Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class [Paperback]

 

 

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I've read some remarkable reviews of this book in the press, most of which comment on how acutely it makes its argument, the forensic detail with which Jones writes, and the wonderful style he employs. Unfortunately, I didn't see much of any of these, and ultimately found this book frustrating. Not because I disagreed with the overall argument - far from it - but rather because at times it's a blunt analysis framed bluntly. It left me feeling that we on the left really need a much better voice than this.

First, the good points, of which there are some. Jones starts promisingly with some astute points about Dewsbury and how it differs from the media representation during the Shannon Matthews case. An early chapter on 1980s contexts for modern class politics is passionate and useful, if something of a primer for those who have never heard of the miners' strike. The real value of the book lies in its critique of the concept of meritocracy, in a passage that will challenge the thinking of many. Jones also effectively deploys some useful statistics and makes some valuable observations about the effects of the misperception of the median salary (£21,000, since you ask, although a better editor would have meant that we didn't have to be told this at least four times).

These points aside, however, the rest of the book is seriously undermined by three major problems:

Firstly, there's the way in which the book presents the working class themselves. Jones is right to challenge the conservative assumption that the working class remain so through choice, a lack of ambition, aptitude, and so on. The problem, however, is that Jones goes too far in the other direction, to the extent that the working class seem to be little more than passive economic victims. The tone is a little too deterministic (which is emphatically not, as the right would argue, the same as Marxist) and occasionally patronising. Related to this is the fact that the book treats the working class as a homogenous body, despite Jones' disclaimer that this stance is to be avoided. Jones has little to say on the fact that many of these chav-bashing attitudes are themselves rooted in certain kinds of working class cultures, a plurality that gets lost in the book's structure of the middle class sneering at the working class. There's also a tinge of romanticizing the working class here, which Jones explicitly says at the beginning he wants to avoid; sorry, you didn't, and especially not when trying to argue that Jade Goody's "poppadom" comments on Celebrity Big Brother might have been "racially tinged." You reckon?

Secondly, the book lacks any theoretical sophistication. Yes, I know it's aimed at a general readership, but that doesn't mean it can't be informed by more sophisticated arguments (Richard Sennett, for instance, writes beautifully and accessibly on similar concepts - see, for instance, his *The Hidden Injuries of Class* or *The Craftsman*), and for a book published by Verso it's a real disappointment in this respect. Jones talks about 'cultural capital,' but Pierre Bourdieu (a crucial source for how taste reinforces social division - which is what this book is supposed to be about) isn't even mentioned in the endnotes. Even Marx and Engels only get a fleeting mention. The book's main sources are (far too) numerous newspaper articles and the stylings of Polly Toynbee and Johann Hari; the former is at least a respected journalist, but this pedigree means that the book feels more like a string of newspaper opinion pieces than a deeply thought-out analysis. Take, for instance, Jones' solution to these problems, which really boils down to a sense of community (indeed, when he visits Ashington, he writes "There's a real sense of community in the air." Really? What does that smell like?). Community is the panacea here, but this seems simplistic, and Jones says nothing on how communities are also defined by exclusion (again, Richard Sennett and Benedict Anderson would have been really useful here). What's really surprising, however, is that Jones makes no reference at all to those who have written before him, making the very same points. I can just about accept that Richard Hoggart's *The Uses of Literacy* isn't at the forefront of working class studies nowadays, but it's really surprising that Michael Collins' *The Likes of Us*, which brought class back to the forefront, doesn't seem to exist in the world of this book.

Thirdly, Jones is really out of his depth when discussing culture, and unfortunately this takes up a hefty portion of the book. The real problem here is that he enthusiastically points out examples that support his thesis, while completely ignoring the many more that challenge it. For instance, he notes that songs such as the Kaiser Chiefs' "I predict a riot" demonizes the tracksuit wearing underclass, and from this concludes that modern popular culture follows suit; yet he seems utterly unaware that for every Chiefs album, there are many more that celebrate working class culture (the Streets, for instance). Likewise, while I hesitate to mount any kind of defence of *Little Britain*, Jones' criticism that Vicky Pollard presents a "grotesque caricature" misses the point that *all* of *Little Britain* is a grotesque caricature, including of the middle and upper class (had Pollard been missing, of course, this would have been invoked as evidence of removing the working class from culture altogether, although this is a far more sinister charge). But on this point, most striking is Jones' rewriting of wider cultural history. He makes the utterly inaccurate claim that the working class only appear in Victorian fiction as cartoonish figures, either ignoring or being ignorant of late Victorian naturalist fiction (Morrison, Gissing, Harkness, etc) and even very late Dickens; likewise, in a book supposedly about twentieth (and 21st) century cultural depictions of the working class, to have no mention whatsoever of Robert Tressell's *The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists* is absolutely shocking (but then again, this wouldn't square with Jones' argument that accurate depictions of the working class only came about in the 1960s).

