Chavs - The Demonization of the Working Class

by Owen Jones

  I did not actually meet anyone willing to admit voting for the BNP, and Danny says that he does not vote. But he eloquently describes some of the ingredients that, together, have made a toxic brew: massive housing shortages, a lack of secure jobs, and a convenient scapegoat, plus total disillusionment with the political establishment added in for good measure.

  Brendan Duffield, a local trade union official who has lived inthe area for three decades, is keen to stress that genuine mixing between communities does take place. 'I've run football teams for over twenty years,' he tells me.

  I've had teams from youngsters right up to men's teams, and I've met every different nationality you could imagine: I've had Irish, I've had Scotch, I've had Africans, I've had Asians ... And they've been great, supportive and everything. And everyone seems to get on very well ... so, I'm a bit amazed that people keep saying that this is a racist area, because I've not really seen too many things in this area happening, like racial attacks ... You get idiots in every area that you go in the country, who've got nothing better to do.

  But Brendan has seen the impact that housing shortages have had. 'I'm a bit ashamed to say, but I think this authority now has just started building thirteen houses for the first time in over-I think it's over thirty years, since Margaret Thatcher was in.' He is in no doubt that this issue, above all else, has unleashed a political whirlwind in his community. 'I think if Labour would have carried on building houses in this area, you wouldn't have half the trouble with the BNP.'

  There was, undoubtedly, a steep rise in the number of foreign immi- grants moving to Dagenham during the New Labour era. This has clearly been a disorientating experience for some who have lived there all their lives. 'Empirically it's the fastest-changing borough in Britain. Empirically, that's a fact,' says local Labour MP Jon Cruddas, who has represented Dagenham since 2001. But what has turned disorientation into outright resentment and hostility is what is on every local resi- dent's lips: housing. 'It's the lowest-cost housing market in Greater London, at a time of exponential rise in the value of property, and at the same time, the effect of right-to-buy means that we have more of a private market,' says Cruddas. 'So you've seen the housing market in one small borough disproportionately take the strain in terms of broader patterns of migration into and within the borough:

  Looming over the whole borough is the shadow of right-to-buy, which massively depleted the borough's council-housing stock. 'You've got many people here who took the opportunity to buy their house under the right-to-buy schemes in the eighties and nineties,' says Sam Tarry. 'Many of them have now reached a point where they've got grown-up children who are either having to live at home, or having to move quite far out of the area to get a house, even just to rent a house, let alone to buy one: Many of the houses bought up by their owners ended up in the hands of private landlords. They have been particularly attractive to what Sam calls.

  new kinds of migrant communities, particularly the African commu- nity in Barking, because if for the same rent you pay, for the price of a house, you can rent somewhere that's got two, three bedrooms, a back garden, a front garden, compared to the sorts of houses in Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham-it's a bit of a no-brainer in terms of wanting to have somewhere that's a bit more pleasant to live!

  Again, he identifies insecure employment as an issue further feeding the frustrations oflocal people. 'The difficulty is that actually the generation of people in their late thirties, forties, fifties, is a generation of people who I think weren't employed by the Ford factory, they didn't have a skilled trade, and left school certainly with no further education qualifications, and very little basic, secondary-level qualifications,' he says.

  And often you find people working in a flexible jobs market, the sort of job where you're more likely to be able to be hired and fired at will, where you're not necessarily going to have a pension, you're often on the minimum wage. It creates a further sense of insecurity, which added to the concerns around housing and other local public services provision, starts to create a tense or uncertain atmosphere.

  Cruddas agrees, blaming the 'extraordinary de-industrialization' that has taken place. 'This was the centre of manufacturing in London, with its associated predictabilities in terms of pensions and employment. And it's no surprise that the BNP move in.'

  In Barking and Dagenham, the BNP has cleverly managed to latch on to the consequences of unfettered neoliberalism. New Labour was ideologically opposed tobuilding council housing, because of its commitment to building a 'property-owning democracy' and its distrust of local authorities. Affordable housing and secure, well-paid jobs became increasingly scarce resources. The response of the BNP was to delegitimize non-native competition, goading people to think: 'We don't have enough homes to go round, so why are we giving them to foreigners?'

  Cruddas describes the BNP as hinging their strategy on 'change versus enduring inequalities, and they racialize it'. All issues, whether housing or jobs, are approached in terms of race. 'Itallows people to render intelligible the changes around them, in terms of their own insecurities, material insecurities as well as cultural ones.' Yes, it is a narrative based on myths. After all, only one in twenty social houses goestoa foreign national. But, with the government refusing to build homes and large numbers of foreign-looking people arriving in certain communities, the BNP's narrative just seems to make sense to a lot of people.

  The BNP's strategy has been obligingly boosted by the right-wing tabloids. '£Sm benefits for disabled migrants who flew home', screams one Daily Express headline. 'Secret report warns of migration meltdown in Britain', warns the Daily Mail. 'Illegal immigrant mum gets four-bedroom house', gasps the Sun. If you are a working-class person struggling to scrape by, who cannot get an affordable home or at least knows others in that position, then being bombarded with these stories gives credence to the BNP narrative: that there aren't enough resources to go round, and immigrants are gettit~g the lion's share of them.

  Coupled with this strategy is an audacious attempt by the BNP to encroach on Labour's terrain. With New Labour having apparently abdicated the party's traditional role of shielding working-class communities from the worst excesses of market forces, the BNP has wrapped itself in Labour clothes. 'I would say that we're more Labour than Labour are,' says former local BNP councillor Richard Barnbrook. BNP literature describes the organization as 'the Labour party your grandfather voted for'.

