Chavs - The Demonization of the Working Class

by Owen Jones

  Or take the case of thirteen-year-old Alfie Patten. In early 2009, it was claimed that his girlfriend had conceived when he was aged just twelve. Newspapers splashed pictures of this baby-faced, four-foot-tall alleged father across their front pages. lain Duncan Smith could not resist making political capital out of the episode, claiming it underlined the Tories' point about 'Broken Britain'. 'Too many dysfunctional families in Britain today have children growing up where anything goes,' he said, warning that the sense of right and wrong was collapsing in some parts of society. The Tories were strangely silent when, in the end, it turned out that Alfie was not the father after all.

  But the Tories are quick to cultivate middle-class fears of rampaging hordes of state-subsidized barbarians just outside the gates. Months before the 2010 general election, then-Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling made an astonishing comparison between Moss Side, a working-class district of south Manchester, and the US drama The Wire, which focuses on the war between police and drug gangs in Baltimore. Moss Side, too, was experiencing an 'urban war', Grayling claimed. Locals were outraged -and no wonder. In 2007, there were 234 murders in Baltimore, a city of 630,000 people. In Britain as a whole there were 624 violent killings in the same year, while figures for 20 10reveal thirty-one murders in the whole of Greater Manchester. Baltimore had 1 per cent of the UK's population, but its murder rate was around a third of the UK's.

  In their effort to create caricatures of depraved working-class com- munities, the Tories were not above citing blatantly false information.In a propaganda leaflet entitled Labour's Two Nations published in early 2010, they released some astounding figures that suggested a teenage pregnancy pandemic was sweeping through Britain's poor communi- ties. The document repeatedly affirmed that women under eighteen were 'three times more likely to be pregnant in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived areas. In the most deprived areas 54 per cent are likely to fall pregnant before the age of 18, compared to just 19 per cent in the least deprived areas.'

  It was a real wake-up call: over half of all teenage girls in some areas were falling pregnant! It turned out the Tories had put the decimal points in the wrong place, making figures wrong by a multiple of ten. The real figure for the ten most deprived areas was actually just 5.4 per cent. The document also failed to mention a decline in under-eighteen conceptions of over 10 per cent in these areas--reversing a trend that had been going up under previous Tory governmenta/ By 2007,11.4 per cent of conceptions were to women under the age of twenty-aboutthe same level as that conservative golden age of family values, the 1950s. Now, no doubt this howler was an honest mistake. But it says much about the Tories' view of these communities that they were not sufficiently startled by such outlandish figures to double-check them before press-releasing their document.

  Indeed, the Tories have shown even more aggressive ways of tapping into middle-class prejudices against teenage pregnancy, which, undeniably, is far more common in working-class communities. Following in the footsteps of Peter Lilley and his stigmatizing 'little list' of teenage mothers, the Tory shadow children's minister, Tim Loughton, hinted at locking them up. 'We need a message that actually it is not a very good idea to become a single mum at 14; he said. '[It is] against the law to get pregnant at 14. How many kids get prosecuted for having underage sex? Virtually none. What are the consequences of breaking the law and having irresponsible underage sex? There aren't any.' When asked if they should be prosecuted, he dodged the question. 'We need to be tougher,' he insisted/

  What the Tories are doing is placing the chav myth at the heart of British politics, so as to entrench the idea that there are entire communities around Britain crawling with feckless, delinquent, violent and sexually debauched no-hopers. Middle England on the one hand and the chavs on the other. This was taken to its logical conclusion by a report published in 2008 by the Tory leadership's favourite think-tank, Policy Exchange. The document reckoned that northern cities such as Liverpool, Sunderland and Bradford were 'beyond revival', had 'lost much of their raison d' etre' because of the decline of industry, and their residents should all be moved south. 'Regeneration, in the sense of convergence, will not happen, because it is not possible.'

