by Owen Jones
themselves:' Manners belonged to the middle classes: and it was high time that they sorted out the impertinent chavs.
Not that the born-and-bred middle classes are the only guilty parties. Some who hail from working-class roots and have achieved wealth and success against the odds have told themselves; 'If I can make it, then anyone with the talent and determination can too'. Take John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue. 'I'm middle class. I got out of the working class as quickly as I could,' he once said. 'The working class is violent and abusive, they beat their wives and I hate their culture.' IS John Bird is far from the only example of a wealthy, formerly working-class individual who spits at those they have left behind. You have 'escaped' purely because of your own exceptional talents and abilities, you can think to yourself-and those who have not got ahead have only themselvesto blame.
It would be nice to dismiss chav-hate as a fringe psychosis confined to ranting right-wing columnists. But there is a type of chav-hate that has become a 'liberal bigotry'. Liberal bigots justify their prejudice against a group of people on the grounds of their own supposed bigotry. The racialization of working-class people as 'white' has con- vinced some that they can hate chavs and remain progressive-minded. They justify their hatred of white working-class people by focusing on their supposed racism and failure to assimilate into multicultural society. '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.'
By defining the white working class in terms of ethnicity rather than social class, liberal chav-haters ascribe their problems to cultural rather than economic factors. Itis the way they live that is the problem, not the unjust way society is structured. If white working-class people are oppressed, it is the result of their own fecklessness. While a liberal chav-hater will accept that massive discrimination against ethnic minority groups explains issues like unemployment and poverty and even violence, they do not believe white working-class people have such excuses.
'The "real" working class is supposed to be white, badly educated, "aspirational for wealth", bigoted and easily persuaded,' says promi- nent trade union leader Billy Hayes, who was born on a council estate in Liverpool. Many of these caricatures appeared in the BBe's White season, a supposedly sympathetic series of programmes dedicated to the white working class that aired in 2007. In reality, it simply boostedthe image of white working-class people as a race-obsessed, BNP- voting rump. Their problems were not portrayed as economic-thingslike housing and jobs that affect working-class people of all colours did not get a look-in. They were simply portrayed as a minority culture under threat from mass immigration. 'The White season examines why some feel increasingly marginalised and explores possible reasons behind the rise in popularity of far-right politics in some sections of this community,' the BBC announced.
But the trailer for the series said it all: a white man's face being scrib- bled over by dark-skinned hands with a black marker pen until he disappeared into the background. Accompanying the trailer was the question: 'Is the white working class becoming invisible?' Here it was---all their problems being reduced to the issue of race. Amongthose angered by this bias was the BBe reporter Sarah Mukherjee, a woman of Asian origin who grew up on a largely white council estate in Essex. The series left a 'nasty taste in the mouth', she said. 'Listening to the patronizing conversations in some newsrooms you'd think white, working-class Britain is one step away from anarchy, drinking them- selves senseless and pausing only to draw benefits and beat up a few Asian and black people.'
As an example of how chav-bashing can be justified on anti-racist grounds, take a column written by journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. 'Tax-paying immigrants past and present keep indolent Britjsh scroung- ers on their couches drinking beer and watching TV,' she claimed. 'We [immigrants] are despised because we seize opportunities these slobs don't want.'17 In another column entitled 'Spare me the tears over the white working class', she slams those who resist calling them racist.
Working-class white men provoked race riots through the Fifties and Sixties; they kept 'darkies' out of pubs and clubs and work canteens. Who were the supporters of Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell? The disempowered have used us to vent their natural-born hatred against the powerful.
Alibhai-Brown regards herself as a writer of the left-and yet she happily uses a perversion of anti-racism to slam white working-class people. This is chav-bashing as liberal bigotry in full swing. A BBC series presented by Evan Davis tapped into similar sentiments. The Day the Immigrants Left had the worthy aim of proving that immigrant workers were not, in fact, 'coming over here and taking all our jobs'. But, after making eleven long-term unemployed people sign up to do jobs (often badly, or failing to turn up at all) favoured by immigrant labourers, the programme portrayed this as a case study of how unem- ployed working-class people in Britain are slovenly and feckless. The hour-long programme with its selective examples ultimately seemed to show that, actually, people in Britain did not have jobs because of their own abject laziness.
Columnist Janet Daley is among those who have perversely justified chav-bashing as a defence of ethnic minority people. Recounting a run- in with what she described as an 'English working-class sociopath' (their cars clipped each other and he shouted a bit before driving off), she launched into a tirade against 'working-class violence'. British working-class people were, she said, a 'self-loathing, self-destructive tranche of the population' who lacked 'civic culture'. In contrast, she celebrated the 'religion, cultural dignity and a sense of family' brought by ethnic minorities. The only thing holding them back, she claimed, was 'the mindless hatred them precisely for their cultural integrity ... I fear long after Britain has become a successful multi-racial society, it will be plagued by this diminishing (but increasingly alienated) detritus of the Industrial Revolution.t" It is certainly a creative way of justifying hatred of working -class people. But then again, Janet Daley is not simply a snob: she is a class warrior.
Another myth used to sustain chav-hate is the idea that the old, decent working class has died away, leaving a rump with no moral compass. In one Daily Mail column, Amanda Platell, a former speechwriter for the present Coalition foreign secretary, William Hague, blamed the 'shabby values' of this rump for their situation. 'When it comes to looking for the real cause why so many of the working class do worse at school, earn less and die younger, the blame must be placed elsewhere--on the countless number of feckless parents.' She even called the mothers of working-class children 'slum mums'. As part of her argument that they were personally responsible for their situation, she argued: 'The working class of the past had enormous self-respect. Men, however poor, wore suits and ties. Women scrubbed front steps. Mothers wouldn't have been seen dead wearing pyjamas in their own kitchen, let alone in public
As Rachel Johnson (editor of the Lady and sister of Boris Johnson) puts it: 'What we're having is a media which is run by the middle classes, for the middle classes, of the middle classes, aren't we?' She is spot on. The journalists who have stirred up chav-hate are from a narrow, privileged background. Even papers with overwhelmingly working-class readerships join in the sport. Kevin Maguire told me of a Sun away day in which all the journalists dressed up as chavs. Chuckle at their venomous columns by all means, but be aware that you are revelling in the contempt of the privileged for the less fortunate. In the current climate of chav-hate the class warriors of Fleet Street can finally get away with it, openly and flagrantly: caricaturing working-class people as stupid, idle, racist, sexually promiscuous, dirty, and fond of vulgar clothes. Nothing of worth is seen to emanate from working-class Bdtain.
This chav-hate has even become a fad among privileged youth. At universities like Oxford, middle-class students hold 'chav bops' where they dress up as this working-class caricature. Among those mocking the look was Prince William, one of the most privileged young men in the country. At a chav-themed fancy dre
ss party to mark the end of his first term at Sandhurst, he dressed in a loose-fitting top and 'bling jewellery', along with the must-have 'angled baseball cap'. But when the other cadets demanded he 'put on a chavvy accent and stop speaking like a Royal,' he couldn't do it. 'William's not actually the poshestsounding cadet, despite his family heritage, but he struggled to pull off a working-class accent,' one cadet told the Sun.ZIWelcome to twentyfirst-century Britain, where royals dress up as their working-class subjects for a laugh.
To get a more detailed sense of what the' chav' phenomenon means to young people from privileged backgrounds, Ihad a chat with Oliver Harvey, an Old Etonian and president of the Oxford Conservative Association. 'In the middle classes' attitudes toward what you would have called the working-class, so-called chav culture, you've still got to see class as an important part of British life,' he says. 'Chav' is a word Harvey often hears bandied around beneath the dreaming spires of Oxford. 'You'd think people would be educated here, but it's still something people find funny.' Unlike other students, he dislikes the term because of its class meaning. 'I think itshows a patronizing attitude and is rather offensive. It's a word used by more fortunate people towards less fortunate people ... Unfortunately it's now a popular term that has been transplanted into people's everyday consciousness.'
A place like Oxford is fertile ground for chav-hare. Nearly half of its students were privately educated, and there are very, very few working-class people attending the university at all. It helps unlock the truth behind the phenomenon: here are privileged people with little contact with those lower down the scale. It is easy to caricature people you do not understand. And indeed, many of these students owe their place at Oxford to the privileged circumstances that bought them a superior education. How comforting to pretend that they landed in Oxford because of their own talents, and that those at the bottom of society are there because they are thick, feckless or worse.
