Chavs - The Demonization of the Working Class

by Owen Jones

  According to the late Alan Walter, a lifelong council tenant and former chairman of Defend Council Housing, this demonization also has political purposes. 'They promote this idea that anyone who wants to get on aspires to be a homeowner, and only those who can't do any better will live in council housing.' Walter saw a two-fold purpose: 'One, to make people who live on council estates feel inadequate; and two, to force those who can afford or might afford it to think they have to get out.' It was all part of New Labour's strategy of encouraging those working -class people who had resisted the Thatcherite property- owning dream to surrender.

  The Flint episode illustrates a real change in the attitudes of what could be called 'old Labour' and 'New Labour' towards working-class people. Yes, 'Old Labour' is a problematic term. As the avowedly New Labour former Cabinet minister James Purnell told me: 'Old Labour was one of those terms which was clearly a construct, and insofar as it meant anything really, it was the sort of things that "you the voters" happen not to like about us now, and because of the things that we've done in your memory.'

  But what was known as the 'Old Labour Right', the old social democratic leadership of the party, was remarkably different from New Labour as represented by figures like Purnell. (Indeed, one right-wing Conservative MP privately expressed to me the Tories' deep regrets at Purnell's decision to stand down as an MP at the 2010 general election. There was a bit of an overlap in political views between them and Purnell, I suggested. 'oh, massive overlap. Massive. I would have loved for him to have become Labour leader.')

  Former prime minister James Callaghan was a classic example of Old Labour: a working-class politician whose power base was the trade unions. Old Labour still celebrated, or at least paid tribute to, working- class identity. Although Callaghan was on what was then the right of the party, he still felt obliged to couch policies in class terms. As chan- cellor in the late 1960s, for example, he confronted the devaluation camp head-on by accusing: 'Those who advocate devaluation are calling for a reduction in the wage levels and the real wage standards of every member of the working class.'

  That is not to deny old Labour's flaws. It was top-down and bureau- cratic, and its celebration of working-class identity did not adapt to the entry of women and ethnic minorities into the workforce. 'Basically, what the London left was doing [in the 1970s and 1980s] was rebelling against that old Labour culture because it was quite sexist and racist,' recalls former London Labour mayor Ken Livingstone. 'It had huge weaknesses, and in a sense so much of what we were doing in the 1970s and 1980s was forcing the labour movement in London to recognize that it had to organize women and ethnic minorities.' Yet Old Labour remained committed to the idea of raising the conditions of the working class as a class, even if this sometimes amounted to mere lip service. In contrast, New Labour's philosophy is not rooted in improving thelot of the working class; it is about escaping the working class. New Labour was very open about this project. For example, Gordon Brown fought the 2010 general election on creating 'a bigger middle class than ever before' .

  According to Matthew Taylor, Blair's former head of strategy, New Labour made a distinction between the 'aspirational working class ... who felt that Labour was anti-aspiration' and a 'non-aspirational working class'. The 'non-aspirational working class' had no place in New Labour. They were ignored on the grounds that they had nowhere else to go and, in any case, were less likely to vote. 'So,' says Taylor,

  I think Labour's strategy was; 'How do we appeal to the aspirational working classi" Does that mean that they took for granted whatever it is we mean by the 'non-aspirational working class'? Well, maybe partly took for granted, maybe partly those people are in constituencies that Labour are going to win anyway. So, whether you might consider that to be callous, but in a first-past-the-post [electoral] system you don't focus your energies on people who are in constituencies where they don't make a huge difference. And partly those people are also less likely, or least likely, to turn out.

  But what did New Labour mean by aspiration? 'If you look at the disCOursearound aspiration, it's a very restricted notion of what it is,' says influential Labour backbencher and former advisor to Tony Blair, Jon Cruddas. 'If you ... compare and contrast the Middle England of Blair and Brown, located somewhere in the South East, everyone's relatively prosperous, growth is guaranteed-it's a very atomized notion of aspiration. You aspire to own more material things.'

