by Owen Jones
The Kaiser Chiefs made a name for themselves with the sort of repethive indie anthem that lends itself to drunken chanting in a club. Listen carefully to their lyrics, however, and you discover pure class bile. Take 'I Predict a Riot'; 'I tried to get to my taxi /A man in a tracksuit attacked me IHe said that he saw it before me IWants to get things a bit gory IGirls scrabble around with no clothes on ITo borrow a pound for a condom IIf it wasn't for chip fat, they'd be frozen I They're not very sensible: The last lines reproduce the caricature of the undignified, 'slapper' chav girl.
Working-class people have become objects of ridicule, disapproval and, yes, hatred. Welcome to the world of British entertainment in the early twenty-first century.
The contempt for working-class people that built up under Thatcherism had reached its terrible zenith in the Hillsborough Disaster. Today, football continues to offer clues to the dramatic change in attitudes over the past three decades. By looking at what has happened to the traditional sporting passion of working-class Britain, we can get a good idea of the cultural impact of chav-hate. The 'beautiful game' has been transformed beyond recognition.
Although major clubs shifted away from their origins long ago---for example, Manchester United was founded by railwaymen-they remained deeply rooted in working-class communities. Footballers were generally boys plucked from the club's local area. Unlike the spoiled plutocrats that some Premier League players have become, for much of the twentieth century 'footballers were often worse off than the crowds watching them from the terraces on a Saturday,' as footballer Stuart Imlach's son has written." Back in the early 1950s, there was a maximum salary for players of just £14 a week during the season-not very much over the average manual wage--and only one in five players were lucky enough to earn that. Players lived in 'tied cottages'
-houses owned by clubs from which they could be evicted at any moment. Little wonder one footballer, speaking at the 1955 Trades Union Congress, complained that 'the conditions of the professional footballer's employment are akin to slavery.'
Football has gone from one extreme to another. The cold winds of free-market economics had largely been kept out of the football world during the 1980s. In the 1990s, they hit with a vengeance. In 1992, the twenty-two clubs of the old First Division broke away to establish the Premier League, freeing them from the requirement to share revenues with clubs in the rest of the League. Part of the new commercial ethos was to keep many working-class people out of the stadium. In its Blueprint for the Future of Football; the Football Association argued that the game must attract 'more affluent middle-class consumers'.
When the old terraces were abolished after the Hillsborough Disaster, the cheaper standing tickets disappeared. Between 1990 and 2008, the price of the average football ticket rose by 600 per cent, well over seven times the rate of everything else.5QThis was completely unaffordable for many working-class people. But some senior football figures were not only aware of this--they even celebrated it. As former England manager Terry Venables put it:
Without wishing to sound snobbish or to be disloyal to my own working-class background, the increase inadmission prices is likelyto exclude the sort of people who were giving English football a bad name. I am talking about the young men, mostly working-class, who terrorized football grounds, railway trains, cross-channel ferries and towns and cities throughout England and Europe.
The demonization of working-class people was being used to justify hiking up ticket prices and, in the process, to keep them out.
At the same time, football became big money-and big business. In the early 1990s, Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB signed an agreement to pay £305 million for exclusive rights to the new FA Carling Premiership. In 1997 they signed another four-year deal, with a £670 million price tag. Not only are huge numbers of working-class people financially barred from stadiums: many cannot even watch their team play unless they splash out on a Sky box. Meanwhile, the huge amount of money sloshing about in the game has severed football teams from their local communities. Huge transfer fees mean that players from hundreds or thousands of miles away dominate the major teams. Clubs have become the playthings of American asset-strippers and Russian oligarchs. And, with players paid up to £160,000 a week, they are completely divorced from their working-class roots. Labour MP Stephen Pound mourns the loss of this working-class icon. 'If you look at the working-class heroes
-people like Frank. Lampard and David Beckham-what's the first thing they do? They move out of the working-class areas into Cheshire or Surrey. The role models don't have the confidence to stick with it.'
It is the ultimate insult. A game that was at the centre of working class identity for so long has been transformed into a middle-class consumer good controlled by billionaire carpetbaggers. Caricaturing all working-class fans as aggressive hooligans intent on mindless violence has provided the excuse to keep them out.
Football was identified as a potentially lucrative piece of workingclass culture, so it was taken away and repackaged. But in today's Britain, nothing about working-class life is considered worthy or admirable. "'Working class" is no longer a term that can be qualified with the word "respectable", because itis now almost wholly a subtly loaded insult,' wrote the journalist Deborah Orr. 'The term carries with it implications of the worst sort of conservative, retrogressive values.'
