Just Finished Reading: Chavs – The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones (FP: 2011)

You don’t have to look far – newspapers, political speeches, comedy shows on TV. These days the once powerful and respected working class, the very salt of the Earth have become the scum of the Earth. In other words – Chavs. These are the remnant, the non-aspiring working class who are either unable or unwilling to move (along with everyone else apparently) into the only class worthy of mention – the middle class. According to politicians both from the Right and Left we’re all middle class now. To which the author says: nonsense!

For one thing survey after survey shows that over 50% of the British population regard themselves as working class – so hardly a left-over rump then! Not everyone it seems aspires to be comfortably in the middle of things. The image of things, rather than the reality, is something quite different. Those who don’t aspire are feckless, scroungers, criminal and racist – at least according to the right-wing press and the right-wing politicians who feed the flames of class war (which they believe they’ve won). Ever since Maggie took on and defeated the union shock troops made up of the miners in the early 80’s things have gone from bad to worse for the workers – with ever growing restrictions on union activity and ever loosening constraint on businesses in their hiring and firing practices leading to abominations such as zero hours contracts and so called internships where young people work for months without pay in the hope (rather than the expectation) of a job at the end of it. Inevitably only those whose parents can support them through their university and internship (not the working classes by the way) have any hope at all of progressing in this way leading to the not unsurprising finding that the vast majority of top jobs are occupied by often privately educated children of the upper middle class. Is it any wonder that they look down on their social inferiors?

Time and again, with facts and figures to back up his arguments as well as an impressive array of interviews from the man (or woman) in the street to the so-called great and good who made decisions that affected millions of workers the author successfully debunks myth after myth and lie after lie. Not only does he show that the so-called ‘sink’ estates are products of government policy – particularly the right-to-buy scheme coupled with heavy restrictions on council house building programmes leaving the most run-down areas as the only affordable place to live for the very bottom strata of society but the reason for so much poverty (not unsurprisingly linked to chronic unemployment or underemployment) is again deliberate government policy which eviscerated the very industries that working class areas depended on for their economic and psychological wellbeing.

About the only thing I disagree on, in this otherwise very readable political polemic, is the author’s fixation on Margaret Thatcher as the instigator of the Class War still raging in this country. The war against the working class has its roots in a time before that class existed. It is a war that has been raging since before the Industrial Revolution and it’s not over yet. The rich may think they’ve won and that the workers have been finally put in their place but we’ve been here before and it didn’t go too well for the rich back then. Workers of the World unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains….