Chavs - The Demonization of the Working Class

by Owen Jones

  Just the shock, really, because they had said that itwasn't closing, and then my other half was one of the ones that got kept on. But he never got called hack to work, and apparently on the Friday his manager was just about to ring all the staff up, and Land Rover pulled out of the contract that they'd got. And then we just got up on Saturday morning, and the postman came, and your redundancy notice was on your mat '" When it happened, all the lads were over on Cotton Park, and they just got told: 'Rover's shut, go and get your belongings' -and fmished. And that was it: itwas just fast. There wasn't even any 'you've got two weeks', or 'you'vegota month'; it was just: 'We're shut now, get your stuff, get out, lock the gates.'

  To begin with, her feeling was 'How am I going to cope?' Five years on, her husband is still out of work.

  There's just nothing about. It's desolate round here: nothing at all ... I increased my hours slightly, but the worst thing is, because I only do part-time, when he went to the Job Centre, he got told: 'Tell YOUl: wife to pack in her job, because you're going to be better off.' Because I refused and increased my hours, and because my money went up that little bit, my tax credits come down to go with it, and he's not entitled to any dole money because of the income that he earned from Roverso he's never got a penny of dole money-never got apenny. We never got one thing. Nothing.

  They were told of a funded scheme to help former Rover workers retrain. 'He went in, and because he likes computers, he wanted to do a Microsoft course and was told, "No, it's too expensive". And yet people were doing the gas-fitting course, which cost over £2,000, and the electrical fitting course, which cost over £2,000. His cost £3,000 and he was told "no".' Being without work for so long has had a devastating impact on his self-esteem. 'It's horrible. Because he writes off and half the places don't bother coming back to you, but we'll phone and we'll arrange interviews; he'll phone places up and say: "Oh, I'll come and work for you for a week for free, if you think it's alright then take me on." And it just feels like you're knocking your head against brick walls.'

  For some of those who lost their jobs, the desperation has been too much. 'We've lost a few friends, who've committed suicide. Ex-Rover workers. All this crap that they've got the help and whatever. It's a load of rubbish. A load of rubbish! They've had nothing! ... All this they're saying-there's all this money in holding. It's not been paid out to them at all.' Payouts of between £5,000 and £6,000 were promised to sacked workers from the Employee Trust Fund but, as legal wrangles con- tinue, workers have not been paid a penny. According to Gemma Cartwright, the chair of the Rover Community Action Trust: 'There have been house repossessions and family break-ups over this: One of Gaynor's great fears is for the children growing up in the 'because there's nothing round here at the moment. I community, mean, you've got all the buildings going on, but they're so slow-I'd have thought they'd be a lot quicker going up. You've just got empty land everywhere.'

  It's true that there are cranes and men at work in the surrounding areas. Attached to a fence is a sign: 'Longbridge West: Sustainable Community, 10,000 new jobs, new homes, local amenities, public open spaces, design and build opportunities'. Another sign is a bit more vague: 'Up to 10,000 jobs', it claims.

  But, in the five years since the Longhridge closure, there has been desperately little work for the men. Many of those lucky enough to find a job have had to accept lower-paid, service sector work. I talked to Mary Lynch who has worked at a local supermarket for eight years. 'We've had a few of the Longhridge workers come and work there and have a career change, so it's been nice getting to know those people and meeting them and that.' It has meant a substantial hit to their pay packet. 'They were disappointed about the level of pay,' she said. 'Obviously the pay wasn't as good as it was at Longhridge, so they've found that a bit disappointing. Because they were on good pay in Longhridge, and supermarket workers don't get the same level of pay. But in the main, they were grateful to have a job.'

  There are a lot of similar themes in Ashington and Longhridge. There is the same sense of despair and pessimism about the future. There are the same stories about the shattering effects locally of the collapse of industrial Britain, and its role in issues as disparate as rela- tionship breakdown, anti-social behaviour, drugs and teenage pregnancy. In both communities there is a lack of good, secure jobs and plenty of people out of work through no fault of their own. It would clearly be absurd to blame the local people for the almost inevita~ ble problems caused by the crippling events that have befallen their communities.