  The report provoked a firestorm and David Cameron had no choice but to repudiate it. Yet this think-tank is at the heart of the modern Conservative Party: it was founded by the current Cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Francis Maude (who described being a co-founder as his proudest political achievement) as well as Nicholas Boles, now an MP and a key figure of Cameron's 'Notting Hill set'.

  The echoes of this breathtaking plan could be perceived in proposals unveiled by lain Duncan Smith in the early days of the Conservativeled coalition following the 2010 general election. While the government was cutting jobs and help for those without work, Duncan Smith suggested that council tenants could be taken out of unemployment black spots and relocated, hundreds of miles away if necessary. Millions were 'trapped in estates where there is no work,' he lamented, without suggesting that the government might consider bringing jobs to these areas. The message was clear: these were communities without hope or a future, and nothing could be done tosave them. As the pro-Conservative Telegraph newspaper put it, the parallels with Norman Tebbit's 1981 call for the unemployed to 'get on your bike' were uncanny.i

  Even before they came to power nationally, the Tories were already undertaking a spot of what you might call 'social cleansing'. In 2009, Conservative-run Hammersmith and Fulham Council came under fire for apparently planning to remove poor residents from council houses. The council proposed to demolish 3,500 council properties and to build upmarket homes to attract middle-class residents in their place. According to council leader Stephen Greenhalgh, an advisor to David Cameron, council housing was 'warehousing poverty' and entrenching welfare dependency. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act described a council estate as a 'barracks for the poor' and included plans to increase rents from £85 to £360 a week.9 Hammersmith and Fulharn is often mentioned as Cameron's favourite council. It certainly showcases some of the Tories' least constructive attitudes to working-class people. Many of the Tories' ideas about social inequality-such as blaming people for their circumstances-have a firmly Thatcherite pedigree. But they can also be traced back to a right-wing pseudo-political scientist, the American Charles Murray. Murray is perhaps most famous for his controversial (to say the least) 1994 book, The Bell Curve, which suggested that inherent racial differences had an impact on IQ levels. Like today's Tories, Murray claimed that family breakdown had triggered the rise of an 'underclass' in British society. He argued 'that the family in the dominant economic class-a-call it the upper middle class-s-is in better shape than most people think, and is likely to get better. Meanwhile, deterioration is likely to continue in the lower classes.'

  Rising illegitimacy in 'the lower classes' had produced what Murray called the 'New Rabble', marked by growing crime, 'dropout from work', child neglect and so on. One of the solutions, Murray argued, was for childbearing to entail' economic penalties for a single woman. It is all horribly sexist, I know. Italso happens to be true:

  Rather than financial sanctions for childbearing single women, the Tories promoted a £150 tax break for married couples in the 2010 general election campaign. Their first Budget scrapped Labour's healthin-pregnancy grant, made it compulsory for single parents to seek work when their child reached the age of five (down from ten), froze child benefit, and introduced tough welfare cuts and penalties that would disproportionately affect single mothers. Nonetheless, Murray and the Cameron Conservatives share a basic underlying philosophy. Social problems in working-class communities are magnified and then blamed on the personal characteristics and lifestyles of the inhabitants. The logical next step is to withdraw state financial support from such communities and, instead, focus on changing individual behaviour.

  To get a better idea of the Tory approach to social division in British society, I had a chat with seni
or MP David Davis. Davis is often feted as a rare working-class Tory, but he prefers to play down his roots. 'People seem to think my background was underprivileged,' he says. 'It wasn't. It was just normal: Indeed, after graduating from Warwick University, Davis spent seventeen years working for Tate & Lyle, ending up as a senior director. When I asked Davis if the privileged backgrounds of Tory frontbench ministers made it difficult for them to connect with the electorate as a whole, he was refreshingly honest. 'Truthfully, it's partly true of me tool You know, it's a long time since I lived on a council estate, and the only thing that you have that pulls you back to earth, really, is the constituency surgery, where you're dealing with people on a Friday night and Saturday morning with their problems.'

