Chavs - The Demonization of the Working Class
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The ambition of the Thatcher government related in some degree to the defeat of Ted Heath. But it had much to do with the determination, to put it at its mildest, to put the labour movement in its place. And the most obvious [way to do] that strategically is to take on and defeat the miners. Because they understood-as anybody who thought about it would understand-the repercussive effects of defeating the miners would he very substantial in the rest of the labour movement, as it turned out to be.
To many people at the time, the Miners' Strike looked like the last hurrah of the working class. Their most ferocious phalanxes had been crushed and sent back to their pit villages, to face a lingering decline. The popular historian David Kynaston remembers the atmosphere after the Strike. 'It basically meant that people assumed that the old working class no longer had the power, no longer had the clout, which was a huge change in thinking,' he recalls. 'And there were people living in sort of middle-class suburbia like me, who felt well-disposed -but it suddenly seemed relatively unimportant in all honesty.'
On the eve of the Thatcherite crusade, half of all workers were trade unionists. By 1995, the number had fallen to a third. The old industries associated with working-class identity were being destroyed. There no longer seemed anything to celebrate about being working class. But Thatcherism promised an alternative. Leave the working class behind, it said, and come join the property-owning middle classes instead. Those who failed to do so would have no place in the new Britain.
When the newly elected Thatcher government unveiled its Housing Bill in 1979, it could barely contain its excitement. 'This bill lays the foundations for one of the most important social revolutions of this century,' Michael Heseltine claimed triumphantly. At the heart of the legislation was what became popularly known as 'right-to-buy'. Council housing tenants were now able to buy their own homes at knock-down prices. If you had been a tenant for twenty years, for example, you could have half the market price taken off. One hundred per cent mortgages were offered. Home ownership was to be promoted by government like never before.
The policywas undoubtedly popular with many working-class people. Amillion council homes were sold ina decade. Former tenants would mark their entry into home ownership by giving their properties a lick of paint. By 1985,the Labour Party had dropped its opposition to the policy. Even so, itwas not always as voluntary as it sounds. At the end of the 1980s, the Conservative government introduced legislation that aimed to strangle councils financially and force them to sell off their housing.
Owning a home did not catapult a person into the middle class. To be paying off a mortgage instead of paying rent did not change the fact that you had to work for a living. Looking hack at his lifetime, Neil Kinnock remembers that 'in the 19505, 60s and 70s, the people in the streets from which I came bought their houses from their private landlords, and it didn't change their affiliations, or their commitment, or their sense of identity at all.' British car workers had long been homeowners, yet had been among the most militant trade unionists in the 1970s.
But the policy was part and parcel of Thatcher's determination to make us think of ourselves as individuals who looked after ourselves above all else. Only that would make people feel responsible for their successes and failures. Thatcherism was fostering a new culture where success was measured by what you owned. Those who did not adapt were to be despised. Aspiration was no longer about people working together to improve their communities; it was being redefined as getting more for yourself as an individual, regardless of the social costs.
The social costs were high indeed. The 'left-behinds', the council tenants who had the audacity not to jump on the property ladder, faced the consequences of official disapproval. Before Thatcher came to power, the average rent of a council tenant was £6.20 a week; a decade later, it was nearly four times higher. Spending on housing dropped by a stunning 60 per cent under Thatcher. But it was to be the next generation that would suffer most. The government prevented councils from building social housing to replace the stock that was being sold off.
Housing charity Shelter opposed right-to-buy at the time. 'The critical reason was a recognition of the impact that the policy would have over the long term on the availability of social housing stock,' says Shelter's Mark Thomas. 'The concern was that we'd be selling off these homes at a discount and that the proceeds that were realized wouldn't actually be reinvested in building replacement social homes, and in fact that turned out to be the reality. We've only just very recently moved to a situation where we're building more social homes per year than we're losing under the right-to-buy.'
Rising demand for housing pushed prices up, encouraging disastrous house-price bubbles. Housing became increasingly unaffordable for huge swathes of the population. Millions of people were condemned to languish for years on council housing waiting lists. Little wonder that the number of homeless Britons soared by 38 per cent between 1984 and 1989 alone.
The policy also drove a wedge through working-class Britain, creating a divide between homeowners and council tenants. Right-to-buy meant that the best housing stock was sold off; and it was the relatively better-off council tenants who were becoming homeowners. Those who remained council tenants tended to be poorer and in the worst homes. By 1986, nearly two-thirds of tenants were from the bottom 30 per cent in terms of income, and only 18 per cent were from the richest half. Yet, just seven years earlier, a fifth of the richest 10 per cent were council house dwellers. Council housing became increasingly reserved for those who were most deprived and vulnerable. Itwas in the 1980s that council estates got their bad name as dilapidated, crime-ridden, and deeply poor: exaggerations in part-and any elements of truth were the direct result of government policies.