And yet such open mockery is a recent development, not least because until quite recently, many students felt embarrassed about privilege. 'To be a middle-class student just twenty years ago carried such a social stigma that many graduates in their forties recall faking a proletarian accent for their entire university education,' says Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead. 'Nowadays, however, a popular student party theme is dressing up as "chavs"-working-dass types with a taste for Burberry, but not the budget, whose ideas above their station provide material for half the jokes on campus today. ,22
Scouring the internet reveals the disturbing levels anti-chav hatred has reached in society at large. A YouTube video with around half a million hits proposes sending chavs to the moon. 'But who'd care anyway if every chav goes to where there's no KFC, no McDonald's, no high street,' the singer croons cheerfully. Before it was finally removed, a Facebook page with nearly three-quarters of a million members was entitled '4000 chavs a year die from tesco cheap booze. Every little helps :).' Type in 'kill chavs' into Google and you get hundreds of thousands of results: like '5 Ways to Kill a Chav' and 'The Anti Chav-Kill Chav Scum Now'. There is even a game called 'Chav Hunter' where you can shoot chavs, 'Chav Hunter is about killing those pikey fucks who dress like 80's rappers. In a sniper fashion, aim for the head,' it recommends.
But the chav phenomenon has sinister implications beyond revealing the growing hatred within the British class system. In early 2009, Ralph Surman, a teacher from Nottingham, launched into a tirade against what he called 'a class of uber-chavs, They are not doing anything productive and are costing taxpayers a fortune.' He knew exactly who to blame: 'The offspring of the first big generation of single mothers were children in the 1980s. Now they are adults with their own children and the problems are leading to higher crime rates and low participation in the labour force.' This dismissal of large swathes of young people may well have dire results. 'The birth of" chavs II ,as parodied by comedians such as Catherine Tate, can leave working-class people feeling patronized and laughed at; writes journalist Hannah Frankel in a thoughtful piece on the education system's approach to working-class people.
Catherine Tate's comic character, a lazy teenage girl with an attitude problem and an annoying catchphrase ('Am I bovvered?'), was JUSt one example of how chav-bashing has become national entertainment. Reality TV shows, sketch shows, talk shows, even films have emerged dedicated to ridiculing working-class Britain. 'Chavtainment' has reinforced the mainstream view of working-dass individuals as bigoted, slothful, aggressive people who cannot look after themselves, let alone their children. 'On the one hand they're served up as entertainment, you know, Wife Swap, whatever; says Labour MP Jon Cruddas. 'And simultaneously they're something to be feared through this notion of a lawless ASBO nation which is at the gate.' The bigots of privileged Britain have truly put an entire class in the stocks.
The world of reality television must have been a bewildering experience for the late Jade Goody, a twenty-one-year-old dental nurse from Bermondsey. Before she entered the Big Brother house, her life had been one of gut-wrenching hardship. When she was one, her mum threw out her junkie father for hiding guns underneath her cot. When she first saw the film Trainspotting at the cinema, she threw up when Ewan McGregor's character injected himself with heroin. 'Those faces that he pulls are the same faces I've seen my dad pull, you see,' she recalled. She remembered the first time she rolled a joint for her mother
-when she was just four years old. When her mother was disabled by a motorcycle accident, Jade was forced to look after her. 'Losing the use of her arm was infuriating for my mum, and as a result she often beat me.'
Because she was born to a mixed-race father'which is why I've got such big lips' -she suffered racist abuse both at schoo I and in her local community. 'My mum got into fights with a lot of women who lived in our block because she thought they were prejudiced,' she said, and her mum took her out of school for similar reasons. She worked in various shops before getting the job as a dental assistant. But, with £3,000 of unpaid rent, she faced eviction from her council flat and possible imprisonment for unpaid tax. That was until 2002, when she sent a promotional video of herself to the new Channel 4 reality TV show, Big Brother.