  Davis is certainly no more sympathetic towards the plight of workingclass people than other Tories. 'There have been a couple of TV programmes recently. One in which they went down to what in the old days would have been called a dole queue ... and said: "Would you like a job?" Chap said yes, and was told: "It's picking squash on a farm." They won't do that, you know. And something similar happened a week or two ago showing the work rate of a British worker against some Polish workers-s-and the Polish workers were working twice as fast. This is a surmise, Idon't know this to be true, but my instant reaction to that sort of thing would be: we are probably facing a work ethic problem, which is worse than welfare dependency.'

  Davis is quite keen to contrast what he depicts as the unmotivated British worker with 'the large number of immigrants who've probably got a stronger work ethic ... And so from the point of view of the employer, they're relatively cheap and work quite hard, so if you want to be hard-nosed about it, why employ a not so hard-working Brit who's demanding a higher salary?'

  What struck me was his willingness to make an intellectual argument in defence of inequality. 'I wouldn't try and do anything about correcting the inequalities,' he explained, 'because the inequalities are widened by people getting richer, not by the poor getting poor-but by the rich getting richer. And frankly, so long as they generate wealth for the economy, so long as they generate tax income and so on, then I'm comfortable with it.'

  I pointed out the recent groundbreaking research by academics Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book, The Spirit Level. They used irrefutable statistics to show that the more unequal a society is, the more social problems it has-like crime and poor health, for example. In other words, more equal societies were happier societies. David Davis gave the book short shrift. 'It's bullshit,' he said. 'It's bullshi: ... I think it's one of these fashionable, stupid ideas. It's easy to sell a book, but Idon't think it stands up.'

  In political historian Ross McKibbin's opinion, the Tories are 'there to defend inequality, always have been. It's like all conservative parties anywhere-they're designed to defend inequality and social privilege.' Davis's comments vindicate Ross's analysis; if anything, perhaps, it doesn't go far enough. Davis is, in effect, celebrating inequality as a good thing. The Tory demonization of working-class communities must be seen in this light. It is difficult to justify a grossly uneven distribution of wealth on grounds of fairness. But what if the people at the top are entitled to be there because of their entrepreneurial flair, while those at the bottom are deeply flawed and so deserve what they get? Davis's attitude towards British working-class people is shaped by the idea that people's lot in life is determined by their personal characteristics. The crux of his argument is that they just don't work as hard as workers from other countries-which, he says, partly explains issues like unemployment.

  Criticizing working-class people is politically useful for a Conservative-led government determined to drive through cuts that will disproportionately hurt the same group. Some of the first programmes to face the axe after the 2010 general election included free school meals and help for the young unemployed. The first Budget unleashed the biggest cuts to public services in a century and-just like the Tory government of the early 1980s-upped the rate of VAT, a tax that hits those on low incomes the hardest. Despite ministers' claims that they were serving in a 'progressive government', economists estimated the poorest would be hit six times harder than the richest." When Tory minister Bob Neill was asked why northern cities were losing millions of pounds compared to southern cities, his shameless response was: 'Those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt.'

  So much for the Tories: after all, most of their leading lights were born into privilege and are ideologically committed to defending grossly uneven distributions of wealth and power. What about Labour's record? Even a politician as New Labour through-and-through as former Cabinet minister Hazel Blears is clear that Labour's purpose was 'to ensure that, first of all, working-class people have a voice in Parliament. That's why it was set up, because before then, you didn't.' Labour governments introduced all of the major reforms of the post-war period that have improved the lot of the working class, from the NHS to workers' rights. The tragedy is that New Labour bears much of the responsibility for the negative light in which the working class is now seen.

  History will remember two TV moments from the 2010 general election. The first was the novelty of televised debates between the party leaders, which led to a surge in Liberal Democrat support that had dissipated by the time the electorate cast their ballots. But just as memorable, and far more revealing, was when Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown bumped into Gillian Duffy, a sixty-five-year-old pensioner, in the streets of Rochdale.

