Chavs - The Demonization of the Working Class

by Owen Jones

  But there were more than nine months and a few hundred miles separating the two cases. After a fortnight, British journalists had penned 1,148 stories devoted to Madeleine McCann. The stunning sum of £2.6 million had been offered as a reward to have her returned to her parents. Prominent donors included the News of the World and the Sun newspaper, Sir Richard Branson, Simon Cowell and J.K.Rowling

  The missing infant quickly became a household name.

  The McCann disappearance was no ordinary media circus. The case became a national trauma. Like some sort of macabre reality TV show, every little detail was beamed into the living rooms of a transfixed British public. News broadcasters sent their most celebrated anchors to report live from the Algarve. Posters with close-ups of her distinctive right eye went up in shop windows across the country, as though somehow the bewildered three-year-old would be found wandering the streets of Dundee or Aberystwyth. Members of Parliament wore yellow ribbons in solidarity. Multinational companies advertised the 'help find Madeleine' messages on their websites. The disappearance of one little girl had provoked the most extraordinary outpouring of media interest over such a case in modern times. The result was something approaching mass hysteria.

  What a contrast with the pitiful response to Shannon Matthews's disappearance. After two weeks, the case had received a third of the media coverage given to McCann in the same period. There was no rolling news team from Dewsbury; no politicians wearing coloured ribbons; no 'help find Shannon' messages flashing up on company websites. The relatively paltry sum of £25,500 (though this later rose to £50,000) had been offered for her discovery, nearly all of which had been put up by the Sun. If money was anything to go by, the life of Madeleine McCann had been deemed fifty times more valuable than that of Shannon Matthews.

  Why Madeleine? Some commentators were remarkably honest about why, of all the injustices in the world, it was the tragedy of this one little girl that provoked such anguish. 'This kind of thing doesn't usually happen to people like us,' lamented Allison Pearson in the Daily Mail.1What Pearson meant by people like her was people from comfortable, middle-class backgrounds. Kidnappings, stabbings, murders; those are things you almost expected to happen to people living in Peckham or Glasgow. This sort of tragedy was not supposed to happen to folks you might bump into doing the weekly shop at Waitrose.

  Pearson's distress at Madeleine's plight was matched only by her lack of sympathy for the case of Shannon Matthews. And it was for the same reason: the little girl's background. Even as police were losing hope of finding Shannon alive, Allison Pearson launched into a smug broadside about her family circumstances. 'Like too many of today's kids, Shannon Matthews was already a victim of a chaotic domestic situation, inflicted by parents on their innocent children, long before she vanished into the chilly February night." Itwas Pearson's only foray into the case. But when the McCanns came under fire for leaving their small children alone in the holiday flat from which Madeleine was abducted, she was one of their strongest defenders. 'The truth is that the McCanns were not negligent; she said decisively. 'None of us should presume to judge them, for they will judge themselves horribly for the rest of their lives.,3

  This middle-class solidarity was shared by India Knight at the more upmarket Times. 'The resort the McCanns went to belongs to the Mark Warner holiday group, which specialises in providing family-friendly holidays to the middle classes,' she confided. The joy of such a resort was that they 'were populated by recognisable types' where you could sigh in relief and think, 'Everyone is like us'. They were not places you would expect to meet 'the kind of people who wallop their weeping kids in Sainsbury's." These are revealing confessions. These columnists' undoubtedly sincere grief was not simply caused by the kidnapping of a little girl. They were distressed, basically, because she was middle class.

  It's easy to see why the McCann family were so appealing to middleclass journalists. The parents were medical professionals from a smart suburb in Leicestershire, They were regular churchgoers. As a couple they were photogenic, well groomed and bursting with health. When pictured lovingly tending to their twin babies, they represented an almost idealized portrait of middle-class family life. Empathy for their plight came naturally to those like Allison Pearson and India Knight, because the McCanns' lives were similar to their own.