  But tell that to the politicians. At the centre of the Conservative Party's election campaign in 2010 was the idea of 'Broken Britain'; the belief that, as Tory leader David Cameron phrased it, Britain had fallen into a 'social recession'. When two young boys from disturbed back, grounds were indefinitely detained for torturing two younger victims in another mining village, Edlington, Cameron seized on the case as evidence. The case could not be dismissed as an 'isolated incident of evil,' he argued. A whole range of issues were identified as part of the Tory narrative, such as 'family breakdown, welfare dependency, failing schools, crime, and the problems that we see in too many of Our communities' .

  Cameron did not identify the collapse of industry as having any role in these kinds of social problems. 'Why is our society broken?' he asked rhetorically. His own answer to this would have surprised the people of Ashington and Longhridge; 'Because government got too big, did too much and undermined responsibility.' That the economies of communities like Ashington and Longhridge, right across the country, have been obliterated is apparently irrelevant. The chilly winds of the free market are ignored; it is the overbearing state that has taken away people's sense of responsibility. And now, they are told, people in these communities must start to take individual responsibility for what has happened to them.

  The social problems that undoubtedly affect many working-class communities have come to define the 'chav' caricature. Teenagers pushing strollers, yobs, feckless adults: this is what chavs are for many people. The media, popular entertainment and the political establishment have gone out of their way to convince us that these are moral issues, an indiscipline that needs to be rectified. In blaming the victims, the real reasons behind social problems like drugs, crime and anti-social behaviour have been intentionally obscured. Symptoms have been confused with causes. The communities that suffer most are the biggest victims of the class war unleashed by Thatcherism.

  When commentators talk in dehumanizing terms about the 'underclass', they are lumping together those sections of the working class that took the brunt of the wrenching social and economic changes of the last three decades. After all, the working class has never been homogeneous. There have always been different groups within it, not all of whom have sat comfortably together: the skilled and the unskilled, those who once lived in slums and those in quality housing, the unemployed and the employed; the poor and the relatively prosperous, the Northern and the Southern, the English, the welsh and the Scottish. But there's no denying that many of the modern divisions within working-class Britain were forged by the neoliberal economic project of the last thirty years.

  Ashington and Longhridge are far from being exceptional. 'The old industrial heartlands have never recovered,' says the Guardian's economics editor, Larry Elliott. 'One way ofIooking atit,which is entirely spurious, is to look at claimant-count unemployment, which has come down to an extent. But once you unpack that, you find that a lot of those jobs have tended tobe part-time, in distribution, and haven't been as well paid as the jobs that were lost.' Claimant count only measures the numbers receiving Jobseeker's Allowance. But that is just a part of the total. According to the government's Labour Force Survey, less than half of those lacking but wanting a job were officially classed as unemployed even before the recession hit.

  Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron is among those on the right who have denounced New Labour for 'acceptingas a fact of life the eight million who are economically inactive', out of a tota
l of thirtyeight million people of working age. The figure actually includes millions who are 'economically inactive' for good reasons, including students, carers and some retired people. Yet Cameron was right to point out that there are large numbers of people without jobs who don't show up in the official unemployment statistics. But, again, he failed to identify the real culprit: the industrial collapse that was first unleashed by Thatcherism, 'If you go to beyond the M4 corridor then labour market participation will be 80 per cent,' says Larry Elliott. 'If you go to parts of the old industrial heartlands it's 55 per cent, or 60 per cent at most. So you've got far fewer people working in those areas, and the jobs they're working in tend to be much more insecure, much less highly paid.'

  Soon after David Cameron came to power in 2010, he started selling the idea that people are out of work due to their personal inadequacies: a sentiment which is, of course, one of the pillars of the chav caricature. The prime minister pledged a crackdown on welfare 'fraud and error', declaring that it cost the taxpayer £5.2 billion. But he had cunningly combined the cost of fraud committed by welfare recipients (just £1 billion a year) with that of errors on the part of officials (amounting to the far more considerable sum of £4.2 billion a year). In doing so, he ensured that a much bigger headline figure associated with benefit fraud was lodged in the popular imagination.