  To Cruddas, aspiration has a very different meaning. He refers to Evetytown, a book written by philosopher Julian Baggini in which he searches for the real 'Middle England': that is, a community containing all the characteristics of the country as a whole. He ends up in the predominantly working-class, Northern English town of Rotherham. 'It was more fraternal, it was more solidaristic, it was more neighbourly,' says Cruddas, 'And in that lies, I think, a tale about how we can completely misconstrue this notion of aspiration ... ' In other words, real aspiration means much more than simple self-enrichment. 'As Alan Milburn [New Labour minister and one ofB lair's key alliesJused to say, when he was asked what was the essence of the Labour project, he said: "It is to help people to earn and own." Well, was it? Was it? Itnever was forme:

  In New Labour's eyes, being aspirational working class meant embracing individualism and selfishness. It meant fighting to be a part of Brown's 'bigger middle class than ever'. As Stephen Pound, a loyalist Labour MP, argues: 'I think part of the problem is that people in the working classes have been sold the line that they shouldn't be there, and you can somehow drag yourself up ... The old socialist motto is "rise with your class, not above it".The reality of this country is that to rise, you rise above your class.'

  What does 'non-aspirational working class' mean, then? 'I think everyone's aspirational,' says Ken Livingstone. 'Ithink that what the Blairites have patronizingly called non-aspirational, I suppose, is those people who still had a sense of community and still recognized that the whole community does better together or they all do badly together: The non-aspirational working class are, as their label suggests, frowned upon: because they have failed to jump on the Thatcherite, property-owning, endlessly acquisitive bandwagon. According to the New Labour lexicon, only self-enrichment counts as aspiration. Unless you're determined to climb up the class ladder, you are devoid of aspiration.

  There are few more devout Blairites than former New Labour Cabinet minister Hazel Blears. But she is affronted by the notion of a 'nonaspirational working class'. 'It's not an analysis that I would ever subscribe to,' she says. 'I have yet to meet a young person who isn't aspirational, irrespective of their background, and Ithink in some ways that writes people off. And Iobject to that, Iobject to that really quite significantly. It's a bit like the Tory division between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor-and that takes us back to Victorian times ... I don't think the Labour Party has time for people who can work but won't. But, neither do you write off their children and their whole families on that basis.'

  It is not just adults who are lumped into the non-aspirational cate- gory. New Labour politicians frequently diagnose a 'poverty of aspiration'in working-class kids to explain things like poor school results or why poverty is transmitted from generation to generation. For example, former New Labour education secretary Alan Johnson once railed against 'a corrosive poverty of aspiration which is becoming particu- larly prevalent amongst today's generation of working-class boys'. It is not the lack of jobs and apprenticeships following the collapse of indus- try that is to blame, but rather the attitudes of working-class children.

  In this spirit, a government report published in December 2008 high- lighted the alleged 'under-ambition' of working-class people living in the old industrial heartlands. The question of what these kids are supposed to aspire to in areas lacking well-paid jobs is never addressed. But this approach was fully in the Thatcherite mould: that responsi- bility for the social problems facing working-class people should be placed squarely on their shoulders.

  The notion of'aspiratio
nal' that New Labour attempted versus 'non-aspirational' was just one way

  The notion of'aspirational' versus 'non-aspirational' was just one way that New Labour attempted to exploit fissures in the working class that had emerged under Thatcherism. Another was to win the support of what New Labour politicians called 'hard-working families' (a term Blears also resisted, because 'there was always the presumption that if you didn't somehow fit in that, then the devil take you, and you were left to your own devices') as opposed to millions of supposedly idle people dishonestly claiming benefits. It is true that bashing 'welfare scroungers' may be more likely to attract the support of a low-paid worker than a mil- lionaire. After all, if you work hard for a pittance, why wouldn't you resent the idea of people living a life ofluxury at your expense?