There can be few more shameful episodes in the British media's recent history than the hounding of Jade Goody. The youngest contestant, she reacted badly to the claustrophobic pressure of the TV programme. She ate and drank to cope with the stress; she fooled around with one of the contestants; and she was bullied into getting naked on national television (which the producers made sure to feature in the edited highlights). The media despised her. Labelled a 'pig', she was mercilessly ridiculed for not knowing what asparagus was (the horror!) and for asking if' East Angular' was abroad. 'Vote the pig our!' demanded the Sun, which also referred to her as an 'oinker', Others taunted her as a 'vile fishwife' and 'The Elephant Woman'. As the campaign became a hysterical witch-hunt (indeed, one of the headlines was: 'Ditch the Witch!'), members of the public stood outside the studios with placards reading: 'Burn the Pigl'
It is remarkable that anyone could have turned this avalanche of hatred around. But she did. Her disarming, almost boundless honesty, her disregard for the social graces of 'respectable' society and her tortured background gradually endeared her to millions. When she returned to the world of reality TV, itwas in the celebrity version of Big Brother.Then came the next wave of anti-Jade spite.
Appearing alongside Jade Goody was Shilpa Shetty, an Indian Bollywood actress from a wealthy background. Jade took an evident dislike to her, and there was open war between the two. It was a much misunderstood dispute. Shilpa suggested that Jade needed 'elocution lessons'. When Jade infamously told the Indian actress to 'go back to the slums' -a phrase wrongly taken to be racist in intent-she was attacking her for being what Jade described as 'a posh, up-herself prin- cess' who should see what real life was like. 'Ultimately, we were fighting because we were from different classes,' she would later claim. 'who the fuck are you? You aren't some Princess in Neverland,' she screamed a
t Shilpa when she tried to flush a cooked chicken down the toilet. Other celebrities on the show, such as model Danielle Lloyd, suffered less media opprobrium despite calling Shetty a 'dog' and telling her to 'fuck off home'. But Goody's undoubtedly stupid and racially tinged references to the actress as 'Shilpa Poppadom' helped unleash a vitriolic media campaign.
'CLASS V TRASH' bellowed the Daily Express. The paper slammed 'the porcine Jade Goody' and mourned the fact that 'Miss Shetty, a huge star in India, has been forced to endure the kind of bullying usually heard around sink estates ... Weare being disgraced around the world by the likes of semi-literate Jade and her unpleasant associates.' The Express was outraged because it felt that a thick, ugly girl from a poor background was attacking a beautiful rich woman. 'Jade and her allies clearly feel threatened by the presence of a woman from a very different strata [sic] of society from their own,' it claimed.
Simon Heffer assailed Goody for indulging 'in the only form of bigotry the law now permits to go unpunished: that of hating your social superi- ors.' He questioned why Channel 4 had to use Big Brother to broadcast the 'repulsive aspects' of society 'when we can see them so easily for ourselves, if we wish, by wandering on to the nearest council estate for half an hour : Even Stuart Jeffries in the liberal Guardian could not resist portraying the clash as 'between ugly, thick white Britain and one imperturbably dignified Indian woman'. He even attacked Jade's garbled English, suggesting she use her fortune for 'remedial education,. But then Stuart Jeffries was being educated at Oxford University while Jade Goody's heroin-addicted father was hiding guns underneath her cot. On the BBC, Andrew Neil suggested she was just one of ' a bunch of Vicky Pollards' and 'thick bitches' cluttering TV screens. Richard Littlejohn described her as 'the High Priestess of the Slagocracy', and others offered her as 'proof of Britain's underclass', In one BBC phone- in, she was described as 'just another chav, the estates are full of them'. The host laughed and suggested 'hosing them down'. Meanwhile, Hamant Verma, the former editor of Eastern Eye magazine, attributed 'the open display of racism' to 'ChanneI 4's decision to give near-illiter- ate chavs such as Jade Goody so much airtime,. One writer in the Nottingham Evening Post described Shetty's tormentors as resembling 'nothing more than a pack of slavering chav estate mongrels spoiling for a scrap'. It was not just Jade Goody under attack in these contribu- tions: it was everybody who shared her background. Those at the bottom of the pile in British society were being presented as little more than animals. 'They smell, they're dirty', was how literary critic John Carey described attitudes towards the poor in interwar Britain. How much have things changed?