by Owen Jones
Leading politicians and journalists had no interest in allowing the Shannon Matthews affair to go down in history as just another example of the capacity of some individuals for cruelty. A mother's grotesque ploy to use her vulnerable daughter for financial gain was deliberately inflated into something much greater, for the purposes of journalists and politicians determined to"prove that traditional working-class communities had decayed into a morally depraved, work-shy rump.
But that's not to say that there are no wider lessons to be drawn from the case. On the contrary, it speaks volumes about class in Britain today. It would be dishonest to say that communities like Dewsbury Moor don't have their fair share of problems, even if they're not full of abusive unemployed parents running amok. The important question is, who is to blame: the communities, or the policies of successive governments over the last three decades? And how has Britain become so polarized that derision and contempt for 'chavs' has become so deeply ingrained in our society?
Neither the journalists nor the politicians who manipulated the affair of Shannon Matthews allowed pesky facts to get into the way of their wild claims. That the Matthews household was not a workless family- Craig Meehan had a job, after all-or that accomplice Michael Donovan was a computer programmer did not trouble right-wing pundits and politicians.
'I remember reading one comment about how many people in Southern England, maybe more middle-class England, were fascinated by what they saw as northern, subhuman, deprived communities,' remarks local Dewsbury vicar Reverend Simon Pitcher. 'I think there was an element of media porn. The whole of Dewsbury was portrayed as being particularly difficult and, in reality, it's not like that.' His statement could be applied to all communities suffering from poverty. In contrast to the sweeping assertions of British politicians and commentators, government figures show that nearly six out of every ten households in poverty had at least one adult in work.
But this coverage was part of an effort to portray our society as divided into Middle England on the one hand and a pack of anti-social chavs living in places like Dewsbury Moor on the other. It's a myth. You wouldn't know it from the media coverage, but most of us think of ourselves as working class. As a poll published in October 2007 revealed, that's how over half the population described themselves. This figure has remained more or less steady since the 1960s.
Of course, self-identification is an ambiguous, subjective business and people of all classes might, for various reasons, mischaracterize their place in the social pecking order. And yet the figure has an uncanny relation to the facts. In today's Britain the number of people employed in blue-collar manual and white-collar routine clerical jobs represents over half the workforce, more than twenty -eight million workers.JS We're a nation of secretaries, shop assistants and admin employees. The lives of this majority are virtually ignored by journalists and politicians. Needless to say, over half the population has nothing in common with Karen Matthews. And yet the rare appearances made by working-class people on the public stage are more likely than not to be stories about hate figures--however legitirnate=-such as Karen Matthews.
Were politicians and journalists wrong to argue that communities such as Dewsbury Moor had particular social problems that set them apart from the rest of Britain? As with most stereotypes, there are grains of truth in the 'chav' caricature. It is undeniable that many working-class communities across Britain suffer from high levels of unemployment. They do have relatively large numbers of benefit recipients, and crime levels are high. Yet the blame has been directed at the victims rather than at the policies promoted by successive governments over recent decades.
Dewsbury Moor is a good example. The ward finds itself in the top 10per cent for overall deprivation and child poverty. As we have seen with the bile spewed out by journalists during the Shannon Matthews affair, the detractors argue that this is largely due to the fecklessness of the people who live there. They're wrong. Governments have effectively socially engineered these working-class communities to have the problems that they have.
We've come a long way since Labour's Aneurin Bevan founded modern council housing in the aftermath of W orld War II. Above all, his aim was to create mixed communities. He reasoned that this would help people from different backgrounds to understand one another, breaking down the sort of prejudices we see today directed at chavs. '1t is entirely undesirable that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live,' he argued. 'If we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should all be drawn from different sectors of the community. We should try to introduce what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street.'3
This laudable principle has been fatally undermined by policies introduced in the Thatcher era which New Labour have been happy to keep in place. Council estates like Dewsbury Moor now display the exact opposite result to that originally intended by Bevan. As the 1970s drew to a close, before the Thatcher government launched the 'rightto-buy' scheme, more than rwo in five of us lived in council housing. Today the figure is nearer one in ten, with tenants of housing associations and co-operatives representing half as many again." Councils were prevented from building new homes and, over the last eleven years, the party of Bevan has refused toinvest money in the remaining houses under local authority control. As council housing collapsed, remaining stock was prioritized for those most in need. 'New tenants coming in, almost exclusively in order to meet stringent criteria, will either be single parents with dependent children, [or] people out of institutions including prisons,' explained the late Alan Walter, a lifelong council tenant and chairman of the pressure group Defend Council Housing. 'And therefore they are, almost by definition, those without work.'