  Of course, protesting that benefit fraud is exaggerated does not mean denying its occurrence. But it is often need, rather than dishonesty, that drives it.

  For example, a compelling study by the Joseph Rownrree Foundation found that many claimants taking undeclared cash-in-hand jobs did so to pay for food or heating, or pay back debt. 'People in deprived areas are resorting to informal work because they are trying to support, feed and clothe their families,' said report author Aaron Barbour. 'They are hard-working, ordinary people trying to survive day by day." Indeed, the report revealed widespread fear among unemployed private tenants that if they worked formally they would lose their housing benefit, plunging them yet further into poverty. Above all, those interviewed expressed a strong desire to get formal paid work and leave benefits, or 'go legit', as soon as possible.

  Given the poverty levels at which many benefits are set, it's hardly surprising that some 'play the system'. Jobseeker's Allowance, for example, ranks among the lowest of any unemployment benefits in Western Europe. If, as in other European countries, it had been linked with earnings since 1979, people without work would receive £110 per week. Because it is pegged to inflation, it was worth just £65.45 a week in 2010. For those unable to find secure employment, life on benefits is a constant struggle to stay afloat. Can we be surprised if a minority of claimants--particularly those with children-top up the meagre amount they receive from the state with a few hours of paid work on the side?

  The 'welfare scrounger' label is not just attached to those claiming benefits while taking on informal work. Pepple claiming incapacity benefits have long been in the firing line of newspaper pundits and politicians of all major parties, who suspected that hundreds of thousands of people were skiving off despite being able-bodied. The numbers of such incapacity benefit claimants explains, in large part, the disparity between the official unemployment statistics and the economic activity levels that Larry Elliott refers to.

  Looking at the figures, the critics appear to have a point. Go back to 1963and there were less than half a million claiming incapacity benefit. Yet by 2009 the figure was around 2.6 million, far higher than the number of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance even in the midst of recession. It is self-evident that society has become considerably healthier in those forty-six years, thanks to advances in medical sciences and improvements in diet and lifestyle. The number of men with long-standing illnesses that limit their capabilities has decreased significantly' from 17.4 per cent to 15.5 per cent.' So how can we possibly explain the jump in incapacity benefit claimants?

  The first point is that the number of claimants shot up under the Tory governments of 1979 to 1997. A particularly steep increase took place in the aftermath of the early 1990s recession, adding around 800,000 claimants by the time Prime Minister John Major was voted out of office. It is now generally accepted that incapacity benefit was used to cloak the unemployment figures and not being overly honest,' admitted Conservative Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, lain Duncan-Smith. 'Conservatives and Labour have signed up to that'

  Incapacity benefit recipients are indeed concentrated in the old, industrial areas of the North, Scotland and Wales. In areas of South em England outside of the capital, on the other hand, the levels are much lower. In a groundbreaking study based on hundreds of interviews, labour market experts Dr Christina Beatty and Professor Steve Fothergill put two contradictory explanations to the test: that claimants did have genuine health problems, and that the concentration of claim- ants in old industrial areas showed that the main underlying cause was a lack of work. 'The long economic recovery from the mid 1990s onward helped plug the gap, but never completely,' they argued. 'In these circumstances there have never been quite enough jobs---especially reasonably well-paid jobs--to go around. With a continuing imbal- ance in the local labour market, with the local demand for labour still running behind the potential local labour supply, it was therefore inevi- table that some individuals would be squeezed out.'

  To begin with, claimants were former industrial workers who had been thrown out of work, like the ex-miner I spoke to in Ashington. Many did have health problems because of their line of work, and could use them to claim incapacity benefits that paid more than unemploy- ment benefits. After all, the collapse ofindustry wiped out local jobs in these areas, and this was before low-paid service sector and public ser- vices jobs started to fill the vacuum to some degree. In the 19905, between a third and a half of incapacity benefit claimants had been made redundant from their last job. But, as time has passed, some of these have found another job after a while; or they have passed on to the state pension.