Encouraging home ownership was not the only tool for redefining the idea of aspiration. In Thatcher's Britain, wealth (and to bewealthy) was to be glorified. The Conservatives promoted the idea that people were rich because of their own hard work and talent, along with the implication that those who did not become so were somehow lacking. 'I believe the person who is prepared to work hardest should get the greatest rewards and keep them after tax, that we should back the workers and not the shirkers,' was Thatcher's clarion call.
The rich were idolized as never before, not least the City men. The so-called Big Bang, or deregulation of financial services, not only made Britain even more dependent on the City: italso turned spivs and speculators into heroes. 'Every man a capitalist,' declared Thatcher: an unattainable goal, but it showed the route that people were now expected to march along.
For the first time in generations, it was a blatant government aim to shovel as much money in the direction of the rich as possible. In the first Budget, top bracket taxes of 83 per cent on earned income and 98 per cent on unearned income were slashed to 60 per cent, and corporation tax went from 52 to 35 per cent. In 1988 the then-chancellor Nigel Lawson went even further: the top rate of tax was reduced to 40 per cent. Geoffrey Howe is unrepentant about what he calls 'changing the tax structure tomake it incentivized and not obstructive of enterprise'. Yet the reality of this part of Thatcher' s class war is that it shifted the tax burden from the rich to everybod y else. 'Whether or not it had the right impact on distribution of wealth or income, Ican't tell,' Howe says. 'But it certainly did liberalize, enhance the chances of making money, saving money, expanding business ... '
As Howe puts it, the Conservatives had 'to find the resources with which to reduce the burden of direct taxes'. So they put up VAT, a tax on consumer goods. The poorer you are, the more of your income goes on VAT. But it was springtime for the rich. By the end of the Tories' reign, in 1996, the richest 10 per cent offamilies with three children were over £21,000 a year richer on average than when Thatcher had come to power.l The wealthiest decile's incomes shot up by 65 per cent for each married couple. Their taxes went from over half to just above a third of their income.i Film director Stephen Frears remembers when Lawson cut the top rate to 40 per cent. 'It was as if Lord L
awson knocked on my door and said, "Well, we'll give you a cheque for fifty grand!" ,
For everyone else, taxes went from 31.1 per cent of their income in 1979 to 37.7 per cent by the end of 1996, courtesy of the 'party oflow taxes'. The real income of the poorest tenth collapsed by nearly a fifth after housing costs. 10The slice of the nation's wealth they owned nearly halved. I 1A family with three children in the bottom 10 per cent of the population was £625 a year poorer in 1996than when Thatcher arrived in No. 10. There were five million people in poverty in 1979; by 1992, the number was closer to fourteen million. And while the top I per cent saw income growth of just under 4 per cent a year under the Conservatives, if you were on a median income it went up by an average of only 1.6 per cent.
Geoffrey Howe was a little uncomfortable when I read him statistics showing that the living standards of the poor had actually declined. 'I haven't often considered it in that form because ... No, Idon't, Idon't sort of leap around at that, it's ... at the end of the period they've got better off, I think?'
According to Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant and leading tax specialist, 'Thatcher shifted the burden of taxation from those who were best offin society to those who were least well offin society. Part of the increasing gap between rich and poor in the Thatcherite years was the result of her fiscal policy. I've got no doubt at all that that was deliberate.' Why deliberate? 'Because her philosophy was, those who were at the top of the pile generated the wealth that she wanted to be created; she viewed the rest as the also-rans, and it didn't matter.' The tax system had been reconfigured to reflect people's supposed worth.
How could a government-backed wealth grab by the rich be justified? Thatcherites talked about trickle-down, as if the growing wealth sloshing around at the top would eventually drip down to the bottom. But this clearly was not happening. So, instead, Thatcherism attacked the victims of its failed economic policies. If they were suffering, then it must be their own fault.
At the centre of Thatcher's philosophy was the idea that poverty did not really exist. If people were poor, itwas because of their own personal failings. 'Nowadays there really is no primary poverty left in this country,' she once said. 'In Western countries we are left with the problems which aren't poverty. All right, there may be poverty because they don't know how to budget, don't know how to spend their earnings, but now you are left with the really hard fundamental character-persona.
At the 1981 Conservative Party Conference, Norman Tebbit famously said that his father 'got on his bike and looked for work, and he went on looking until he found it'.Now that industrial Britain was in meltdown, this was what the swelling ranks of the unemployed were supposed to do. 'Get on your bike' became a national cliche, summing up Thatcherism in a nutshell: that the unemployed (among others) must take personal responsibility for the problems that the government had foisted upon them. In line with this thinking, unemployment benefits were cut and no longer rose with people's earnings. That government policies had landed people in this situation did not even get a hearing. The irony, of course, was that when workers fought for their jobs--as the miners had-they were demonized even more.
