by Owen Jones
When you look back at the 1945 Labour Cabinet that constructed the welfare state after the ravages of W orId War II,the contrast is almost obscene. The giants of Clement Attlee's government were Ernest Bevin, Britain's representative on the global stage; Nye Bevan, the founder of the National Health Service; and Herbert Morrison, Anlee's number two. All were from working-class ~ackgrounds, starring life as a farm boy, miner, and grocer's assistant, respectively. It was the trade unions and local government that had provided them with the ladders to climb, enabling them to end up as towering political figures and respected statesmen.
But take a look at today's treatment ofJohn Prescott, one of the few working-class members of New Labour. You don't have to agree with his politics to flinch at the class-based ridicule heaped on him. The son of a railway signalman, Prescott went on to fail his eleven-plus and became a waiter in the Merchant Navy. His impressive rise from such roots to the post of deputy prime minister was rarely applauded, however. Tory MP Nicholas Soames, a grandson of Winston Churchill, used to shout drinks orders at him in the House of Commons whenever he rose to speak. Tory MPs and journalists who have benefited from hugely expensive private educations mocked his occasionally garbled English.
When he entered the House of Lords, that retirement home for the ruling elite, the Telegraph's chief leader writer scoffed: 'I'm not sure ermine suits John Prescott.' The comments left by Telegraphreaders on the newspaper's website were a class war free-for-all. One passed on a friend's hilarious description of him as 'the builder's bum-crack of the Labour Party'. 'Baron Pie & Chips' and 'Prescott is a fat peasant' were other witticisms, as was 'John "here's a little tip" Prescott'. 'Someone has to serve the drinks between debates!' guffawed another. Prescott was ridiculed because some felt that by being from lowly working-class stock, he sullied the office of deputy prime minister and then the House of Lords.
Working-class people once rose in politics through the mighty institutions of trade unions and local government. But today the trade unions are on their knees and local government has been stripped of many of its powers. Former London mayor Ken Livingstone regrets the abolition of the traditional council structure where working-class people got elected, learned via committees how things are run, and then went to Parliament. That's gone ... There's a lot of people that used to he on Lambeth Council or Camden Council who weren't terribly good in terms ofliteracy and numeracy, hut loved representing their area, and could work the machine and the council. They didn't have to have bloody A-levels or degrees to do it. In that sense the barriers against the working class are stronger now, not because an aristocratic elite is keeping them out, but because a sort of middle-class layer has introduced too many qualifications, rules, and regulations.
You are more likely to make it to Parliament if you are a middle-class, Oxbridge-educated former special advisor these days.
When I spoke to Peter, a leisure centre worker in East London, he summed up the scepticism many working-class people feel towards the political establishment. '1 think they're on a different wavelength. I think most of the politicians are very rich and don't understand the normal problems of people, because they come from a different background. And, you know, you see them all on television, most of them are very wealthy, so they wouldn't understand our problems, you know.'
It was his firm belief that 'they would never know what normal people go through.' This is a fundamental point in understanding poli- ticians' demonization of working-class communities. It is, of course, largely down to the legacy of Thatcher's assault on working-class Britain, and the establishment of a consensus that individual salvation can only be achieved through joining the middle class. But this consen- sus has established itself so easily in Westminster because our increasingly privileged political elites were-s-and are-s-fertile ground for these kinds of ideas. They are largely disconnected from working-class communi- ties, and cannot imagine anyone not sharing their middle-class values and aspirations. They find it easy to explain working-class problems as the consequences of personal behaviour, not the social structure of the country. Above all, stereotypes about the 'forking class have found a sympathetic hearing from overwhelmingly middle-class politicians who have rarely mixed with people with less privileged backgrounds.
The shadow of Thatcher's class war and the demonizing of workingclass communities by both the Tories and New Labour have had drastic consequences. Political trends always exert a profound influence on the culture. The repercussions of the attack on working-class values and institutions have fanned out through society. Like Westminster, our media and entertainment are dominated by the most privileged sectors. They have been all too ready to put working-class people down in the crudest possible ways.
