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 crime and incarceration, the rise of New Labour and how to develop a new politics of class. Part 1 is here.

One of the more striking manifestations of the economic and cultural attack on the working-class has been the explosion in the prison population. As you write in your book much of this has to do with the policies of successive Tory and Labour administrations. I wonder, however, how much of it is intrinsically related to the structural forces you have also mentioned. Just as in society at large working class communities are becoming more segregated and isolated, so are many more working class people being quarantined behind bars.

From the early 1980s onwards, there was undoubtedly a dramatic increase in crime. This was the case across the Western world following the global recession of the early 1980s. According to the British Crime Survey, violent crime had doubled between 1981 and the end of Conservative rule. Drug addiction soared: there were less than 3,000 registered in 1980, compared to 43,000 by 1996. Areas particularly hit by the Thatcherite project - like old mining communities - experienced big increases in drug abuse. And the so-called “war on drugs” helped bolster violent crime: nearly a hundred thousand were being charged with drug-related offences in 1995, about four times more than a decade earlier.

The rise in youth crime has to be understood partly in the context of de-industrialisation that left large numbers of young working-class people lacking an obvious route to a future with security and dignity. Youth unemployment is currently running at one in five, and there are many young people trapped in a cycle of low-paid jobs and joblessness. Being unemployed at a young age has a “scarring” effect that lasts throughout people’s lives. As Professor Robert MacDonald put it to me: “It is well established that industrial restructuring has played a significant part in the restructuring of working-class youth transitions to adulthood.” Both youth crime - and anti-social behaviour - has to be understood in this context: as a product of despair as well as a lack of stability and economic security.

The rise in the number of young people locked up does, in part, have to be looked at against the backdrop of a genuine increase in crime. But while Tony Blair promised in opposition to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” that’s not how it panned out in practice. As his former political secretary John McTernan admitted, New Labour’s strategy ended up as “tough on crime, tough on criminals”. Between 1991 and 2006, the numbers of young people aged between ten and seventeen with a custodial sentence trebled. This is a damning indictment of our society, and shows a complete failure to offer genuine solutions to many young people growing up in often desperate circumstances. In any case, locking people up makes things worse: some three-quarters of young offenders go on to re-offend. Crime did fall - and, as a leaked Number 10 memo put it in 2006, “80 per cent of [the] recent decrease in crime [is] due to economic factors” - but the number of people locked up carried on rising.

Rather than offering genuine solutions to the growing problems of working-class youth, successive governments have opted to lock growing numbers up. With the prospects of young people (both working-class and middle-class, if we’re going to be honest) bleaker than ever, this cannot be sustainable.

It occurs to me that it might not be just the working class that bears the marks of 30 years of neoliberalism in this respect. Is there a sense in which as the ruling classes abandon their commitment to full employment and start regarding large swathes of the population as effectively surplus to requirements, their priorities shift from one of social integration (manifested in the therapeutic experiments in the 1970s for example) to one of social control (manifested in more punitive approaches)?

I suppose the political manifestation of the split in the ruling class was the division between the Thatcherites and the Tory “wets” in the 1970s and early 1980s. The “wets” were basically seen by their rivals as suffering from complacency. After all, British capitalism was genuinely in a real state in the late 1970s: there was a huge squeeze on profits, and the labour movement was incredibly strong. So Thatcherism increased the profit share of the economy and smashed the labour movement with anti-union laws and mass unemployment. The “wets” feared that these radical measures would lead to social chaos - or, at the very least, would do huge amounts of damage to Britain’s social fabric with unknown consequences.

Of course, what we now know as the “post-war consensus” - that is, the social democratic settlement constructed by the Attlee Government - was only reluctantly accepted by Britain’s ruling class. It was imposed on capitalism by a strong labour movement and a working-class that had no desire to return to the 1930s. The business elite was resigned to this consensus as long as they made profits (which they did - the Keynesian model supported unparalleled economic growth), and because they feared the consequence could be revolution. When revolution faded as a threat, and when they stopped making profits, the post-war settlement could be safely dismantled - as far as the Thatcherites were concerned, in any case.