Many-but not all--of those who remained in council housing were tOO poor to take advantage of the right-to-buy scheme. 'A growing number of people who can afford to get out of social housing have done so, and it's then sold off to someone else not necessarily in a respectable family,' Polly Toynbee argues. 'The more people absent themselves from living in a council estate, the worse the divide gets: after all, there's virtually no rented sector.' The problems people faced had nothing to do with the fact they lived in council housing, and everything to do with the fact that only the most deprived were eligible to live on estates. The unsurprising result is that over two-thirds of those living in social housing belong to the poorest two-fifths of the population. Nearly half of social housing is located in the poorest fifth of neighbourhoods." Things have certainly changed compared to thirty years ago, when a staggering 20 per cent of the richest tenth of the population lived in social housing." If places like Dewsbury Moor have major social problems, it's because they have been madeto have them.
Because of the sheer concentration of Britain's poorest living in social housing, council estates easily become associated with the socalled' chavs'. While it is true that about half of Britain' s poor own their homes, they too tend to live on estates. The increasing transformation of council estates into social dumping grounds has provided much ammunition for the theory that Britain is divided into middle-class society and a working-class chav rump, suffering from an epidemic of self-inflicted problems.
Government housing policies are not the only cause of the social disadvantages affecting working-class areas. Thatcherism unleashed a tsunami of de-industrialization, decimating communities such as Dewsbury Moor. Manufacturing jobs have collapsed over the last thirty years. When Thatcher came to power in 1979, over seven million of us earned a living in manufacturing. Thirty years later, this was true for less than half as many, a mere 2.83 million-not least because factories had relocated to developing countries where workers cost less.
The town of Dews bury was once home to a thriving textile industry. Over the past three decades, these jobs have all but disappeared. At the bottom of the street where Karen Matthew
s once lived are dozens of disused lock-ups, including abandoned textile mills and expansive industrial estates. 'This was known as the heavy woollen area of West Yorkshire. There were also lots of engineering and manufacturing jobs,' Reverend Pitcher explains. 'Those jobs have all gone; there's virtually no manufacturing industry. So what do people do? What choices do people have for work? People depend on the big supermarkets for their jobs. There's no other place to work for any significant job.' The impact on local people has been devastating. 'This has had a destabilizing effect on the community-the sense of community we once had has evaporated.' The lack oflarge manufacturing firms made it very difficult for those who had not succeeded in education to find a job.
The impact of this industrial collapse can be seen on the Matthews family. Both the grandparents and parents worked in local industry, particularly in textiles. And yet, as Karen Matthews's mother put it: 'The town has changed now. The textiles have gone and there aren't the same jobs as there were. ,40Manufacturing in areas like Dewsbury Moor used to provide secure, relatively well-paid, highly unionized jobs that were passed down from generation to generation.
'The decline of the British manufacturing and industrial base has decimated communities up and down the country,' says Labour MP Katy Clark. 'If you just talk about the constituency Irepresent [North Ayrshire and Arran], we used to have large-scale industrial and manufacturing industries which employed on occasion tens of thousands of people. All those jobs have gone and in their place, low-paid usually service-sector and public-sector jobs have come.'
Industry was the linchpin of local communities. Its sudden disappearance from places like Dewsbury Moor caused massive unemployment during the 1980s. Today, the official unemployment rate in the area is only a percentage point above the national average. But this statistic is deeply deceptive. If you exclude people engaged in full-time study, well over a quarter of the people in D ewsbury West are classed as 'economically inactive'. That's around 10 per cent over the average. The main reason is that many of those who lost their jobs were officially classified as illor incapacitated, in a process common to all the areas that, like D ewsbury , lost their industries in the 1980sand 1990s. It is difficult to argue that this is because they are lazy scroungers. In late 2008, the government announced plans topush 3.5 million benefit recipients into jobs. At the same time they estimated that there were only around half a million vacancies. That's the lowest on record. People are out of work in places like Dewsbury Moor quite simply because there are not enough jobs to go around.
It is clear that the 'chav' caricature epitomized by Karen Matthews has sunk deep roots into British society. More and more of us are choosing to believe that the victims of social problems are, in large part, responsible for causing them. Three-quarters of us, for example, thought that the gap between high and low incomes was 'too large' in 2006--but only slightly over a third supported spending more on welfare benefits for the poor. While nearly half of us felt that an unemployed couple should be classed as 'hard up' in 1986, that level declined to just over a third by 2005. Even more strikingly, while only 19 per cent felt that poverty was caused by laziness or a lack of willpower in 1986, the figure had increased to 27 per cent twenty years later.
