralysed by the scene unfolding before me, I responded that he was equating black with criminality and white with respectability.

What unnerved me most about Starkey’s rhetoric were the possible consequences. Could David Starkey become a new Enoch Powell, with critics like me dismissed as a liberal elite trying to crack down on a brave historian for telling the truth? Would badges and t-shirts be produced proclaiming ‘Starkey Is Right’? Would there be marches in his support, like there was in 1968 when Powell was sacked from the Conservative Shadow Cabinet for his racist bigotry? My fear was that he had introduced race at a time of intense anxiety, when people were angry and scared. But what sympathy there was for him was not particularly strong or deeply felt. Since World War II, struggles against racism had transformed how people looked at race: for example, just over fifty years ago, a Gallup poll found that 71 per cent were opposed to interracial marriage. The number admitting such a prejudice today is virtually non-existent. Although racism was far from being purged from British society, Britain had changed and the public ramblings of a TV historian were not going to reverse that.

As the riots subsided following a surge of police officers onto Britain’s streets, the Government pledged a crackdown on those responsible. With a mood of widespread fury, a furious right-wing backlash followed, carefully nurtured by senior Conservatives. One traditional target of right-wing moralizers was singled out for particular opprobrium: the single mother. ‘Children without fathers’ was one of the factors identified by Tory Prime Minister David Cameron; it was a point echoed by right-wing commentators. The Daily Express appeared to find no contradiction in claiming that ‘we have bred feckless, lawless males who pass on to their own children the same mistakes’ and, in another paragraph, that ‘fatherlessness is the single most destructive factor in modern society’.

It smacked of the arguments of US right-wing pseudo-sociologist Charles Murray, who claimed that rising illegitimacy among the ‘lower classes’ had produced a ‘New Rabble’. This was classic demonization, reducing complex social problems to supposed individual failings and behavioural faults.

Pervading the backlash was the talk of a ‘feral underclass’. This was the idea of the Victorian ‘undeserving poor’ taken to a new level: the rioters and their families weren’t just undeserving, they were barely human. Some commentators took this rhetoric to its logical extreme: right-wing journalist Richard Littlejohn used his Daily Mail column to describe rioters as a ‘wolfpack of feral inner-city waifs and strays’, calling for them to be clubbed ‘like baby seals’. The idea of a ‘normal’ middle-class majority versus a problematic underclass was ubiquitous in post-riot commentary. According to Conservative Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith, ‘Too many people have remained unaware of the true nature of life on some of our estates. This was because we had ghettoised many of these problems, keeping them out of sight of the middle-class majority.’

In the febrile atmosphere that followed the riots, the government proposed that rioters living in council homes should be evicted, along with their families: in other words, collective punishment. It ‘should be possible to evict them and keep them evicted’, Cameron told MPs, and local councils—such as Nottingham, Salford and Westminster— announced their intention to do precisely that. Further plans were unveiled to dock the welfare benefits of those convicted of committing crimes during the riots. In this way, a link was made between the rioters, council tenants and people on benefits as a whole—all of which reinforced the notion of a feral underclass. But a precedent was set in Cameron’s Britain: if you were poor and if you committed a crime, you would be punished twice—once through the justice system, and again through the welfare system.

Cases were rushed through the courts, but the sentences handed down were, it seems, as much about retribution as justice. ‘Mum-of-two, not involved in disorder, jailed for FIVE months for accepting shorts looted from shop’, boasted Greater Manchester Police’s Twitter feed. ‘There are no excuses!’ The police force in question was subsequently forced to apologise. Twenty-three-year-old Nicholas Robinson, a man with no previous convictions to his name, was imprisoned for six months for stealing £3.50-worth of bottled water. Two young men were jailed for

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Well researched and aligned with my own political views, but 100 pages in I felt defeated. Yes, the working class is demonised. So what do we do about it? I couldn't struggle through the last half of the book to find out whether the author had any proposed course of action.

I think that this is a really important book. It explained to me how & why Labour has, to my mind, lost its way and how many of the problems we now have are still the legacy of Thatcherism. Reading it was like having the lens on our society cleaned.

I only read this to chapter 4 but what I did read was enough for me. It is of its time all Thatcher ( spits) and Blair ( beyond derision) Post Brexit it is clear that the working-classes are still despised by the media and the so called middle classes and elite in the UK. Watching Question Time boils my piss every time - woking class is always prefixed by ' the ordinary' - and what exactly is ordinary about a class of people that literally built Britain? SO just to bite back I call the others The Midlings - a dull and uninspiring homogenised lump of busy bodies busy being busy and agonising over the trivia of life - right back atcha!

A polemic that wears its leftwing politics unashamedly (and largely legitimately) on its sleeve. This is a solid review of the excesses of Thatcherism, how gravely it damaged working-class culture in the 1980s, and its upshot in Britain today - where a working-class rump has gone from being viewed as 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth'. Some discussion of globalisation would have been useful (after all, Thatcher's economic policies and smashing of the trade unions didn't take place in a national vacuum), but overall this is a fairly convincing read.