4
A Class in the Stocks
Treorchy in the Rhondda is chav-infested. Although here, people don't even know what a chav isl! The reason being that everyone is a chav! There are no posh folk, as the place is working class and unemployment is rife!
-ChavTowns website
There has never been an age when the working class were properly respected, let alone glorified. From the Victorian era to World War II, working-class people were barely mentioned in books. When they appeared at all, they were caricatures. As one expert on Victorian literature put it, even a middle-class supporter of reform like Charles Dickens presented working-class people as having 'the two-dimensional qualities of cartoon figures'.1George Orwell observed: 'If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole ... the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do find their way between the comers of a book, it is nearly always as objects of pity or as comic relief.,
And yet things did change after World WJr II. Labour, the party created by working-class people to represent them in Parliament, had won a landslide victory and was there to stay as one of the country's two major political forces. Sweeping social reforms were introduced to address working-class concerns. Trade unions enjoyed influence at the highest levels of power. Working-class people could no longer be ignored.
'The war changed everything,' says Stephen Frears, a film director who often weaves class themes into his work (from early television serializations of Alan Bennett plays to the 1985 classic, My Beautiful Laundrette). 'Novels started being about the working classes. Plays started being about the working classes. I found all of that very, very interesting.' For someone from a middle-class background like Frears, this was a profoundly liberating experience -what he refers to as his 'emancipation'. 'There was suddenly a whole group of people who'd never been heard before, really ... The focus before had been on such a narrow range of subjects in Britain, which was those who live the life of the upper classes or middle classes, whatever. So suddenly the world became more interesting.'
A real milestone was the launch of Coronation Street on lTV in 1960. For the first time a TV series revolved around sympathetic, realistic working-class characters and looked at how they lived their lives. It struck a chord and within months attracted over 20 million viewers.It rode the wave of so-called Northern Realism, a new genre of film that explored the realities of working-class life. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, Room at the Top and Cathy Come Home were classic examples. While working-class people were the stars of favour- ites such as The Likely Lads, it was middle-class people who could find themselves the butt of jokes in The Good Life and other series. There was even a popular sitcom in the 1970s- The Rag Trade-about female trade unionists who took on their bosses and always won. As late as the 1980s there were classic TV shows being written around likable working-class characters, such as Only Fools and Horses and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
That is not to say that the portrayal of working-class life was always completely realistic. 'I think there was an awful lot of romanticizationof the working class and their communities, say thirty, forty, fifty years ago,' says historian David Kynaston
. 'If you think about the portrayals of the working class in the films of the immediate post-war period, often they show working-class people as sort of buffoons, but not as vil- lains or unpleasant. It was more kind of one-dimensional. They might be uncouth, but nevertheless not bad people.' Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock agrees. 'For a very, very long time, certainly in much of the twentieth century, the working class was idealized by a small number of very influential intellectuals, people in the arts and educa- tion. Otherwise it was patronized.'
There was a big leap from being patronized to being despised. The shift would corne with the advent of Thatcherism and its assault on what you could call working-classness-working-dass values, institu- tions, industries and communities. 'The big shift in portrayal is surely -and it's an obvious point but it's surely a true point-that from about the 80s, it became possible in the media to, as it were, disparage the working class ... in a disrespectful and wholly unkind way,' as David Kynaston puts it.
Among the earliest examples of these sentiments filtering into popular culture were two characters invented by comedian Harry Enfield, Wayne and Waynetta Slob. First appearing in 1990, they could be regarded as 'proto-chavs': feckless, foul-mouthed, benefit-dependent and filthy. When Waynetta (a 'nightmare prole', as one journalist put it in 1997)3becomes pregnant, for example, the couple debate calling their unborn child 'Ashtray'. Even today, the media enthusiastically use Waynetta Slob as a template when attacking groups of working-class people. 'Rising toll of "Waynettas" with three times as many women as men signing onto sickness benefits under New Labour' screamed one recent Daily Mail headline. Underneath a photo of a greasy-looking Waynetta Slob holding her baby was the thoughtful caption: 'The type of people mocked by Harry Enfield's character Waynetta Slob have [sic] increased.'
