Owen Jones is a union lobbyist turned political commentator. He has written for a wide range of publications and has been prominent on television and radio since the publication of his new book, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (Verso, June 2011). Recently he caught up with Sam Grove to discuss the issues raised by the book. In this part he addresses the roots of the ‘chav’ phenomenon and the structural economic and political forces that lie behind it. Part 2 will follow shortly.

Your new book is called Chavs:The Demonization of the Working Class. Can you briefly explain where the term ‘chavs’ comes from, what it is supposed to represent, and who is using it?

The word ‘chav’ comes from the Romani word ‘chavi’, which means ‘child’. When it first entered the Collins English Dictionary in 2005, it was defined as a ‘young working-class person who dresses in casual sports clothing’. Its use is widespread, but it is its use by middle-class people that is particularly disturbing. I open the book by discussing an anecdote: I was having dinner with people from an exclusively middle-class, professional background, and one quipped: ‘It’s a shame Woolworths is closing. Where will all the chavs buy their Christmas presents?’ What he was saying could easily be rewritten as: ‘Where will the lower orders buy their Christmas presents?’

There are several acronyms that have been made up for ‘chav’ that are dripping with class hate: like Council House Associated Vermin and Council Housed And Violent.

Several ‘chav-bashing’ books have been published which come up with definitions of those they are attacking. According to ‘The Chav Guide To Life’, as well as being ‘loud and lower class,’ ‘Most chavs come from not well-off, working-class families on council estates’. The bestselling Little Book of Chavs goes through a list of ‘chav’ jobs: supermarket checkout workers, cleaners, hairdressers, fast-food workers, etc.

As an example of how the wealthy and powerful associate ‘chavs’ with working-class people, it’s worth recalling how Prince William dressed up for a ‘chav-themed’ fancy dress party at the end of his first year at Sandhurst. When the other cadets demanded he ‘put on a chavvy accent and stop speaking like a Royal’, he couldn’t do it: ‘William’s not actually the poshest-sounding cadet, despite his family heritage, but he struggled to pull off a working-class accent,’ one cadet told The Sun.

The website ‘ChavTowns’ goes through a number of working-class communities, writing them off in their entirety as, well ‘ChavTowns’. My own hometown of Stockport gets a repeated beating: take one article attacking the town - ‘To be fair, Stockport has some very wealthy areas. Unfortunately, it has more than its fair share of scummy ones too.” Another article attacking the local population similarly moans: “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).’ Or, for a Southern example, check out an example of eloquent chav-bashing directed at Basildon, which is described as a ‘seething mass of chavite humanity’.

For many, Vicky Pollard - the invention of two wealthy, privately educated comedians - is a symbol of the ‘chav’ caricature. A few years ago YouGov ran a poll of people who worked in TV: the majority thought that probably the most famous ‘chav’ icon out there, Vicky Pollard, was an ‘accurate representation’ of the white working-class.

What is most problematic is how the meanings of ‘chav’ and ‘working-class’ have fused together, even among many people who would ordinarily be described as working-class.  Take the alarming findings from the recent BritainThinks survey about class:

‘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. By contrast, being middle class is about being, well, a bit classy.’

Above all, the book argues that the caricature is linked to the theory we’re all middle-class now, apart from those who could be described as ‘the chavs’. Take Simon Heffer, who argued: ‘Something called the respectable working class has almost died off. What sociologists used to call the working-class does not now usually work at all, but is sustained by the welfare state.’
Or similar sentiments from William Hague’s former advisor, Amanda Platell, who argued that the respectable working-class had declined, and poor academic results among working-class kids could be explained as the consequences of bad parenting by so-called ‘slum mums’.

The assumption is that the working class are no longer a part of society; society is now homogenously middle class and what problems there are exist with an ‘underclass’ that lies at society’s margins. Apart from the crude ideological function this analysis serves (placing the burden of responsibility on the victims) many of us on the ‘left’ would dispute the claim that what was once the working-class has disappeared.  However in order to challenge this claim we need a fairly clear idea about what we mean by working-class.

The idea that ‘we’re all middle-class now’ was embraced by both New Labour and the Tories alike. For the right, the exception to this was the so-called ‘underclass’, who were believed to be the product of state dependency and behavioural problems; for influential US right-winger Charles Murray, the break-down of marriage among lower income groups was the culprit. As well as being dehumanising (who would ever want to be labelled ‘underclass’?), it’s a ridiculous concept - are the rest of us part of an ‘overclass’?