  The reality is that attacks on welfare have been directed at the working-class communities most devastated by the collapse of industry. The old industrial heartlands contain the highest levels of people without work and dependent on benefits. The root cause is a lack of secure jobs to replace the ones that disappeared. As lain Duncan Smith has admitted, rather than creating new jobs, successive governments encouraged unemployed people to claim disability benefits, in order to massage the employment figures.

  Yet New Labour's approach was to stigmatize and demonize these vulnerable working-class people. The then-government's welfare advisor David Freud-who, appropriately enough, later defected to the Tories--claimed in 2008 that two million people should be pushed offbenefits and into work. And yet the government claimed at the time that there were only half a million job vacancies, and this was before the full force of the recession had hit. 'I mean, that was a figure that David Freud just kind of plucked out of the air,' admits his former boss, James Purnell.

  Until an abortive attempt to overthrow Gordon Brown in 2009, James Purnell had overall charge of New Labour's so-called welfare reform programme. He had promised tocreate 'a system where virtually everyone has to do something in return for their benefits'. Itwas right to 'penalize' people who, he claimed, were not trying to get work. 'If there is work there for people, we believe they should do it. We can't afford to waste taxpayers' money on people who are playing the system/" That £16 billion worth of benefits were in fact going unclaimed each year-around two and half times the amount of money the government was trying to save-went unmentioned. So did the fact that the majority of people inpoverty were in work. Purnell was presenting work as an automatic gateway out of poverty but, in low-pay Britain, that's hardly the case.

  One of Purnell's proposals was that people could be made to work in exchange for benefits. Given that [obseeker's Allowance at the time was worth only £60.50, if you were made to work a forty-hour week, for example, you would end up being paid just £1.50 an hour. Those unlucky enough to find themselves in the most devastated communities were not only accused of 'playing the system'. They faced being made to work for a fraction of the minimum wage.

  When speaking to me, Purnell markedly softened his rhetoric. 'All of the conditionality in the system was there to make sure that people helped themselves; he argued. It was consistent with long-established Labour traditions, he reassured me. But what about the fact that there were more people on benefits in certain communities because all the old industrial jobs had vanished, leaving only scarce, low-paid, insecure service sector jobs? 'I wouldn't buy the argument that it's better to be on IB [Incapacity Benefit] than to be in a supermarket job or in a call centre job,' he responded, referring to evidence that prolonged jobless- ness is unhealthy both for the individual and their family. '1 totally recognize that going from a job which was a highly skilled industrial job into something which people not necessarily would have wanted is a step down, but it's certainly less of a step down than ending up on Incapacity Benefit.'

  It is safe to say that Mark Serwotka is not a fan of Purnell. Serwotka is the leader of the 300,OOO-strong civil service union, the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union. Agitated to even hear his name, he described Purnell as 'the worst social security secretary in the history of this country' and 'a shameful man who professes to be a Labour politi- cian'. He was particularly angered by Purnell's attitude to places like Merthyr, where Serwotka grew up. Recently, Hoover closed its factory there after sixty-one years of providing work for the community. 'There's no mines, there's no pits, there's real deprivation-and Purnell essentially says: "You're not trying hard enough to get work, and therefore we need sanctions to force people into work." ,

  Serwotka repeatedly clashed with Purnell when he was in office. The minister demanded to know how he was stigmatizing people, so Serwotka quoted back at him a New Statesman article in which Purnell speaks of people on benefits 'having miserable lives where their universe consists of a trip from the bedroom to the living room'." Serwotka says that Purnell claimed he was' only quoting someone else', although there is no evidence of this in the article. 'If we think about that for a moment,' says Serwotka, 'it is absolutely blaming the victims of all this, when they're the victims,not the problems.'

