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'Superb and angry.' --Polly Toynbee, Guardian
'A work of passion, sympathy and moral grace.' --Dwight Garner, New York Times
'Persuasively argued, and packed full of good reporting and useful information - [Jones] makes an important contribution to a revivified debate about class.' Lynsey Hanley, Guardian; 'A timely book.' Book of the Week, The Times; 'A blinding read.' Suzanne Moore, Guardian; 'It moves in and out of postwar British history with great agility, weaving together complex questions of class, culture and identity with a lightness of touch.' Jon Cruddas, Book of the Week, Independent; 'A lively, well-reasoned and informative counterblast to the notion that Britain is now more or less a classless society.' --Sean O'Hagan, Observer
'A work of passion, sympathy and moral grace.' --Dwight Garner, New York Times
'Persuasively argued, and packed full of good reporting and useful information - [Jones] makes an important contribution to a revivified debate about class.' Lynsey Hanley, Guardian; 'A timely book.' Book of the Week, The Times; 'A blinding read.' Suzanne Moore, Guardian; 'It moves in and out of postwar British history with great agility, weaving together complex questions of class, culture and identity with a lightness of touch.' Jon Cruddas, Book of the Week, Independent; 'A lively, well-reasoned and informative counterblast to the notion that Britain is now more or less a classless society.' --Sean O'Hagan, Observer
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In modern Britain, the working class has become an object of fear and ridicule. From Little Britain's Vicky Pollard to the demonization of Jade Goody, media and politicians alike dismiss as feckless, criminalized and ignorant a vast, underprivileged swathe of society whose members have become stereotyped by one, hate-filled word: chavs. In this acclaimed investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth.' Exposing the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, he portrays a far more complex reality. The chav stereotype, he argues, is used by governments as a convenient figleaf to avoid genuine engagement with social and economic problems and to justify widening inequality. Based on a wealth of original research, Chavs is a damning indictment of the media and political establishment and an illuminating, disturbing portrait of inequality and class hatred in modern Britain. This updated edition includes a new chapter exploring the causes and consequences of the UK riots in the summer of 2010.
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5 of 33 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you are politically uncommitted, this book will steer you firmly towards the centre-right and support for the market economy. It's a naïve but venomous polemic written by a privileged young Oxford graduate, the son of middle class, publicly-funded, civil servants and lecturers, who is profoundly ignorant about the people he has chosen to champion - as others have pointed out, he draws far too wide a definition of `chavs'. Mr Jones invents chips to put on his shoulder. He is an intolerant Marxist, apparently sympathetic to violent revolution, who manipulates any old regurgitated, pressure-group-filtered factoid to support his diatribe. Many of his assertions are unsourced and all are selective. A self-confessed class-warrior, he falsely chastises others for being just that. He rails against the laws of economics like Canute against the tide: at least Canute knew that the tide would swamp him. He would like to persuade us that `Thatcher' (boo, hiss!) deliberately set out to deindustrialise Britain for no other purpose than to victimise the working class - she did neither. It's all a wicked plot by the stinking rich! He blames `the ruinous economic policies of successive governments', for example, for the demise of the car industry, carefully overlooking that it was the unions that destroyed British Leyland and that Britain now exports record numbers of cars. No solution is offered to any problem except, perhaps, a general Soviet-style levelling down. This book is a worthless rant.
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