  The contrast with the Matthews family could not have been greater. Shannon grew up on an impoverished estate in an old industrial northern town. Her mother, Karen, had seven. children from relationships with five different men. She did not work, while her partner, Craig Meehan, was a supermarket fishmonger. Ms Matthews appeared to the world in unfashionable clothing, her hair pulled back, her face dour, without make-up and looking strikingly older than her thirty-two years. A slouching Mr Meehan stood next to her in a baseball cap, sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms. They were definitely not 'people like us'.

  The case simply could not provoke the same response among predominantly middle-class journalists. And itdid not. Roy Greenslade, the former editor of the Daily Mirror,had no doubts about the dearth of media coverage: 'Overarching everything is social class.,5 Was this unfair? It's difficult to explain why else, even in the first week of the Matthews disappearance, newspapers were still opting to give frontpage coverage to possible sightings of Madeleine nine months after she had vanished.

  Shannon's background was just too far removed from the experience of journalists who covered such stories. You don't need to indulge in psychobabble to understand why those who write and broadcast our news were so fixated with 'Maddie' while displaying scant interest in a missing girl from a northern backwater, 'Dewsbury Moor is no Home Counties idyll, nor is it a Portuguese holiday resort,' commented one journalist at The Times in an effort to explain why there was no media frenzy over Shannon. 'It is "up North", it is a bleak mix of pebbled ash council blocks and neglected wasteland, and itis populated by some people capable of confirming the worst stereotype and prejudice of the white underclass.' He could hardly overlook the distress of some neighbours, but felt that others 'seemed only too readytotreat the drama of a missing child as a sort of exciting game that has relieved the monotony of life on the poverty line.'6

  Such comments open a window into the minds of educated, middleclass hacks. They had stumbled into strange, unfamiliar territory. After all, they knew nobody who had grown up in these circumstances. It's no surprise that they found it difficult to empathize with them. '1suspect in general a lot of national journalists, the people who will have gone up north to cover it, would have been entering an alien world,' says senior Mirror journalist Kevin Maguire. 'It'll have been as alientothem as Kandahar or Timbuktu. They just wouldn't know that Britain ... Because it's not their Britain, it's not the bit they live in, they come from.'

  This is not baseless speculation. The occasional journalist even confessed as much. Melanie Reid in The Times argued passionately that 'us douce middle classes' simply did not understand the case 'because we are as removed from that kind of poverty as we are from events in Afghanistan. For life among the white working class of Dewsbury looks like a foreign country.' 7

  The working -class residents of Dews bury Moor were certainly painfully aware of the reasons behind the lack of interest in Shannon Matthews. They knew that many journalists had nothing but contempt for communities like their own. 'Listen, we're not pissed out of our trees or high as a kite all the time, like they associate with council estates,' local community leader Julie Bushby angrily berated journalists. 'Ninety per cent of people here work. We've all taken money out of our own pockets for this.' Aware of the contrasting response to the disappearance of the girl who had become affectionately known simply as 'Maddie', she added: 'Two children have gone missing, that's the point. Everyone feels the same when that happens: rich, pauper, whatever. Good luck to Kate McCann. It's the kids we're looking for, isn't it? Not the mothers.'

  But, as it was to turn out, there was a big difference between the two cases. Unlike Madeleine McCann, Shannon w
as found alive on 14 March 2008. She had been kidnapped, tethered with a rope tied to a roof beam, hidden in a divan bed and drugged to keep her quiet. As far as the public was aware at that point, an estranged distant relative had snatched her. It was to be weeks before the true story emerged. Yet the knives were not out for the man believed to be the abductor, an eccentric loner who was the uncle of Karen Matthews's partner. In the firing line were Karen Matthews and, more importantly, the class she was taken to represent.

  With Shannon safe, it was no longer considered tasteless to openly lay into her community. The affair became a useful case study into Britain's indulgence of an amoral class. 'Her background, a scenario that encompasses the awful, dispiriting and undisciplined face of Britain, should be read as a lesson in failure,' one columnist wrote in the Birmingham Mail. 'Karen Matthews, 32 but looking 60, glib hair falling across a greasy face, is the product of a society which rewards fecklessness.