Jones documents how successive British governments, from Thatcher onwards, have pursued policies that had serious negative effects on the working class, by accelerating the shift away from manufacturing industry, enacting repressive measures against trade unions, cutting welfare benefits and support for public services (especially education), shifting from income tax to VAT, selling off most of the (council-owned) social housing stock, and so on. These policies have often been sold to the electorate on the back of patently untrue assertions that "we're all middle-class now" and accompanied by equally misleading propaganda about "welfare scroungers", "workshy single parents" and so on, echoing a negative stereotype of feckless working-class people as "chavs" propagated by right-wing newspapers, TV game-shows, and the rest. In reality, of course, there is still a large section of British society that thinks of itself as "working-class". Since the annihilation of manufacturing, most of them work in retail, catering, call-centres, construction, agriculture and the like, often in jobs that are less fulfilling, less secure, and far less well-paid than the jobs their parents had in factories and mines. Those who are unemployed, Jones urges, are unemployed not because they are feckless and idle, but because there is a structural shortage of jobs, especially in former industrial towns. And most of them feel let down by the political establishment, which has less and less contact with them and their concerns. Even the Labour Party has few MPs with working-class roots these days, a result of the professionalisation of politics and the "unpaid intern" system, which effectively closes off political careers to those whose parents can't support them in unpaid jobs (in London!) whilst they gain experience. And the same goes for journalism and the law.Jones also argues that social mobility in general is far less significant than it used to be (other people dispute this, and it's not easy to find an agreed definition of social mobility anyway). The education system is "rigged" by the middle classes to make sure their own kids have access to good schools and university places, leaving the schools most working-class kids attend marginalised; the cost of university education has become so high that few young people from working-class backgrounds can see the benefit of saddling themselves with student loans they won't necessarily ever be able to pay off. All this demonization and exclusion of working-class people has created a political vacuum that right-wing nationalist parties have moved into. From the interviews and canvassing he's done in working-class neighbourhoods, Jones concludes that the people who vote for the likes of UKIP and the BNP usually don't support the explicitly racist parts of their platforms, but they do respond to the way those parties seem to be listening to their concerns, unlike Labour and the Conservatives. Worries about immigration (competition for housing and services, possible undercutting of pay rates) don't necessarily equate to racism, and Jones argues that the notion of an "embittered white working class" is both false and counter-productive: working-class districts (and working-class families) tend to be more mixed ethnically than elsewhere, and it's often second-generation immigrants who are most worried about the effect of newcomers. It all sounds pretty convincing, even if it is quite at odds with my experience of British society. I grew up in an environment where the line between "working-class" and "middle-class" was fluid and hard to pin down, and where no-one would have dreamed of mocking the class, or the type of work, that most of their neighbours and relatives were associated with. Or of voting for anyone, under any circumstances, who didn't have "Labour" after their name on the polling card. Even at university, I don't remember anyone expressing disrespect for working-class people, and most people I knew were at most a couple of generations away from miners and factory workers. Except the drunken public-school prats we all laughed at, who are now running the country. But I moved away from the UK about the time Jones must have started primary school, so I've probably missed a lot.

An outstanding read that isn't at its heart about chavs at all. During my visit to Manchester and Liverpool, I could observe, to my horror, the strange customs and dress code of the British working/under class. In contrast to Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier, the working class is no longer invisible in the street. They even have reality TV show vehicles like "Geordie Shore" to beam their behaviors across the globe. In contrast to their visibility in life and in the media, politics is ignoring this lost generation completely.Jones' claims that this is the consequence of the Thatcher revolution which broke the trade unions and conquered the mind of New Labour. Politics has ceased competing for working class votes. The working class which still accounts for over 50 percent of all jobs has answered by not voting at all (the so-called sofa option) or voting for protest candidates (who usually are ineffective and do not last long in politics). Owen's description of the English political landscape is smart and the absence of a nutty left to balance the nutty right a misfortune for sound governance. Between Tories, Lib-Dems and Labour, English voters are offered three flavors that may taste a bit different but contain much the same ingredients and perform whatever the City of London demands. No wonder that the areas that profit least from such politics such as Wales and Scotland increasingly seek to go their own way. I hope that the author will present a follow-up book soon.

A very passionate call for the return of class politics, Jones' book will be read by nods of agreement by anyone with a flicker of belief in social justice. The only problem is of course that only the already converted will actually read this; but thats the same for all polemics. Jones' argues that the working class have become acceptable targets for ridicule and victimisation and its hard to argue with him. Starting from Thatcher's destruction of British manufacturing as a price worth paying to emasculate the trade unions, the myth of "aspiration", the identification of the working class with lack of aspiration and ambition and indeed with being a "non working class" , the developing weasel narrative that poverty is mainly the fault of the poor, the domination of media channels by the wealthy, the lack of actual social mobility other than amongst the very rich - these are all themes Jones explores well and at length. Mainly I agree with him. The Shannon Matthews and Madeline McCann cases, and their very different treatments in the press based on the class of the families is particularly well handledThe reasons this book doesn't get 5 stars from me are partly literary and partly interpretative. From a literary perspective there is sone repetition here - basically we have heard all Jones' arguments (and are in agreement) by around page 150. The rest feels like filler or a restating of the obvious. Secondly he needs a greater range of sources - Larry Elliott and Polly Toynbee of The Guardian are quoted often, but their opinions are already well known. We need to hear from a greater rage of right wing sources too, rather than Simon Fuller and the eccentric David Davis. But his discussions with "ordinary people" are well doneFrom an interpretative point of view, I would pick a number of nits. I don't think football hooliganism - and its very important part in making the population scared of young working class men from industrial towns, even if many perpetrators were not working class - is given enough attention. Thatcher's crack down on football hooligans was applauded by most - and set up a political mood where crackdown was an acceptable and appropriate policy. The break up of the miners strike was a short step from there. I also disagree with his image of the mining village and working class towns based around one industry as social utopia - most miners hated mining and were very eager for their children not to follow their footsteps. The difference of course is that mining, factory work, what Jones call "decent jobs" were at least SOMETHING. Now they have been replaced by the shopping centre, the call centre or nothing at all. The was nothing wrong with getting rid of nasty, dirty jobs in unprofitable industries - the tragedy was to replace them with nothing. But on the whole warmly recommended. It would be nice if some Conservatives would read it. But they wont

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