I really wanted to agree with this book; indeed, in many respects I do, but in spite of it rather than because of it. I would recommend it as a beginner's text on these issues, but it doesn't really say anything more than what you'll have already read in the Guardian or Independent (oh come on, you're looking at this book - you're not a Daily Mailer, are you?).

I hesitated to title this review 'Class War' - it seems so out-of-date, so 'old Labour'. But that is what this book is about. It is about the sustained economic, social and ideological attack on the majority of the population of this country.

The idea of 'chavs' is, these days, so pervasive that as I read the first few chapters, I had my doubts. The book seemed merely an apologia for a post-industrial lumpenproletariat, a group of alienated misfits beyond the reach of the rest of society. But Jones' analysis is far wider, deeper and more powerful than that and deserves as wide an audience as possible.

The book starts with a shocking comparison between the media coverage of Shannon Matthews and Madeleine McCann. The point is forcefully made that the coverage clearly showed a deep-rooted class prejudice - and ignorance. The McCann's come from the same class as the majority of journalists, leader writers and 'opinion formers'. The same journalists have virtually no experience of the world of Shannon Matthews. Jones makes the point in a quote from Kevin Maguire of the Mirror:

'Increasingly, the lives of journalists have become divorced from those of the rest of us. 'I can't think of a national newspaper editor with school-age kids who has them in a state school,' [Maguire] reflects. 'On top of that, most journalists at those levels are given private medical insurance. So you're kind of taken out of everyday life.' (P27)

Jones continues:

'More than anything, it is this ignorance of working-class life that explains how Karen Matthews became a template for people living in working-class communities. 'Perhaps it's because we're all middle class that we tut at the tragic transition of aspirational working class to feckless, feral underclass, and sneer at the brainless blobs of lard who spend their days on leatherette sofas in front of plasma TVs, chewing the deep-fried cud over Jeremy Kyle,' speculated commentator Christina Patterson. 'We've got a word for them too: "Chavs''' (P27)

So how did this come about? How has the whole working class come to be seen as a 'feckless, feral underclass'? Jones continues with a look at 'Class Warriors'. He suggests that:

'Thatcherism fought the most aggressive class war in British history...Thatcher wanted to end the class war - but on the terms of the upper crust of British society. 'Old fashioned Tories say there isn't any class war,' declared Tory newspaper editor Peregrine Worsthorne. 'New Tories make no bones about it: we are class warriors and we expect to be victorious.' (P48)

This class war was waged as an attack on collectivism - the promotion of an aggressive individualism that sees success or failure as a purely personal matter. Everyone should naturally aspire to be middle class. This is not simply the adoption of a neoliberal free market economic philosophy but also an essentially neoconservative cultural approach - defining whole working class communities as 'chavs'. And it worked, thoroughly and conclusively:

'Even before the advent of New Labour, Thatcherism had ensured that the working class would be bereft of political champions. 'The real triumph was to have transformed not just one party, but two,' as [Geoffrey] Howe was later to put it.' (P71)

This reminded me very much of Peter Oborne's The Triumph of the Political Class. Hardly a left-wing firebrand, Oborne details the formation of a metropolitan elite. Oborne suggests:

'The Media Class and the Political Class share identical assumptions about life and politics. They are affluent, progressive, middle- and upper-middle class. This triumphant metropolitan elite has completely lost its links with a wider civil society.' (The Triumph of the Political Class, P259)

In case there was any doubt left, Jones states:

'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 even Labour 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.' (P94)

Jones details how even supposedly liberal opinion can come to regard the working class as 'chavs'. By emphasising that the working class is predominantly white working class, liberal opinion can ignore the economic underpinnings of class in favour of, as Jones puts it, 'racialization':

'It's one of the ways people have made their snobbery socially acceptable,' says journalist Johann Hari: 'by acting as though they are defending immigrants from the "ignorant" white working class." (P116)

Although, in the past, television representations of working class life might have included Alf Garnett, they also included shows like The Likely Lads and The Rag Trade. Nowadays working class representations seem limited to Vicky Pollard, Wayne and Waynetta, Shameless or even Eden Lake ('[i]t may not come as a surprise that the Daily Mail treated Eden Lake as though it was some kind of drama-documentary, quavering that it was 'all too real' and urging every politician to watch it.' P131)

The representations of the working class have changed as the economic conditions have changed. With the deindustrialization of large swathes of the country, the 'flexibilization' of the work force, the increasing numbers of low-paid, low-skill and part-time jobs, the labour market has become an 'hourglass' economy:

'highly paid jobs at one end, and swelling numbers of low-paid, unskilled jobs at the other. The middle-level occupations, on the other hand, are shrinking.' (P152)

This has significantly weakened the opportunities for collective action. When staff turnover is high, union power is limited. The attacks on the remaining bastions of union activity continue. The latest targets are public sector workers who are currently being portrayed as over-paid, pampered and secure, which is so far from the truth it is almost laughable. Given the 'hourglass economy', commentators who point to a lack of working class aspiration are rather missing the point.