  Here was an opportunity to score fresh political points. Melanie Phillips is one of Britain's most notorious self-appointed moral arbiters and an aggressive champion of what she sees as traditional values. To her, the Shannon Matthews case was a gift, vindicating what she had been saying all along. Days after the girl was found, Phillips argued that the affair helped to 'reveal the existence of an underclass which is a world apart from the lives that most of us lead and the attitudes and social conventions that most of us take for granted.' In a hysterical tirade, the writer alleged that there were 'whole communities where committed fathers are so rare that any child who actually has one risks being bullied', and where 'boys impregnate two, three, four girls with scarcely a second thought'. No evidence was given in support of these allegations.

  In an increasingly poisonous atmosphere, some of the most extreme prejudices began to erupt into the open. In a debate on the case in March 2008, one Conservative councillor in Kent, John Ward, suggested that: 'There is an increasingly strong case for compulsory sterilisation of all those who have had a second child-s-or third, or whatever-while living off state benefits.' When challenged, Mr Ward was unrepentant about calling for the sterilization of 'professional spongers' who he claimed 'breed for greed'." Sounds familiar? Local Labour councillor Glyn Griffiths thinks so, telling me it is 'effectively Nazi eugenics' which is 'unacceptable in a Western democracy'.

  But his horror was not shared by the dozens of Daily Mail readers who bombarded the newspaper with messages in support of the Tory councillor. '1 fail to see the problem with his comments,' wrote one, adding: 'It is NOT a God-given right to mass-produce children.' 'What a great idea; wrote another well-wisher. 'Let's see if the politicians are bold enough to adopt it.' More practical contributors suggested starting a petition in support, while another came up with the imaginative proposal to lace the entire water supply with an infertility drug and then offer an antidote only to 'suitable' parents. 'No doubt the liberal lefties will be up in arms,' added this perceptive contribution. 'After all, they rely on the unemployed "chavs" to vote them into power.' Yet another expressed their '100%' agreement with Ward's proposals: 'The country is sinking under the weight of these sponging bludgers.:"

  of course, class prejudice isn't always as crude as this. Unhinged though some of these comments are, they undoubtedly reflect an undercurrent of hatred in British society. But this was only the tip of the iceberg. When the dark truth of the Matthews affair came to light, open season was declared on working-class communities like Dewsbury Moor.

  Over three weeks after her daughter had been found alive, Karen Matthews was dramatically arrested. In one of the most unimaginable crimes a mother could commit, she had kidnapped her own nine-yearold daughter to pocket the reward money, by then totalling £50,000. As if the case couldn't get any more surreal, Craig Meehan was charged with possessing child porn. 'which one of you lot is going to be arrested next?' mocked the crowd gathered to watch the friends and relatives of Matthews as she appeared in court.'

  Yet there was much more to the strange case of Shannon Matthews than an abusive parent who went to extraordinary lengths to use her own daughter for financial gain. The episode was like a flare, momentarily lighting up a world of class and prejudice in modern Britain. Of course, media intrigue was more than justified by the unique horror of the case and the perverse manner in which Karen Matthews had deceived her community, the police and the nation as a whole. And yet, for a whole host of media commentators and politicians, this was far from an isolated case, involving a depraved individual who shared guilt only with those who were directly complicit, 'The case seems to confirm many prejudices about the "underclass",' reflected one local newspaper." It was as though everyone in the country from a similar background was crammed into the dock alongside her.