  So who are today's incapacity benefit claimants? Beatty and Fothergill discovered that they were 'typically the poorly qualified, low-skill manual worker in poor health, whose alternative would at best be unre- warding work or close to the national minimum wage.' That means the type of person claiming incapacity benefit is different than it was even a decade ago, even though the headline figure has remained fairly con- stant. The researchers looked at the example of Barrow-in-Furness in North West England: a former shipbuilding town hit by industrial col- lapse. Incapacity benefit claimants in the 1990's were largely laid-off skilled shipyard workers, but now they were low-skill, poorly qualified workers who had dropped out of their last job because of'ill-health, and were 'now disenchanted with the idea of ever returning to work'.

  In an area with a 'surplus oflabour', there was less of an incentive for employers to keep on staff with poor health by, for example, giving them lesser duties. Once they had been made redundant, workers with poor health were at a disadvantage because employers could always hire healthier people. Overwhelmingly, people on incapacity benefit lack any qualifications whatsoever. We know that these days there are far fewer manual job opportunities for these sorts of workers, and if they are physically impaired in some way, there are even less. The researchers' conclusion was that 'the UK's very high incapacity claimant numbers are an issue of jobs and of health:

  Glasgow is a particularly striking example of how the de-industrialization of Britain has left continuing-but disguised-mass unemployment inits wake. The city houses more incapacity benefit claimants than any other local authority. The number of people claiming some form of disability benefits peaked in 1995 at one in five of the working population, or almost three times the UK level. A group of Glasgow University and Glasgow City Council experts looked at how the number of recipients increased during the 1980s, and concluded: 'The main reason for the huge growth in sickness benefit claims was the city's rapid de-industrialization.' The number of manufacturing jobs in 1991 had collapsed to just
a third of the 1971 figure. Staggeringly, Glasgow rose from 208'th to tenth place among local authorities for economic inactivity levels in the decade following 1981.

  The situation improved in the noughties as the number of disability benefit claimants dropped from three times to double the national rate. The key finding was that this decline was, above all, down to a 'strength_ ening labour market'. No wonder the study dismissed government claims that: 'The problem is not a lack ofjobs." The fact that a consid_ erable number ofincapacity benefit claimants are those without work in post-industrial Britain does not mean we should disregard the health issues involved. As both New Labour and, following the 2010 general election, the Conservative-led government began clamping down on claimants even as the recession stripped jobs out of the economy, the Citizens Advice Bureau exposed the scandal of clearly unwell people having their benefits taken away. Over 20,000 benefit claimants got in touch with them after a new, stringent test found them 'able to work'. Terminally illpatients, people with advanced forms of Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis, suffering from mental illness or awaiting open heart surgery, were registered as capable of returning to work. One woman had her benefits cut after she missed an assessment appointment-because she was in hospital having chemotherapy for stomach cancer.

  Of course there are people who play the system and falsely claim benefits. Right-wing tabloids relish hunting down the most outrageous examples of such fraud. But this small minority is in no way representative of the majority of people out of work. The latest figures available (for 2006/07) reveal that just 6,756 people were successfully prosecuted for benefit fraud. Professor Robert MacDonald has spent years investigating the impact of wrenching economic changes on working-class communities, along with research partner Jane Marsh. I asked himifhe thought there was such a thing as an underclass, 'Short answer-s-no! ... Better, more accurate and truthful terms and theories than "the underclass" can and should be used to describe the situations of those typically called this. "Processes of economic marginalization" is the best we came up with instead.' MacDonald is convinced that the notion of 'welfare dependency' is an overblown issue ... Or it is a big problem, in the sense that this is a very powerful and popular idea that obscures the fuller story. No doubt there are households that have 'given up' and resigned themselves to and found ways to get by with a life on benefits. I haven't, however, been able to locate any such households yet, in all the tramping round the estates we've done over the past years, despite being told the neighbourhoods we research are awash with such cultures of welfare dependency.