New Labour’s own version was ‘social exclusion’. As Tony Blair’s former head of strategy, Matthew Taylor, put it to me

‘Class is something which is given to me. Exclusion is something which happens to me and in which I am somehow an agent. And so I think, yeah, absolutely, there was a sense not that you should blame the poor for being poor, although there was a bit of that as well, but that poverty was a process in which people were active in one way or another… not simply the result of great impersonal social forces.’

So it is in the context of these mainstream, distorted views of class that the left needs to redevelop an analysis of what the modern British class system actually is. I was never cocky or arrogant enough to think that’s what my book would do. Above all, the main purpose of the book was to get a debate on class going.

The working-class certainly looks a lot different than it did thirty years ago. On the eve of Thatcher’s assumption of power, over 7 million worked in manufacturing. Today, it’s little over two and a half million. Instead, we’ve seen the rise of the service sector and, with that a ‘new’ working-class. For example, there are a million people working in call centres: as many as worked down the pits at the peak of mining. Retail is the second biggest employer in the country, having trebled since 1980.

There are key differences between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ working-class. In the industrial era, many communities were based around the factory, the dock or the mine; jobs were passed from generation to generation, and were more likely to last a lifetime; rates of unionisation were high; jobs had relative prestige. The workforce was, of course, more male; the work was often dirtier and physically exhausting. But the service sector working-class is different. You don’t have communities based around supermarkets or call centres in the same way. Jobs are not passed from generation to generation, and there is a much greater workforce turnover. Job insecurity is higher. There are more part-time and temporary workers. Jobs are cleaner and less physically demanding, but often have less prestige.

Pay is generally lower: according to 2008 figures, the median wage for all service sector workers was less than £20,000 a year, but it was £24,343 in manufacturing. Take the Longbridge car factory workers who lost their jobs in 2005: the median annual income of their new jobs (often in the service sector, such as working in supermarkets) is £18,728, a fifth lower than the £24,000 they were earning at Rover. And, of course, the levels of unionisation are a lot lower. Over half of public sector workers are unionised, but it’s only 15% in the service sector - and, when it comes to supermarkets, for example, it’s even lower.

Mary Lynch, a Birmingham supermarket worker, put it to me that she was working-class because ‘I just feel we’re working just to pay our way all the time.’ I think this should be the starting point, linking in nicely with the traditional Marxist view that the working-class is made up of those who sell their labour in order to live. In the book, I also argue that it represents those who have no control over that labour: call centre workers and shop workers have no input on what they do on a daily basis - they have no power in the workplace.

I wouldn’t argue it was cultural. For example, I don’t think a member of the Royal Family becomes ‘working-class’ because they watch X-Factor or read a tabloid newspaper; and I don’t think a postal worker becomes ‘middle-class’ because they listen to Radio 4 and read The Guardian. But there are those who will argue they are working-class because of the family they were born into (even if they now have a “middle-class job), and it’s not up to me or anyone else to get in the way of people celebrating their background. But I still would stick to an economic view of class.

There is an interesting dialectic between myth and reality in the book. On the one hand there is the production and promulgation of defamatory fictions about the working-class; on the other hand there are the distressing features of working-class communities to which these fictions attach themselves. There is a sense then in which the construction of the ‘chav’ must be challenged on two fronts; both as a social construction and a very real symptom of structural economic changes.

Let’s be clear. Elements of the ‘chav’ caricature do exist. If we take the fashion aspects: there are large numbers of young working-class people who wear casual sportswear. When I was growing up in Stockport, it was probably the most common casual attire you would see young people wearing out and about. Equally you can encounter young public school types wearing bow ties, tweed jackets and pink chords. When I worked in Parliament I noticed these fashion styles becoming increasingly fashionable among Tory researchers. But as I put it in the book: ‘You might think that people in tracksuits or people in tweeds look pretty silly - but who cares?’

The way working-class people spend their money is another component of the ‘chav’ caricature; there is a common snobbery that they do not spend it with the taste and discretion of middle-class people, and instead waste it on supposedly tacky or frivolous items. This is taken to its extreme with celebrities from working-class backgrounds who have become wealthy very quickly: like Cheryl Cole or David Beckham, for example.