But it was the emergence of the 'chav' phenomenon that brought together previously disparate prejudices against working-class people.
The website 'ChavScum' was launched at the end of2003, with a tagline reading: 'Britain's peasant underclass that is taking over our towns and cities'. In its current incarnation ('ChavTowns') contributors compete over attacking chavs: entries can be simple, like'shiny council scum people' living in 'shitty council/ex-council housing', for example. Another targets the chavs of the town of Leek who' spend their days on the checkout at Aldi or working in the delightful Kerrigold cheese factory. The most ambition ever seen in the town made the front page of the Leek Post and Times when one 15 year old mother of 17 made a passing comment about maybee [sic] working on the deli counter at Morrisons one day.'
Supermarket employees in Winchester don't come off much better. According to one account: 'Even when they are on the checkout, the customer is always invisible as they chat about pregnancies at fourteen, and how "Cristal got drunk on Friday night, and went home with Tyrone--the bastard" etc etc ad nauseam.'
There are entire books dedicated to this genre. For a long time, Lee Bok's The Little Book of Chavs was perched on the counters of the nowdefunct bookshop chain Borders. Its most recent edition boasted that it had sold over 100,000 copies and had been reprinted eight times. It even contains a list of' Chav occupations' to aid identification. If you were a female chav (or 'Chavette'), you would be a trainee hairdresser, a trainee beautician, a cleaner or a barmaid. Chav men work as cowboy builders, roofers or plumbers; they may also be market stall traders, mechanics or security guards. Both sexes could be spotted at a checkout in low-price supermarket chains like Lidl, Netto or Aldi, or toiling in a fast-food restaurant/ The equally poisonous follow-up book, The Chav Guide to Life, revealed that as well as being 'loud and lower class', 'Most Chavs come from not well-off, working-class families on council estates, and get their money from the dole.
The creators of the Chavscum website published their own literary contribution to chav-hate. In Chav!: A User's Guide to Britain's New Ruling Class, Mia Wallace and Clint Spanner offer tips for 'Spotting a chav in the wild'. Chavs, you see, are like animals. 'Cutting-edge, fake designer fashion, branded sportswear and accessories to die for, fabulously extravagant 9-carat-gold "bling" (jewellery), it's all here in this fun-for-all-the-family, point-scoring game!' A 'chavette' was regarded 'as an infertile freak by her immediate community' if she had not had a child before the age of seventeen. The chav television channel of choice was 'lTV Chav ... where a chav knows they will never get stimulated or challenged or anyfing.' Unless they are watching This Morning, because 'with its slightly middle-class aspirations it can be a bit scary.' Worst of all, chav kids were in danger of swamping decent children at schools across the country:
There used tobe a stigma attached to receiving free school meals and some poorer families would send their kids in with a packed lunch rather than accept such a benefit. However, as the balance has shifted in schools and many of the pupils now come from a chav background, getting the free meal is de rigueur.Non-chav children are now embarrassedtopay for a meal, and may be set about as the 'posh kid' if they do.'
