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Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class Paperback – 6 Jun 2011

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Owen Jones (Author)
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Owen Jones (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars 439 customer reviews
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Product details

  • Paperback: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Verso; 1 edition (6 Jun. 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 184467696X
  • ISBN-13: 978-1844676965
  • Product Dimensions: 1.5 x 0.2 x 2.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (439 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 167,077 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

The stereotyping and hatred of the working class in Britain, documented so clearly by Owen Jones in this important book, should cause all to flinch. Reflecting our high levels of inequality, the stigmatization of the working class is a serious barrier to social justice and progressive change. --Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, authors of The Spirit Level

It is a timely book. The white working class seems to be the one group in society that it is still acceptable to sneer at, ridicule, even incite hatred against. ... Forensically, over 304 pages, Jones seeks to explain how, thanks to politics, the working class has shifted from being regarded as 'the salt of the earth to the scum of the earth'. --Carol Midgley, Times

Superb and angry. --Polly Toynbee - Guardian

About the Author

OWEN JONES has worked in the British Parliament as a trade union lobbyist and parliamentary researcher. He is currently writing a PhD on the history of blue-collar America and the rise of the New Right. He lives in London.

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 starsImportant and readable...
By os TOP 500 REVIEWER on 31 May 2013
Format: Paperback
'Chavs' is an important and readable book `Chavs' is shorthand for people who have been stigmatised as being idle, undeserving and socially undesirable. Its main thesis is that the returns to labour compared with the returns to capital have diverged sharply over the last 30/40 years, resulting in a vastly unequal society. A trend that successive governments, Conservative and Labour governments have both conspired to encourage by a variety policy tools: mostly involving the tax and benefit system, council house sales, deregulation of financial markets and regular union 'bashing', to either help the rich to a bigger slice of the pie or deny those lower down the scale their former share of the goodies. Couple these policies with an ongoing propaganda war whose sole aim was to demonise, discredit and isolate the 'lower' classes and all their works and you effectively have a 'class war'.

'Chavs' could be read as one long anti-Thatcher rant. A more positive reading of the book would be to see it as a warning for the future. By creating an economic and social underclass, we are storing up the seeds for failure and extremism as a result of allowing the rich to 'get away with it' and the poor to 'pick up the tab' in the form of higher taxes, low wages and uncertainty of employment. Such great inequality in terms of wealth, income and opportunity is a form of injustice that will create problems that will only become more entrenched in society with time.Read more ›
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2.0 out of 5 starsA missed opportunity
By Christopher Pittard on 8 Aug. 2011
Format: Paperback
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.Read more ›
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2.0 out of 5 starsA category error, innit?
By Young Offender on 24 Sept. 2012
Format: Paperback
Owen Jones's book starts from a false premise - that `chav' and `working class' are synonymous. Chavs are a particular subset of a much broader social stratum. Moreover, while many may mock aspects of chav culture (the Burberry cap, the status Staffy, calling offspring after footballers, etc.), to poke fun is not to demonise - any more than to find the `toffs' of 'Made in Chelsea' absurd is actively to despise them.

If I were to dislike a group of people for the accident of their birth into underprivileged circumstances, that really would be contemptible. However, it seems more reasonable to dislike the freely chosen attitudes and behaviours of a smaller chav subset - viz. feckless dependency and anti-social activity which makes others' lives (often their working class neighbours) a misery. Remarkably similar characteristics are shown by a subset of the upper class, like the Bullingdon Club yahoos depicted in the recent play 'Posh': both groups think the world owes them a living, and both show cavalier disregard for anyone with the misfortune to be in their way. Can I not deplore these attributes, whoever is exhibiting them, without being accused of class hate?
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5.0 out of 5 starsClass War
By Diziet on 6 Jun. 2011
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
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.Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

A must read for any sociologist!

Published 26 days ago by Flossy Abraham
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Enjoyable read

Published 1 month ago by handyman
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Excellent

Published 2 months ago by vicki
1.0 out of 5 starsThe justification of the chav from generation snowflake

Its not that he fact that ideologically i dont agree with owen jones,neither it is his attacks on thatcherism which he probably didnt live or him being a middle class oxbridge... Read more

Published 2 months ago by Jose Manuel Diaz Beveridge
5.0 out of 5 starsMust-read for modern British socialists

A wonderfully instructive and enraging book, showing how the British working class has been marginalised and worse since the end of the 1970s, the start of Margaret Thatcher's... Read more

Published 2 months ago by Mr. G. J. Taylor
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Good read

Published 3 months ago by ESTHER.P.TAYLOR
1.0 out of 5 starsAnother 'left' phoney.

Isn't Jones a member of the so-called 'metropolitan elite'? I think he's originally from the north but he's Oxbridge educated and yet he's a self-styled spokesperson for the... Read more

Published 3 months ago by Miles Plastic
2.0 out of 5 starsTake The Blinkers Off

"The stereotyping and hatred of the working class in Britain", presumably similar to that shown in the arrogance displayed towards the many members of the working class who... Read more

Published 3 months ago by Patrick Clarke
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Everybody should read this book Its frighteningly enlightening

Published 3 months ago by Frances Lennon
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Great book.

Published 3 months ago by Desmond HISLOP

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