And then there’s the way many ‘chavs’ are often supposed to behave. Again, this hasn’t come from nowhere. In fact, anti-social behaviour and actual criminal behaviour, for example, are class issues: they are far more likely to affect working-class people than middle-class people. Of course, it is often exaggerated. As one retired Birmingham pattern-maker told me:

‘You hear, “Oh they’re all hoodies” - but they’re not! I used to hang around with a gang of lads. I used to wear a three-quarter length coat. Winklepickers and jeans you could hardly get into. I was called a ruffian. We survived! And I’m sure this generation will grow up and the next generation will have something different that people will be moaning about. No, I don’t think they’re a bad lot really. You might get one or two, but then again you always did!’

Professor Robert MacDonald has studied anti-social behaviour in depth, and concluded it was ‘an age-old theme’. As he saw it, ‘swathes of ordinary, working-class young people get corralled, herded, moved on, labelled as “trouble” simply for passing their evening leisure time in unremarkable, un-troublesome friendship groups on the streets. The street-corner society was the dominant form of leisure for ordinary working-class young people in our studies. Wasn’t it ever thus? Was for me!’

But, that said, the wrenching social changes of the last thirty years have had an impact. The collapse of industry took with it a large number of skilled, secure jobs: and, in particularly, paid apprenticeships that provided a gateway to a career. Large numbers of young people have been deprived of a future: indeed, youth unemployment is currently running at one in five, and those with work often find themselves in low-paid, low-prestige jobs. That’s the sort of environment in which anti-social behaviour will flourish.

When I visited Ashington - the biggest mining village in the world until the pit closed in 1986 - the local priest gave me detailed examples of anti-social behaviour. But he put it in a wider economic and social context: ‘I sometimes feel [...] that among the younger generations, because maybe they’ve got no prospects, there’s a “couldn’t care less” attitude.’

The idea of ‘fecklessness’ is also a key component of the ‘chav’ caricature. Again, let’s be clear: benefit fraud, for example, exists. But it has to be put in context. The government estimates that £1.5 billion a year is lost through welfare fraud, compared to £70 billion a year lost through tax evasion. The amount of benefits left unclaimed - ‘welfare evasion’, if you will - is about ten times the amount lost through fraud.

Rather than communities brimming with workshy freeloaders, there are simply not enough jobs to go around. There are 2.5 million unemployed people in Britain today, and another 1.5 million in part-time jobs who want full-time work. That’s excluding those on incapacity benefit who the government wants to push into work. And yet there are only around 500,000 vacancies - and generally not where they are most needed. When Iain Duncan-Smith suggested the people of Merthyr - a Welsh town battered by deindustrialisation - get on the bus to find work in Cardiff, it was subsequently pointed out that there were 9 jobseekers for every 1 vacancy in the Welsh capital. As Ed Miliband himself highlighted in his response to the Budget earlier this year, there are 10 people chasing every 1 vacancy in over 130 constituencies.

It is true that, as Iain Duncan Smith has admitted, Tory governments in the 1990s manipulated unemployment figures by encouraging those without work to be transferred to incapacity benefit. But, as research by Dr Christina Beatty and Professor Steve Fothergill has revealed, many incapacity benefit claimants are those who are least able to work in areas with the least amount of jobs. When there are large numbers of people competing for a small amount of work, those with ill health are least likely to get work: hence they concluded that ‘the UK’s very high incapacity claimant numbers are an issue of jobs and of health.’

You can see how this has played out in Glasgow, which houses more incapacity benefit claimants than any other local authority. Indeed, the number peaked in 1995 when one in five were on IB: about three times the UK level. But as a group of Glasgow University and Glasgow City Council experts pointed out: ‘The main reason for the huge growth in sickness benefit claims were the city’s rapid de-industrialisation.’ After all, the number of manufacturing jobs in 1991 was just a third of what it was just two decades earlier.

Rather than large numbers of people in the old industrial working-class communities suddenly becoming lazy or idle, a large portion of secure work has disappeared, and the vacuum has not been adequately filled.

So - of course - elements of the ‘chav’ caricature do exist, but they need to be put in a wider social context: particularly with reference to the wrenching economic changes of the last 30 years.

There is a sense then in which the ‘chav’ caricature is a coalesence of age old fears of young people and the working-class that go back much further.

There has always been snobbishness towards working-class people in society, since class forces people to rationalise each other’s position in the pecking order. But I’d argue there was counterbalance to all that in the past: working-class pride and identity were still respected, and working-class people were shown in a positive light. Above all, they still had an effective voice in politics and the media. So what’s happened today is that the ‘snobbishness’ has strengthened, and the resistance against it has been drastically weakened.