Even after all this, the class war continues. Turning on the radio this morning, I heard that Vince Cable is threatening further anti-union legislation. In the same news bulletin, it was announced that '[over the last 30 years] wages grew by over 100% for judges, barristers and solicitors, while they fell by 5% for forklift truck drivers and 3% for packers and bottlers.' (BBC 'TUC: Wage stagnation over decades as income gap widens').

After all that, it is very difficult to not agree with Owen Jones when he says:

'...as a government of millionaires led by an Old Etonian prepares to further demolish the living standards of millions of working class people, the time has rarely been so ripe for a new wave of class politics.' (P257)

This book just wasn't as insightful as I felt the cover was suggesting it would be. I was left feeling it could have been written by someone like Tony Benn (no disrespect to Tony Benn). It didn't represent enough of an authentic take on the subject, but instead used the Chavs phenomena to support quite a familiar left-wing polemic - arguing the 'Chavs' label is a middle-class term that has given a permission to those harboring prejudice towards the English working class, basically.

To give a concrete case, the book discusses the Shannon disappearance and the Madeline abduction in Portugal and argues the greater amount of money spent on the latter demonstrates in part that the media did not care much about the working class Shannon case (in which the child was subsequently found alive), going on to paint Dewsbury where the Shannon family live in a negative (Chav) light.

This was the book's opening real-life examination of the Chav stereotype harming a community, ie Dewsbury. It highlighted the organisational expertise of the Maddeline family and the lengths to which they went to find the child, mentioning campaign posters as far away as Dundee, as I remember. The Shannon case was resolved when they found the child in a relative's place, which is mentioned in the book. The Maddeline case has never been resolved. Now to my mind, this does not represent a particularly strong argument against the media purportedly labeling a certain community as chavs: Shannon case - solved = good (but still, look at how everyone is prejudice towards the family that conspired to have the girl kidnapped for money); Maddy case: unsolved = bad (but they still had a lot of resources because they were an attractive middle-class family with celebrity support and friends and loads of money was spent on a somewhat hopeless cause).

I think this is actually quite an irresponsible argument to make, especially in the opening pages of a book and as I suggested, the cover, I feel, misled me into reading something that was very familiar re Thatcherism, New Labour etc.

Before I get comments for being middle class and privately educated, actually I am neither. Chavs just wasn't what I expected - which brings me to the old adage 'Don't judge a book by it's cover'!.

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1.0 out of 5 stars nonsense
Marxist tosh from start to finish. Clearly a book written to harvest revenue from the glowering misguided anti-business anti-aspiration element of society. Read more

Published 4 days ago by bob

4.0 out of 5 stars Passionately engaged
It's passionately engaged in it's subject and an easy read.

Jones covers a lot of ground in his analysis and produces often angry arguments to support his case. Read more

Published 6 days ago by Colin Wilkie

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing
I am very much in agreement with the excellent review by Christopher Pittard, so I won't waste time repeating his central points here. Read more

Published 10 days ago by J. Goddard

5.0 out of 5 stars Came really quick
Reccommended by a friend, book came really quick. In good condition bought it as a present for my partner. He usually reads his kindle but there is nothing like a good book!

Published 19 days ago by Hayley

3.0 out of 5 stars Beware Of The Dogma
Lordy, this is a young man's book. No one likes a bit of good, old-fashioned Tory-bashing as much as me, but the polemic-o-meter's off the scale, here... Read more

Published 22 days ago by Ivan Zehdra-Maychayne

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading
My partner was reading this, I picked it up and couldn't put it down until I'd finished it. Whilst I accept the criticisms made by the other reviewers, I felt that in order to... Read more

Published 24 days ago by J. Fitzpatrick

5.0 out of 5 stars great read
This was great and was a real eye opener at times,It was good to have someone write about the disgraceful way the right wing have changed the face of Britain. Read more

Published 1 month ago by P. J. McCartney

2.0 out of 5 stars a champion for the chavs
I had heard much about this book and as i have english friends and an english god son i decided to check it out. As a whole i find it disappointing. Read more

Published 1 month ago by C. Nielsen

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant eye opener
As someone who describes themselves as left wing, this book highlights what most people prefer to ignore and dismiss. Read more

Published 1 month ago by C. Warren

5.0 out of 5 stars essential reading
This book should be compulsory reading for everyone in Britain.
It has completely opened my eyes to the oppressed society in which we live
That is all I have to say on... Read more

Published 1 month ago by kieran

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