  If you were looking for a representative Labour voter, Mrs Duffy would surely fit the bill. Before retirement she had spent thirty years working with disabled kids for Rochdale Council. Her late father used to sing Labour's anthem, 'The Red Flag', when he was a teenager. Mrs Duffy shared his commitment and had voted Labour all her life.

  When Mrs Duffy spotted Gordon Brown on a walkabout around her home town, she demanded answers to the sorts of concerns shared by millions of working-class people. She told Brown that the three main things ' I had drummed in when I was a child was education, health service and looking after people who were vulnerable'. She was worried that her two grandchildren would struggle to afford to go to university when they were older. Finally, she expressed fairly mild concerns about the levels of immigration. The conversation ended amicably as Brown told Mrs Duffy: 'You're a very good woman, you've served your community all your life.'

  And that might have been all there was to it.But Brown had forgotten to remove his TV microphone. As soon as he stepped into the waiting car, he let his annoyance rip. 'That was a disaster. Should never have put me with that woman ... whose idea was that?' When an aide asked what she had said, Brown uttered words that, for many, represented the last nail in his political coffin. 'Ugh, every thingshe's just a SOrt of bigoted woman, said she used to be Labour. It's just ridiculous.'

  The scandal (inevitably christened 'Bigotgate') summed up the contempt many felt New Labour had towards working-class people. 'Working-class people are sort of seen as a problem. They drink too much, they smoke too much, they don't look after their kids properly, they're feckless, they're work-shy. Racist. Essentially, that's how they're seen,' says Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott, who contends that one of the big reasons Labour lost the 20 I0 election was because it lost touch with its working-class base. 'They didn't really like these people very much,' he argues. 'They thought they didn't have the right sort of raspberry-wine vinegar to put on their radicchio and so on. There was a growing contempt for the working class, not just among the parties of the right, but also among the parties of the left. And I think that's a really big part of what's changed in Britain in the last thirty years.'

  Bigotgate was an accidental bubbling to the surface of New Labour's private contempt for Labour's working -class electoral base. Yet it appeared in the form of intentional policy announcements, too. There are four million overwhelmingly working-class social housing tenants in Britain. While 30 per cent of voters overall opted for Labour and 37 per cent voted
Tory in the 2010 general election, it was 47 and 24 per cent respectively among people living in social housing. New Labour did not reciprocate their loyalty. In early 2008, the then housing minister Caroline Flint sneered at the levels of unemployment among council-house tenants. Referring to the culture of 'no one works around here', Flint suggested that those who did not get a job could lose their home. New tenants would sign 'commitment contracts' before moving into a property, and it was hinted that the measure could eventually also apply to those already living in council homes.

  The housing charity Shelter expressed dismay; claiming that Flint would send Britain back to the Victorian era. 'The Government wants to return Britain's unemployed to the workhouse by throwing them on the streets,' said Adam Sampson, Shelter's chief executive. 'What is being proposed would destroy families and communities and add to the thousands who are already homeless.'

  'You've got to ask: what would happen to those people told that they had to leave their current properties?' adds Shelter's Mark Thomas. 'Where would they actually end up? And what would be the cost to the taxpayer associated with that? And the government really didn't seem to have answers to that sort of question.'

  Caroline Flint's proposals could never have been implemented, because they were illegal under existing laws: councils were not permitted to make people homeless. But she had fuelled the now widespread political sentiments that council tenants were freeloaders.

  Flint expressed surprise at how social mixing in council housing had declined and levels of unemployment had shot up on estates over the last thirty years. Unless she was grossly incompetent at her job, she would have known that this was the legacy of right-to-buy. The least disadvantaged tenants had bought their homes, while the Tories-followed by New Labour-had refused to build any more. That meant that the remaining, ever-diminishing most in need.