  As Serwotka says, the 'absurdity' of the whole policy is that it was 'the same for the whole country, as if the labour market in the South East was the same as the labour market in the South Wales Valley, and clearly it's not. But if you introduce the same policy, what you do is stigmatize the areas where there's no work.' The 'welfare reform' programme fuelled still further the demonization of the poorest workingclass communities. It magnified the problems it purported to address and failed to explain the real reasons behind them. It also cleared the ground for the Tories--who went out of their way to praise James Purnell and his welfare policies--to go even further after they formed a government in May 2010.

  Looking at the whole welfare debate, Jon Cruddas thinks that 'even if it's unacknowledged, it still is premised on the notion of "the mob" that we have to control.' Cruddas saw the promotion of what he calls 'the mob at the gates' being 'reproduced culturally through forms of representation on TV -you know, the whole language around" chav" '. This is an absolutely fundamental point. New Labour, through programmes like its welfare reform, has propagated the chav caricature by spreading the idea that people are poor because they lack moral fibre. Surveys show that attitudes towards poverty are currently harder than they were under Thatcher. If people observe that evenLabour holds the less fortunate to be personally responsible for their fate, why should they think any different? No wonder the image of communities teeming with feckless chavs has become so ingrained in recent years.

  This spectre of the 'the mob at the gates' conjured up by Cruddas has heavily featured in the government's crackdown on anti-social behaviour. Again, huge numbers of working-class people support action to combat anti-social behaviour. It is, after all, more likely to affect someone living on a council estate than a professional out in the suburbs, and has a real impact on the quality of people's lives. But the government's response has been to stigmatize working-class youth rather than address the root causes.

  Take Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), introduced under New Labour but now facing abolition under the Conservative-led gov- ernment. They could be imposed for minor incidents and restrict the individual's behaviour in various ways: like banning them from a street, or forbidding them from swearing. If the ASBO was violated, the culprit could be sent to prison for up to five years. Originally, New Labour promised that under-eighteens would only have ASBOs served under exceptional circumstances but, as it turned out, year on year around half were imposed on the young. Overwhelmingly, those on the receiving end were both poor and working class-s-end, according to a survey in 2005, nearly four out of every ten ASBOs went to young people with mental health problems such as Asperger's Syndrome. In one case, a child with Tourette's was given an ASBO for his compulsive swearing.

  Whether or not you agree with ASBOs, it is difficult to deny that they have increased the bad reputation of young working-class kids and popularized the chav caricature. After all, members of the Bullingdon Cl
ub-whose great tradition is to smash up pubs and restaurants-- were never likely to be awarded an ASBO. Even New Labour's own youth justice 'tsar', Professor Rod Morgan, criticized the measures for 'demonizing' a whole section of British youth and criminalizing them for offences that once would have been regarded as 'high jinks', Itis dif- ficult to disagree with author Anthony Horowitz when he says that ASBOs 'add up to create a cumulative vision of a Britain full of yobs, with crack houses on every inner-city estate; drunken youths running amock in provincial towns, and so on.

  Taken together, New Labour policies have helped to build a series of overlapping chav caricatures: the feckless, the non-aspirational, the scrounger, the dysfunctional, and the disorderly. To hear this sort of rhetoric from Labour, rather than the Tories, has confirmed the stereo- types and prejudices many middle-class people have about working-class communities and individuals. But it can be far subtler than outright attacks. Many of New Labour's underlying philosophies were steeped in middle-class triumphalism. They were based on the assumption that the tattered remnants of the working class are on the wrong side of history --and must be made to join 'Middle England' like the rest of us.

  'The new Britain is a meritocracy; declared Tony Blair upon assuming office in1997.If New Labour had an official religion, it would surely be meritocracy. But there is a dark irony in how celebrated this concept became. 'Meritocracy' was not originally intended to describe a desirable society-far from it. It was meant to raise the alarm at what Britain could become.

  Michael Young, who penned Labour's 1945 Manifesto, coined the phrase in his1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. As he later explained, this was 'a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2003.' He warned that its consequences would mean 'that the poor and the disadvantaged would be done down, and in fact they have been ... It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none.'