None of the chav-bashing we've explored can be understood in isolation. Itis part and parcel of an offensive against everything associated with the working class, started by Thatcherism and cemented by New Labour. 'I think culture reflects politics,' says Ken Loach. 'There was a major shift ... during the Thatcher years. . .. It was the era of "loads of money", it was the era of "look after number one", all the jewellery, the City Boys with their red braces-s-it was a worship of capital.' This van- quishing of working-class Britain had inevitable cultural consequences. 'So, after that, the trade unions were diminished, working-class culture was diminished, celebration of working-class culture was diminished -but it stemmed from that political moment,' Loach says.
A great hero of working-class culture was [left-wing theatre director] Joan Littlewood. And she put on plays at Stratford East, they were probably some of the best theatre we've ever produced. Original, anarchic, humorous, humane, funny, rumbustious; but a great sense of empowerment for working-class people in politics. It's impossible to imagine something like that in the aftermath of the Thatcher regime.
Everything is to be judged by middle-class standards because, after all, that is what we are expected to aspire to. The working class is therefore portrayed as a useless vestige made up of ,non-aspiration al' layabouts, slobs, racists, boozers, thugs--you name it.
It is both tragic and absurd that, as our society has become less equal and as in recent years the poor have actually got poorer, resentment against those at the bottom has positively increased. Chav-hare is a way of justifying an unequal society. What if you have wealth and success because it has been handed to you on a plate? What if people are poorer than you because the odds are stacked against them? To accept this would trigger a crisis of self-confidence among the well-off few. And if you were to accept it, then surely you would have to accept that the government's duty is to do something about it, namely, by curtailing your own privileges. But, if you convince yourself that the less fortu- nate are smelly, thick, racist and rude by nature, then it is only right they should remain at the bottom. Chav-hate justifies the preservationof the pecking order, based on the fiction that it is actually a fair reflection of people's worth.
To what extent is chav-hate just a new wave of old-style snobbery, rebranded for the twenty-first century? Snobbery certainly comes into it. Just look at the mocking of the tracksuit-and-bling among some working-class people, especially teenagers. style popular Itis true that people's backgrounds often define how they dress. Walk into the bar of Oxford University's debating society, the Oxford Union, and you will see a crowd of public-school types wearing bow ties, tweed jackets and pink cords. There
is even a chance you will spot the odd one with a pipe in hand. You might think that people in tracksuits or people in tweeds look pretty silly-but who cares? Or, alternatively, why should we care?
But the reality is that chav-hate is a lot more than snobbery. Itis class war. It is an expression of the belief that everyone should become middle class and embrace middle-class values and lifestyles, leaving those who don't to be ridiculed and hated. It is about refusing to acknowledge anything of worth in working-class Britain, and systematically ripping it to shreds in newspapers, on TV, on Facebook, and in general conversation. This is what the demonization of the working class means.
The caricatures thrown up by chav-hate have other consequences. Coupled with the ludicrous mainstream political view that Britain is now a classless society, the 'chav' phenomenon obscures what it means to be working class today. The myth that British society is divided between an affluent middle-class majority and a declining workingclass rump has airbrushed the reality of class in Britain today. An overwhelmingly middle-class political and media establishment has been more than happy to foster this image. That is not to say that the working class has not been changed dramatically by the Thatcherite crusade. It's time to look beyond the Vicky Pollards, chav bops and reality TV shows, and ask: 'What is the working class in twenty-first century Britain?'
5
'We're all middle class now'
To say that class doesn't matter in Britain is like saying wine doesn't matter in France; or whether you're a man or a woman doesn't matter in Saudi Arabia.
-Nick Cohen
Is the working class no more? Tony Blair certainly thinks so. His onetime senior advisor Matthew Taylor recalls the former prime minister proudly announcing that 'we're all middle class' at a think-tank event when he was still Labour leader. Some of our newspapers are inclined to agree. 'We're all middle class now, darling,' echoed the Daily Telegraph. Or, as The Times put it, 'We're all middle class now as social barriers fall away.' The Dai{y Mail goes into greater detail: 'You might say that there are now three main classes in Britain: a scarily alienated underclass; the new and confident middle class, set free by the Thatcher revolution ... and a tiny, and increasingly powerless, upper class: I
The chav caricature has obscured the reality of the modem working class. Weare fed the impression of a more or less comfortable 'Middle England' on the one hand, while on the other the old working class has degenerated into a hopeless chav rump.
It certainly used to be easier to answer the question: 'Who is the working class?' When the historian David Kynaston was writing his hook on post-war Britain, Austerity Britain, he had no trouble identifying the three emblematic occupations of the 1950s. 'They were, in no particular order, miners, dockers, and car workers.' But, partly because of the ruinous economic policies of successive governments, the mines have closed, the docks are deserted, and most of the car factories are empty husks. As these old pillars of working-class Britain crumble, it has become easier for politicians and pundits to claim that we really are all middle class now.