The Conservatives remain prone to launching regular broadsides against so-called welfare dependency. But it was under Thatcher that public spending on benefits soared to historically unprecedented levels
-because of the permanent loss of secure jobs in the old industrial heartlands. Thatcher has robustly defended herself against accusations that her policies were responsible. When it came topeople on welfare, she proclaimed, their 'poverty is not material but behavioural'. She even insisted that 'welfare dependence is the classic manifestation of a still-too-socialist sociery.:" Perhaps, then, Thatcher brought the country closer to socialism than has previously been recognized.
The explosion of crime was another striking example of how Thatcherire ideology worked in practice. The British Crime Survey, launched in 1981 to gauge the level of violent crime, reported just over two million incidents at its inception. By the end of Conservative rule, the rate had doubled. The areas hardest hit were poorer communities where jobs had vanished. The link between crime and the socialdamage wrought by mass unemployment and poverty was indisputable-c-except for people like Thatcher. 'It is often said and Ihave had it said to me in the House that unemployment is the cause of crime. I have said: "No it is not, it most certainly is not." ,
Thatcher was determined to deal with the symptoms of her scorched-earth economic policies, not the causes. The Criminal Justice Bill in 1986, which provided for longer sentences and limited defence challenges to jurors, appealed to a popular fantasy that the solution to crime was simply to lock up more criminals. In the same year, the Public Order Act granted the police sweeping new powers. Thatcherism's attitude was that crime was an individual choice, not one of the many social ills that thrive in shattered communities.
The attitude to drug users was much the same. The number of registered drug addicts soared under Tory rule: from less than 3,000 in1980 to 43,000 by 1996. In contrast to the predominantly middle-class drug misusers of the 1960s, the addict of the 1980s was young, often out of work, single, with few or no qualifications and living in a deprived area. Drugs specialist Dr Julian Buchanan found de-industrialization to be a root cause as opportunities for unskilled young people disappeared: 'For the first time, drug-taking became associated with working-class youth living in disaffected and isolated communities.'
Martin Barnes, chief executive of DrugScope, has no doubt that the collapse of the old industries is in large part to blame. 'I'm old enough to remember the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s, and they ripped the guts out of a lot of communities, and families and individuals,' he says.
With communities and families and individuals impacted by unemployment, it wasn't just that they lost their jobs, it wasn't just the communities being impacted by the businesses moving out. It was also that their incomes were simply inadequate. If you can buy some heroin or pinch some stuff to buy it-the first time you take it, the experience is apparently almost indescribable, you couldn't imagine how good it feels. Is itany wonder then that's what some people used to feel better?
But Thatcher's response was to declare: 'Weare at war against drugs. ' By 1995, nearly a hundred thousand people were being charged with drug-related offences, around four times more than just a decade previously.
Other vulnerable working-class groups faced attack. Single parents, who largely lived in poverty, were characterized as feckless, benefitaddicted and work-shy. By 1991, there were twice as many as there had been just twenty years ago. The increase had been greater in poorer areas, particularly those hardest hit by unemployment. But there was no sympathy for often desperately poor women struggling to raise a child alone.
When Peter Lilley, then Cabinet minister in charge of Social Security, attacked single mothers in a speech at the 1992 Conservative Party Conference, he was merely articulating years of prejudice against them. To the tune of a song by Gilbert and Sullivan, he sang: 'I've got a little list, I've got a little list of young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list.' Ithad got to the point where government ministers were singing songs on public platforms to taunt poor people who were utterly voiceless. This was Thatcherism at its basest.
Did this bile go down well with some working-class people? Undoubtedly it did, and itbecame a fixture of politics to play groups of working-class people against each other. Thatcherism aimed to separate the working-class communities most ravaged by the excesses of Thatcherism from everybody else. This was old-fashioned divide-andrule, as practised by conquerors throughout the ages. Those workingclass communities that suffered most from Thatcher's ruinous class war were now herded into an 'underclass' whose poverty was supposedly self-inflicted.
All this hammering of working -class culture, communities and identity would have lethal consequences. Football had long been the key leisure interest of working-class people. As scriptwriter Jimmy McGovern has put it:
Football fans had become demonized as hooligans and thugs because of the actions of a small, violent minority. The manner in which workingclass people had become not just demonized, but even dehumanized, had a stomach-churning role in the worst tragedy in the history of British football: the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster.
On a sunny spring day, before kick-off at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Sheffield's Hillsborough Stadium, huge numbers of Liverpool fans congregated outside the stadium. The central pens were already crammed with enthusiastic fans waiting for the referee to blow his whistle, but, disastrously, the police opened an exit gate to allow more through. Protocol dictated that when the central pens had reached capacity, police would direct fans to the side pens. Inexplicably they failed to do so. A crush ensued. As had become standard practice in football stadiums across the country, Liverpool supporters were caged in like animals by metal fences. As suffocating fans spilled out on the pitch in a desperate bid for survival, the police tried to drive them back because they presumed it was a pitch invasion.