The story is different when it comes to working-class youth. There have been previous moral panics over ‘mods and rockers’, for example: but I don’t think there’s any real positive portrayal of working-class youth in the mainstream, but a hell of a lot of negative stuff.

One of the more insidious aspects of this defamation campaign is the way it is often cloaked in humanitarianism; either in an expressed concern for ‘broken Britain’ or as a reaction to working-class intolerance. Such professed moralism is also apparent in political circles (for example the Conservatives appeal to the principles of fairness in their reforms and cuts to the public sector). Is this a new addition to our political discourse?

When the franchise had property qualifications and was made up of wealthy elements, the Tories could be open about their purpose: to defend property and privilege. When the 1831 Reform Bill was presented to Parliament - which merely proposed to extend the suffrage so that one in five men could vote - the Tories were hysterical. One MP alleged the Bill represented ‘a revolution that will overturn all the natural influence of rank and property.’ Lord Salisbury, who would end up Prime Minister, would sulk about the expanding suffrage with dark predictions that ‘first-rate men will not canvass mobs, and mobs will not elect first-class men.’

Even when the suffrage embraced working-class men, the mask would slip from time to time. Referring to the Tories’ support for the Taff Vale legal judgement in 1901 which basically crushed the right to strike by making unions liable for profits lost in industrial action, future Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin confessed: ‘The Conservatives can’t talk of class war. They started it.’

I would argue that the Tories are the political wing of capitalist interests, but they cannot present themselves as such in a democratic system where they need to win a significant section of working-class votes to get into office.

Thatcherism was, in my view, an all-out class war in the 1980s: as Tory newspaper editor Peregrine Worsthorne put it: ‘Old-fashioned Tories say there isn’t any class war. New Tories make no bones about it: we are class warriors and we expect to be victorious.’ But despite Thatcher’s strident rhetoric (‘enemy within’ and all that), Thatcherism always tried to present itself as a universal creed - on the side of strivers of all classes, and all that.

Today, the Tories’ ‘Broken Britain’ is all about the idea of social problems being caused by a breakdown in personal responsibility, not least because of a supposedly too big state. That’s a convenient way of avoiding the legacy of deindustrialisation - which has left many communities bereft of secure well-paid work, even today; it’s also useful for justifying the cuts agenda, by demonising poor people in working-class communities.

So, for example, Tory minister Jeremy Hunt justified the slashing of welfare benefits by arguing that long-term claimants had to ‘take responsibility’ for the number of children that they had, and that the state would no longer fund large workless families. In reality, just 3.4% of families in long-term receipt of benefits have four children or more. But Hunt was tapping into long-established prejudices of poor people multiplying at taxpayers’ expense, as well as conjuring up the caricature of a slobbish single mum who has lots of kids to get benefits.

But of course ‘Broken Britain’ is dressed up moralistic rhetoric: it conjures up the idea of a society in crisis and that it’s in the interests of all of us to sort it out. So it is a clever device to disguise an all-out class war by a government of millionaires as a well-intentioned attempt to solve society’s ills.

And the question of working-class intolerance (and racism)?

One of the only ways that the ‘working class’ has made a re-appearance in the mainstream media and politicians’ speeches in the past few years has been in the new incarnation of the ‘white working class’. They are defined more by their ‘whiteness’ than their class; they’ve almost been transformed into a new, marginalised ethnic minority, disorientated by multiculturalism and obsessed with immigration. At worst, they’re portrayed as special brew-swilling racist thugs.

But actually working-class communities are far more mixed than middle-class suburbs, for example. Take London: compare suburbs in Outer London like Richmond with predominantly working-class communities like Tower Hamlets, Newham and Hackney. Jobs in retail, for example, are far more likely to be ethnically mixed than many middle-class professional jobs. We have some of the highest levels of interracial relationships in the Western world.

Does that mean you don’t get racism in working-class communities? Of course you do. But actually we are far less racist society than we were, say, fifty years ago when polls showed a large majority opposed to interracial marriages.

What has fuelled the backlash against immigration, in my view, has been insecurities over jobs and housing which are far greater in working-class communities. There are no politicians offering the radical solutions that are necessary so the BNP have filled the vacuum, offering reactionary solutions to everyday problems.

Samuel Grove is an independent researcher and journalist.