  Acting as the nation's judges, juries and executioners, the tabloids turned on Dewsbury Moor. Local residents were fair game: after all, they had the audacity to live on the same street as Karen Matthews. The estate became a template for similar working-class communities up and down the country. 'Estate is like a nastier Beirut' was one thoughtful Sun headline. At first glance, this might appear rather tasteless. After all, Beirut was the epicentre of a particularly horrific civil war in which around a quarter of a million people died, reducing much of the city to rubble. But the Sun didn't lack evidence for its assertion. 'As the Press descended, people were pictured walking into the shops in their pyjamas up to MIDDAY ... even in the rain.' The estate 'is a real-life version of the smash hit Channel 4 series Shameless,' claimed this nuanced piece, referring to the hit show about the chaotic lives of a few families on a council estate in Manchester. Despite them having been tried and convicted by the Sun, the paper surprisingly found that 'local families refuse to admit it'

  Journalists had to be more than a little selective to create this caricature. They didn't mention the fact that when the media became bored with some scruffy working-class girl vanishing 'up north', the local community had compensated by coming together to find her. Scores of of the increases in public spending under New Labour will be slashed away.'

  The retreat from the politics of class is far from unique to the Labour Party. Across the whole of the left-and by that I mean social democracy, democratic socialism and even the remnants of revolutionary socialism-there has been a shift away from class politics towards identity politics over the last thirty years. The pounding suffered by the labour movement under Tharcherism, particularly following the nadir represented by the defeat of the Miners' Strike, meant that class no longer seemed to be a plausible vehicle of change for many leftists. Identity politics, on the other hand, still felt radical and had achievable aims: history actually seemed to be on the side of those fighting for the emancipation of women, gays and ethnic minorities.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, left-wing intellectuals who were both inspired and informed by a powerful labour movement wrote hundreds of books and articles on working-class issues. Such work would help shape the views of politicians at the very top of the Labour Party. Today, progressive intellectuals are far more interested in issues of identity. In his epic The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose published the results of a search he did using an online academic resource, the MLA International Bibliography, for the years 1991to 2000. There were 13,820 results for 'women', 4,539 for 'gender', 1,862 for 'race', 710 for 'postcolonial'-and just 136 for 'working class'.5

  of course, the struggles for the emancipation of women, gays and ethnic minorities are exceptionally important causes. New Labour has co-opted them, passing genuinely progressive legislation on gay equality and women's rights, for example. But it is an agenda that has happily co-existed with the sidelining of the working class in politics, allowing New Labour to protect its radical flank while pressing ahead with Thatcherite policies. Take all-women shortlists, promoted by New Labour to increase the number of women candidates standing as Members of Parliament. This is a laudable goal, but it has largely ended Dewsbury Moor. It was full of people like Karen Matthews. Peo
ple who'd never had jobs, never wanted one, people who expected the state to fund every illegitimate child they had-not to mention their drink, drug and smoking habits.' Their 'houses looked like pigsties--dog crap on the floor (trust me, I've seen it), putrid carpets, piles of clothes and unwashed dishes everywhere.'

  In case her attempt to strip these working-class communities of their humanity was too subtle for the reader, Malone spelt it out in black and white. Matthews, Meehan and Donovan, she declared, 'belonged to that sub (human) class that now exists in the murkiest, darkest comers of this country'. They were' good-far-nothing scroungers who have no morals, no compassion, no sense of responsibility and who are incapable of feeling love or guilt.'16 According to Malone these communities were filthy, subhuman and devoid of the basic emotions. They were crawling with the type of person who would stage the kidnapping of their own daughter for cash, or-as the Daily Mail put it more succinctly

  -the 'feral underclass,

  Imagine that Carole Malone had been talking about people who were black, or Jewish, or even Scottish. There would have been the most almighty uproar, and rightly so. Malone's career would be over and the Sun would be facing legal action for printing material that incited hatred. But there was no outcry and no angry demands for her sacking. Why? Because the communities she was attacking are regarded as fair game. 'There is an ugly trend of bashing the less privileged developing in this country and I don't like it at all,' pleaded Daily Star columnist Joe Mott at the height of the hysteria over Karen Matthews. 'Let's stop using the situation as an excuse to take cheap shots at the working class.'IS His was a lonely voice. As far as his fellow journalists were concerned, Karen Matthews wasn't a one-off. Britain was teeming with people like her.