But of course the wets had a point: dismantling the social democratic consensus would have consequences. Having significant numbers of people out of secure, properly paid work for large periods of their lives is hugely disruptive, and breeds frustration and desperation. Crime and anti-social behaviour were two inevitable consequences - but, having abandoned traditional social democratic means of dealing with the circumstances that breed them, the political elite has resorted to punitive measures that deal with the symptoms. Social fragmentation has bred forms of social disorder which has provoked forms of social control in response.

I am interested to know your opinion on the role of New Labour in this sequence. You quote Margaret Thatcher’s boasting that they were her greatest achievement. On the other hand you emphasise the significance of Blair’s purge of the unions within the Labour Party structure. Were Blair et al merely dead fish swimming with the stream or do they deserve credit as powerful class warriors in their own right? I ask this question particularly in the context of what the Left’s attitude to Labour should be now that it is in opposition.

It’s always tempting to rant at Tony Blair and the New Labour cabal for dragging the Labour Party to the right and trashing the party’s original purpose: to be the political voice of the working-class. But as a socialist I don’t subscribe to the ‘Great Man View of History’: that is, the idea that history is dictated by the people at the top, like some kind of soap opera. New Labour has to be understood as the consequence of a perfect storm that consumed the left, not just here, but everywhere: the rise of the New Right, the defeats suffered by the labour movement in this country in particular, the globalisation of capital, and - above all - the collapse of Stalinism, which unleashed a wave of capitalist triumphalism and apparently discredited the idea of any alternative to free market capitalism.

Yes, Blair et al brought the Thatcherite project to the Labour Party. But if not him, it would have been someone else. Across the world, social democratic parties, Communist parties, third world national liberation movements like the African National Congress - all capitulated to neo-liberal policies that benefited capital at the expense of working people.

That’s not to say we let the Blairites off the hook: humans have agency, despite the constraints placed on them. The global shift to the right did not mean Blair and co had to butcher hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, for example. But that Blairism could have such a strong hold on the Labour Party (and the broader labour movement) has to be explained by a broader social and political context: not least as the product of a successive number of defeats. Blairism would have been impossible if there had been strong countervailing pressure from below - that’s what stopped Hugh Gaitskell scrapping Clause IV in the late 1950s, for example.

If Labour is to be re-established as a genuine voice for working-class people, then all of this has to be taken into account. Dismissing Labour as irretrievably right-wing - as though its political evolution was an internal issue, rather than the product of a whole number of external factors - is, in my view, a fatally flawed analysis.

Your thesis is not simply that the demonization of the working classes is a product of the destitution of working class communities, but that it serves very specific purposes in an ongoing class war. What does the defamation of large swathes of the population mean for these ongoing struggles and how can it be resisted?

The demonization of working-class identity has had far-reaching consequences. A recent study by BritainThinks revealed most people thought of themselves as middle-class, in large part because they associated “working-class” with being a “chav”. “Working-class” people felt their identity was once a source of pride, but was no longer, and was simply a synonym for “poor”. Now, other recent polls have come up with very different results - but it does show that the demonisation of “being working-class”, if you like, has had an impact.

But it is possible that the coming mobilisations of workers will change things. The demonisation of the working-class is, after all, linked to their perceived weakness. In part, it’s basically about saying they’re a bit pathetic. But in the late 1970s, working-class people were being demonised for their strength: “union militants holding the country to ransom,” and so on. We may have a return to that if we are indeed on the verge of the biggest upsurge of union struggle since the 1970s and 1980s.

In the recent student protests, it struck me that working-class kids were the most militant and vocal. They turned up on the protests from estates in communities like Peckham, with big ghetto blasters blaring out grime (called the “dubstep revolution” by some). And it struck me that many of the kids were exactly the sorts of people demonised as archetypal “chavs”. If we see more of that, it will certainly challenge perceptions.