The long, lingering demise of the industrial working class began but did not end with Thatcher. The Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott points to the three major culls of British industry: the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the current recession. 'All of them have been caused by bubbles bursting and by macro-economic mistakes. We were told after the first cull in the 1980s that British industry was leaner and fitter. Then there was another cull in the early 1990s, and we were told after that that British industry was ready to meet the world-and then there was another cull. '
When New Labour swept to power in 1997, manufacturing made up more than a fifth of the economy. A paltry 12 per cent was all that was left by the time Tony Blair left office in 2007. Back in 1979, there were nearly 7 million people working in factories, but today's number is just over 2.5 million.
The policies of governments besotted with City slickers must take much of the blame. 'Labour bought into the whole myth of the boom in the financial sector and the City,' says Elliott. Like previous Tory governments, New Labour presided over an overvalued exchange rate, rendering our manufacturing goods deeply uncompetitive abroad. 'It paid lip service to its old industrial base, but did absolutely nothing to help it, and in fact actually made things a lot worse for the manufacturing sector.'
With all the talk about the 'information economy' and a country where more people work in pop music than down the mines, it is easy to overstate the point. Nearly four out of every ten men are still manual workers. But there is no denying an obvious trend. Industrial occupations are vanishing with every passing year.
Already embattled sectors suffered yet more crippling blows at the hands of the Great Recession of 2008. The crisis may have been caused by the greed of bankers, but manufacturing paid the price. It lost well over twice the proportion of jobs as finance and business services in the first year of the crisis. The City's share of the economy has actually grown since 2005, leaving us more dependent on the part of the economy that caused the crash in the first place. As former City economist Graham Turner puts it, it is 'a staggering outcome of this credit crunch'.
With industrial jobs steadily drying up, it might seem bizarre that the British public stubbornly continues to self-identify as working class. Matthew Taylor recalls reactions to Blair's 'we're all middle class' speech: 'It was quickly pointed out that, interestingly, more people in Britain call themselves working class now than did in 1950.' Opinion polls show that over half the population consistently describes itself as working class, but one poll in 1949 recorded it as just 43 per cent.2That was a time when there were a million miners, most people worked in manual jobs and rationing was still in full swing. In the era of deindustrialization, how can most people honestly regard themselves as working class?
You could be forgiven for thinking that there is an identity crisis going on. Multi-millionaire businessman Mohamed Al Fayed once described himself as working class. I have heard of stockbrokers with telephone number salaries who ask with faux puzzlement: 'I work, don't I? So why aren't I working class?'
If you look at the polling numbers, it is true that some people in the top socio-economic category describe themselves as working class. Equally, some in the bottom category think that they are middle class. This triggered my curiosity. When I asked a childhood friend, whom I considered indisputably working class, if he agreed with that characterization, he was almost affronted. 'Maybe in terms of income, but middle class in terms of things like education.' He felt that being working class meant being poor, while being middle class meant being educated.
The vilification of all things working class seems to have had a real impact on people's attitudes. In the run-up to the 2010 general election, the Guardian journalist Simon Hattensrone asked a former bus driver, who had retired in 1981 on £50 a week, which class he belonged to. 'Middle class,' he said after a bit of thought. Why? 'Well, I'm not down on my uppers. If I was on my uppers I'd call myself working class, and I always worked for a living.' He associated being working class with being broke. As Hattenstone put it: 'It's not just for the politicians that the term working class has become pejorative."
With so much confusion about class, what doesitmean to be working class? When Iput this question to New Labour ex-Cabinet minister James Purnell, he thought a big part of the answer was 'cultural identity' and 'a sense of history and a sense of place'. He represented the northern working-class constituency of Stalybridge and Hyde where, he said, people lived in 'Coronation Street rows of houses' and 'where I think people think of themselves as working class because of the community where they grew up, and things they do together and all the shared understandings which come from being from a particular place. '
I grew up in Stockport, a few miles from Purnell's former constituency, and a sense of place, shared community and common values certainly were a major part of many people's working-class identities. People grew up with each other; mixed groups of families and
friends would do things together, like watching football in the pub; and people felt rooted ina community that they and their families had lived in alltheir lives. The younger generation would often move only a few blocks away from where they grew up, and they still went out on the town on a Friday night with friends they had known since they were born.
But the reality is that this sense of rootedness has been breaking down for a long time, partly because of the collapse of industry. Entire working-class communities used to be based around a particular factory, steelworks, or mine. Most of the men would work at the same place. Their fathers and their grandfathers may well have worked there and done similar jobs. When industries disappeared, the communities they sustained no longer became fragmented. As Purnell puts it, the working class is made up of 'a whole bunch of men who left the house at the same time to go to broadly the same factory, and then socialize broadly in the same way'.
It is often tempting to think of class in terms of income. So, you could stick a 'working-class' label on someone earning £14,000 a year, and a 'middle-class' label on someone earning £60,000. Yet there are small businessmen-who, after all, live off their profits--who might only make a few grand. A well-paid skilled worker could be getting twice as much as a shopkeeper brings home.