As chav-hate began to emerge as a force in mainstream culture in 2004, it found supporters in the mainstream press. Jemima Lewis, a Telegraph journalist, responded to the Chavscum website with a column entitled 'In defence of snobbery'. 'Both varieties of snobbery-traditional or inverted-have their perils, but on balance, I prefer the former,' she wrote, without satire. 'This is partly because Iam middle class and would prefer not to be mocked for it.But it is also because traditional snobbery at least aspires towards some worthy goals: education, ambition, courtesy.' Hating the lower orders was good for them, was the crux of her argument: it made them aspire to escape their woeful circumstances and get some manners. ,
For those of its readers who were bewildered by the chav phenomenon, the Daily Mail published a handy 'A to Z' of chavs. 'A' was for 'A-Level'-'Something no Chav has ever possessed.' 'U' was for 'Underage': 'What every Chavette is at the time of her first sexual experience.' The sexual promiscuity of chav women, one of the big obsessions of chav-haters, is encapsulated in the Mail's 'joke' offering: 'What's the difference between a Chavette and the Grand old Duke of York? The Grand Old Duke of York only had 10,000 men.' And, of course, chavs were to be taunted for their low-paid jobs. 'What do you say to a Chav when he's at work? Big Mac and fries, please, mate." Another article by the same journalist suggested that Britain was being overrun by chavs. 'Some people call them scum. Sociologists call them the underclass. But call them what you like, they're taking over the country.,
Those labelled 'chavs' became frequently ridiculed for failing to meet lofty middle-class standards in what they wore, or how they ate. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver was rightly applauded for his crusade to bring healthy food tothe British school dinner menu. But it was a campaign marred by tut-tutting at the eating habits of the lower orders. On his Channel 4 programme, Oliver referred to parents who failed to sit around a table for dinner as 'what we have learned to call "white trash" '. Indeed, his TV seriesjamie Oliver's School Dinners focused on poor estates where mothers struggled to feed their kids with what little money they had." Jonathan Ross asked him on BBCI: 'Well, do you ever think that some people shouldn't be allowed to be parents? Like people from council estates?' Itwas a 'joke' met with cheers.
The same goes for alcohol consumption. When the government's chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, issued guidelines recommending that children under the age of fifteen should not drink at all, Daily Telegraph journalist James Delingpole became hot under the collar. Sir Liam had had the temerity to suggest that offering young kids small amounts of wine was a 'middle-class obsession'. But Delingpole thought he was aiming at the 'wrong target': 'We all know where Britain's most serious child-drinking problems lie: on sink estates and among broken homes where rudderless urchins are routinely downing alcopops and cans of reached their teens.'
The middle classes had been attacked because they were a 'soft target', while the real culprits had been let offbecause even if they 'were capable of reading a newspaper, they wouldn't give a stuff'. Never mi
nd that a study by the National Centre for Social Research found that children from affluent backgrounds were the biggest drinkers, and teenagers with unemployed parents were less likely to have even tried alcohol. 'This seems to indicate that young people of very low social position may be less likely to try alcohol, possibly because it is less likely to be available in the home,' said the researchers." But Delingpole was merely fleshing out the stereotype that, while the middle classes consumed alcohol in a respectable, cultured way, the lower orders spent around in a drunken stupor. It was their lifestyles that needed regulating, not those of the civilized middle class.
Middle-class journalists were also affronted by the bad manners ofthe chavs. So much so, in fact, that they used their well-paid columns to launch snooty attacks against people who lack a platform to defend themselves. The Daily Telegraph's Janet Daley has a particular distaste for the unwashed masses. She cannot even go to the theatre without 'a gang of boisterous, inebriated chavs who will disrupt the performance and may threaten you with assault if you upbraid them.' Meanwhile, the National Gallery had been overwhelmed by a 'human barricade of dossers and fun-loving exhibitionists'.
of particular concern to Daley were the 'yobs' who by going on holiday forced her to 'flee to those parts of Abroad which the louts ignore'. What perturbed her most was that these people were 'neither poor nor unemployed. Indeed, most of them had the sorts of jobs that would once have been described as "respectable working class".' The truth was that rude working-class people were ruining the holidays of sensitive, superior people like herself. Daley wanted the middle classes to civilize the lower orders-but they were prevented from doing so. 'It is bourgeois guilt that prevents those who would impose standards from acting: the socially privileged simply cower and refuse to intervene, for fear of appearing contemptuous of those less fortunate than