What is remarkable about these figures is that they have come at a time when inequality has grown as sharply as social mobility has declined. The G ini coefficient-used to measure overall income inequality in Britain-was rated as 26 in 1979. Today it has risen to 39. It is not simply that this growing social division renders those at the top more likely to be ignorant of how other people live their lives. As we have seen, demonizing the less well-off also makes it easier to justify an unprecedented and growing level of social inequality. After all, to admit that some people are poorer than others because of the social injustice inherent in our society would require government action. Claiming that people are largely responsible for their circumstances facilitates the opposite conclusion. 'We're developing a culture where it's acceptable and indeed normal to speak of the white working class in very dehumanized language, and this is a common symptom of a highly unequal society,' Johann Hari warns. 'If you go to South Africa or Venezuela--or other Latin American countries with a tiny wealthy elite-it's common for them to speak of the poor as if they're not quite normal or somehow subhuman.'
The Shannon Matthews affair casts a disquieting light on modern Britain. It didn't spark contempt for working-class people. It simply exposed prejudices that have become rampant in our society. The hys- teria around the case shows that it is possible to say practically anything about those caricatured as chavs. Somehow a huge part of Britain has been made complicit in crimes they had nothing to do with. With neither middle-class politicians nor journalists showing any willingnessto give a platform to the reality of working-class communities, the piti- fully dysfunctional lives of a tiny minority of individuals have been presented as a case study of modem life outside so-called Middle England. 'Chavs' have become more despised than practically any other group of people.
Where has this hatred come from? There is certainly nothing new about venting spite against those at the bottom of the pile. Theologians of the seventeenth century deplored the 'indiscreet and misguided charity' extended to poor people who were 'the very scabs, and filth, and vermin of the Common-wealth,.42 In the nineteenth century, the harsh Poor Laws threw the destitute and unemployed into workhouses where they toiled in hellish conditions, and commentators debated whether the respectable working class was giving way to a debauched rump they labelled the 'residuum'. The rise of eugenics in the early twentieth century led even some who considered themselves left-wing to argue for the sterilization of the 'unfit' poor--or even for their extermination.
Chav-bashing draws on a long, ignoble tradition of class hatred. But it cannot be understood without looking at more recent events. Above all, itis the bastard child of a very British class war.
2
Class Warriors
... one of the worlds is preaching a Class War, and the other vigorously practising it.
-George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah
The Tories have, in modern rimes, been at pains to present themselvesas standing above class and sectional interests. 'One Narion' was one of their most treasured phrases throughout much of the twentieth century. When David Cameron was elected leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, the Tories were, to begin with, full of fluffy rhetoric about under- standing marginalized young people (Cameron wants us to 'hug a hoodie', mocked New Labour), and even about narrowing the gap between rich and poor.
But as soon as they are safely behind closed doors, away from the cameras, the cuddly PR-speak can abruptly disappear. I witnessed the mask slip myself, when in my final year as an undergraduate. An extremely prominent Tory politician from the moderate wing of the party had come to deliver an off-the-record speech to students. So that he could speak candidly, aspiring student journalists were barred from reporting on the speech and we were sworn to preserve his anonymity.It soon became clear why. As the logs crackled in the fireplace on a rainy November evening, the Tory grandee made a stunning confession.
'What you have to realize about the Conservative Party,' he said as though it was a trivial, throwaway comment, 'is that it is a coalition of privileged interests. Its main purpose is to defend that privilege. And the way it wins elections is by giving just enough to just enough other people.'
Here was an analysis that could have dropped out of the pages of Socialist Worker. A doyen of the Conservative Party had more or less confessed that it was the political arm of the rich and powerful. It was there to fight the comer of the people at the top. It was waging class war. Asked to picture a 'class warrior', perhaps most people would see a chubby union leader in a flat cap, becoming progressively redder in the face as he denounces 'management' in a thick regional accent-not
well-bred men with sleek suits and clipped accents.
When Iasked former Labour leader Neil Kinnock if the Conserv
atives were the class warriors of British politics, he shook his head gravely. 'No, because they've never had to engage in a class war,' he said. 'Largely because we signed the peace treaty without realizing that they hadn't.'
The demonization of the working class cannot be understood without looking back at the Thatcherite experiment of the 1980s that forged
the society we live in today. At its core was an offensive against working-class communities, industries, values and institutions. No longer was being working class something to be proud of: it was something to escape from. This vision did not come from nowhere. It was the culmination of a class war waged, on and off, by the Conservatives for over two centuries.
This is certainly not the way the Conservative Party has sought to present itself in public. Whenever the interests of its 'coalition of privileged interests' have been menaced by even the most moderate arguments for social reform, it has decried them as attempts at 'class war'. After six years spent resisting reforms introduced by the post-war Labour government, such as the National Health Service and the welfare state, the Tories denounced Labour in those exact terms. 'of all impediments the class war is the worst,' declared the 1951 Conservative Manifesto, accusing Labour of hoping to 'gain another lease of power by fomenting class hatred and appealing to moods of greed and envy'.