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Chavs and the Return of Class Politics |
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. Owen Jones, in his book Chavs, which has opened up a major debate about the stereotyping and hatred of the working class in Britain 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, one based on the media’s inexhaustible obsession with an indigent white underclass, he portrays a far more complex reality. Moving through Westminster’s lobbies and working-class communities from Dagenham to Dewsbury Moor, Jones reveals the increasing poverty and desperation of communities made precarious by wrenching social and industrial change, and all but abandoned by the aspirational, society-fragmenting policies of Thatcherism and New Labour. 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.
Speaker addition: Owen will be joined by Deborah Mattinson, from Britain Thinks, who has been carrying out research into attitudes to class in Britain.
Owen Jones has worked in the British Parliament as a trade union lobbyist and parliamentary researcher. Chavs is his first book.
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August 25th, 2011 at 4:03 pm
A friend of a friend of mine has set up an e-petition asking the government to address the issue of income inequality. If you agree that this is something the government should address please sign the petition http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/9169
September 21st, 2011 at 4:26 pm
[...] Source: http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/?p=1799 [...]
October 5th, 2011 at 2:57 pm
Owen Jones and Deborah Mattinson were on hand to “re-open the debate about class”, which Jones sees as having been deliberately closed down by both politicians and a media keen to use a simplistic demonisation of the working class to justify an unequal society and the ripping up of the benefits system.
Mattinson opened the talk with an avalanche of statistics showing that among the dwindling numbers of Britons who define themselves as working class there is (perhaps unsurprisingly) a great deal of financial insecurity and a generalised fear of the future.
What was striking was the way observations illustrated how younger members of this cohort defined themselves in terms of their poverty rather than by any aspect of class solidarity, and how for all the overiding fear was of being identified as one of the so-called underclass – a “chav”.
Jones took up the discussion to explain how the “chav” label has been used to undermine working class identity in general, and how to be working class, therefore, is no longer seen as a source of pride.
He supplied a number of examples of egregious media reporting determined to show white working class communities in general as living in a “Shameless” hell.
Jones traced the origins of these attitudes back to the Thatcherite assault on the traditional industries and the communities in which they were embedded, and to the mantra of “we’re all middle class now” that was later enthusiastically embraced by New Labour.
The situation is exacerbated by what Jones sees as a “crisis of representation” of working class voices in both the media and the political sphere, which leads to a lack of both interest in and focus on policies that could improve the lot of those on the wrong side of the inequality equation.
Both speakers put forward a passionate and convincing argument that when it comes to the working class, the rest of society is piling insult onto injury.
I myself come from a working class background and live in a traditional working class area of Bristol, and I accept Jones and Mattinson’s analysis almost without reservation.
However, I feel that over the last 15 years I have witnessed a substantial increase in what is quaintly termed “anti-social behaviour” in my own neighbourhood that I cannot simply write off to getting older and less tolerant. So I asked if it was the case that many at the “wrong end” of society are so without hope and self-respect that they are becoming alienated in increasing numbers from what were only recently seen as societal norms. I am not coming at this argument from the right, as I see the problem not in terms of feckless individuals but a system that both ignores, abandons and washes its hands of people while lying to itself that it is not in any way to blame.
But I feel there is a growing problem, one that is cynically used by the right to justify further exclusion and oppression even as they denounce it, and to some extent played down by a left terrified of being seen as judgemental or as attacking “their own”.
If I understand Jones correctly, he said that he felt that anti-social behaviour could well be driven by both despair and, in an age of no/meaningless employment, a feeling that there is little or nothing to lose.
On my way home, I reflected that the erosion of community cohesion over the last 30 years could only add to this toxic mix, as people no longer fear censure or ostracism by communities that have been fragmented and turned inward-looking by many years of bad policy making.
It is fashionable for politicians of all stripes to bemoan the state of “Broken Britain”. If indeed the country does lie in shards, the vandals are not hard to find – they are the very same pious political hand-wringers that point hysterically at spurious bogey men (“The Sixties!”), or claim to have no idea where it all went wrong.