But of course what I’m interested in is taking on the crisis of working-class representation, which is the crisis of modern British politics. Working-class people have been purged from the political system, the media, and so on: they lack a voice. The labour movement, in particular, has the key role in tackling this crisis: it still represents 7 million workers, and can organise them in a way no other movement can.

A new class politics would have to renew pride in being working-class, not least to restore the sense of a “class for itself”. It would need to promote the idea of being working-class as something that puts you in conflict with the small group of wealthy people running society - those who want to maximise profits by keeping wages down, who wish to suppress working-class self-organisation, who want to keep taxes as low as possible, and who want to dismantle public services.

I’d argue that a new class politics would push for progressive policies like a mass council housing programme (thus taking on the biggest social crisis in the country); real, well-paid, secure jobs; union rights; democratic social ownership of the economy by workers and consumers; and so on. Only then will we be able to push for a new society based on need, rather than the interests of the wealthy elite - and indeed a society in which classes are dissolved.

But - let’s be honest - this is a far cry from the situation we’re currently in. We are still suffering from the legacy of the repeated defeats unleashed on working-class Britain in the 1980s. If Cameron defeats the coming struggles, I doubt that our movement will recover in my lifetime. The stakes could not be higher. But things looked pretty bleak in the aftermath of the 1926 General Strike, but things did change. Let’s just make sure that - this time - we win.

It is heartening to hear members of the left once again talking of “dissolving class”; but this requires moving beyond advocating a return to the post-war consensus. The challenge is not just to re-constitute the working-class as a force within liberal corporatistism; the challenge is to universalise it as a political entity. Ultimately the concerns you mention: the problem of needs, of equality, of ownership and of democracy are problems that concern everybody. This does not obviate traditional working-class collectivities but it does at the very least suggest we need to consider questions of language. Rather than talking of the interests of the working-class (which can always be dismissed as sectarian or factional) should we be referring to more generic terms like the “people”, the “demos” or the “population”?

I agree that there can be no return to the post-war consensus - not that I think it is possible to resurrect it, in any case. We have to build something else. In any case, a challenge to neo-liberalism cannot take place in one country. If an old-style social democratic government came to power in Britain, it would trigger a flight of capital and the financial markets would soon blackmail it into submission. One of the developments of the last quarter of a century that has really strengthened the hand of capital has been India and China entering the world market, bringing with them cheap labour in the hundreds of millions. This “race to the bottom” is part of the reason that wages stagnated even before the crash in Britain. There are no shortcuts: as capital has globalised, so must the workers’ movement.

For me, if there’s no working-class, there’s no left. It is class politics that makes the left “the left”, rather than radical liberals. The left has to make the case that the working-class (those who cannot live a decent life without selling their labour, and who lack control over - or are alienated from - that labour) is the majority of society. The working-class isn’t at the centre of left politics out of simply abstract dogma: it’s the position of working-class people - as those directly exploited by capitalism, and whose interests are in direct conflict with those of wealthy businesspeople - that makes them the “gravediggers” of modern capitalism.

I’m not sure we could use “the people” - it’s an abstract term that doesn’t mean very much (it can be everyone, by definition); and “the population” has the same drawbacks, as well as sounding very clinical. Because of the demonisation of working-class identity and the challenge we face overcoming it, there is a case for talking about “working people”, even though some on the left won’t like that. “Working people” lacks the connotations that “working-class” has been given.

That’s not to say that socialism should not aim to win over those who define themselves as “middle-class” (another contested term). It is in the interests of most middle-class people to have job security, rights in the workplace, good public services and cohesive communities; and, as polls have showed, support among middle-class people for higher taxes on the rich (like the 50p tax rate) is almost as strong as it is among working-class people. A left movement would only ever win with the support of a majority of working-class people and a sizable minority of middle-class people.

But of course socialism aims to emancipate all of humanity - working-class, middle-class - and even the wealthy elite, although they won’t necessarily appreciate being saved from themselves in the medium-term.

Samuel Grove is an independent researcher and journalist.