  Sifting through the BNP's policies exposes this as a nonsense. Their tax policy, for example, includes abolishing income tax and increasing VAT instead-a policy beloved of extreme right-wing libertarian economists that would benefit the rich at the expense of ordinary working people. The party freely adopts Tharcherite rhetoric, committing itself to the 'private-enterprise economy' and arguing 'that private property should be encouraged and spread to as many individual members of our nation as possible'.

  And yet, in communities such as Barking and Dagenham, the BNP has deverly managed to package itself as the champion of the white working class. As well as counterposing the interests of white workingclass people to those of ethnic minorities, the BNP has won support by throwing itself into community politics. Party activists organise fetes, help toclear rubbish, help out in pensioners' gardens--things that give the impression that they are rooted in the local community. 'You see lots of old people saying "the BNP put on a bingo night", or "the BNP wants people to stop gathering on street comers", and it's really classic community politics that masks what they're really about,' says trade union leader Mark Serwotka.

  Disturbingly, it is not just former Labour voters that the BNP has managed to attract. 'One interesting factor, which we certainly saw in the 2006 elections, when the BNP got their eleven councillors elected, was the fact itwasn't just disenfranchised Labour voters,' says Sam Tarry. 'They actually turned out great numbers who'd never voted at all before, so-called virgin voters. To actually motivate people who would usually just not bother with the political system, to actually
go and take their first political step and doing it hand-in-hand with the BNP is an extremely worrying sign.' The far right has managed to mobilize people who have never voted before because they feel that the traditional political parties simply do not represent their interests.

  It is clear that the BNP has thrived by offering reactionary, hateful solutions to the everyday problems of working-class people. But the demonization of working-class Britain has also played a role. For Tarry, it has fuelled a crisis of identity that accelerated the growth of the BNP and the wider anti-immigrant backlash. As well as recent national soul-searching about what constitutes Englishness and Britishness, the question raised in communities like Barking and Dagenham is: 'What does itmean to he working class?'

  'We've seen a switch into a sort of English nationalism, and you'll see a lot of the white families deliberately hanging out the English flag from their windows, almost as though they're staking out the territory, in a slightly aggressive, non-inclusive way,' says Tarry.

  For me, there is an element there which I can't quite put my finger on about this sense of what itmeans to be from a working-class background: what it means to be English, and where your sense of identity and purpose and direction actually now come from, because of that decline of those traditional kinds of social structures that gave working-class people their sense of purpose and identity, and kinship and brotherhood through the trade union movement. And that still seems to have declined, even though we still have such a strong trade union movement in this area.

  Pride in being working class has been ground down over the past three decades. Being working class has become increasingly regarded as an identity to leave behind. The old community bonds that came from industry and social housing have been broken. But working-class identity was something that used to be central to the lives of people living in communities like Barking and Dagenham. It gave a sense of belonging and of self-worth, as well as a feeling of solidarity with other local people. When this pride was stripped away, it left a vacuum that the waking beast of English nationalism has partly filled.

  In a similar way, we have seen Scottish and Welsh nationalism gain new roots in the hitherto Labour-voting estates of Glasgow and the Rhondda Valley. But there is a key difference: Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) shun ethnic-based nationalism in favour of a progressive-leaning, inclusive nationalism. Indeed, Plaid Cymru boasts of having more ethnic minority councillors than the other Welsh parties put together, while the first Asian elected to the Scottish Parliament was a member of the SNP. Central to the jingoist streak in English nationalism is the long, sordid history of Empire. 'It's not that long ago, certainly when I was growing up, when you had the map with all the red blocks of where the British Empire ruled,' trade union leader Billy Hayes notes. The centuries-old traditions of domi- nation over other peoples have left a very large imprint in the national psyche, which the BNP constantly manipulates.

  The far right have switched their targets of choice over the years: Jews, Irish, blacks and Asians were each the villains at various points. Today, above all others, it is Muslims. An ugly wave of Islamophobia has accompanied the so-called war on terror that was launched follow_ ing the 9/11 attacks. British soldiers are at war with Muslim peoples in Muslim lands. Aided by hysterical media baiting of Muslims, the BNP has made Islamophobia into the very core of its propaganda.

  More perversely, the BNP has cynically manipulated mainstream multiculturalism with its focus on inequality as an issue of race. BNP propaganda has tapped into this by recasting white working-class people as an oppressed ethnic minority, allowing it to appropriate anti-racist language. BNP leaflets are full of bogus talk of the 'whi te minority' and 'anti-white racism'. When the party was taken to court for its 'whites- only' Constitution, it retorted by asking why it should be any different from other ethnic minority organizations, like the National Black Police Association.

  Of course, this represents a distortion of mainstream multiculturalism. Irrespective of its flaws, multiculturalism is essentially about defending the rights of ethnic groups, who make up only one in ten of the popu- lation in our overwhelmingly white society. But this is one of the consequences of eliminating class from our understanding of inequal- ity-because a group like the BNP can simply argue that it is defending the rights of whites in a multicultural society, just as others might defend the rights of Muslims or black people.

  It would be simplistic to maintain that the waves of immigration that took place under New Labour have had no impact in and of themselves. By historical standards immigration has been high, and this alone would have provoked anxiety or hostility among some people. If you have always lived in a homogenously white area, with little or no expe- rience of--or contact with-e-different cultures, then a sudden change in your community may, to begin with, be a cause of confusion or alarm. Even though history has shown this tension dissipates within a generation or so when genuine mixing has taken place, there may inevi- tably be tensions in communities undergoing transition.

  But economic insecurities have lent added ferocity to the backlash against immigration-and it is this that the BNP has so successfully manipulated. 'The wider issue is that there weren't jobs created for working-class people and there weren't homes for their children to live in,' says Ken Livingstone. 'And it's easy for the BNP to say, well, the blacks are getting it all. In reality no one was getting any, because they weren't building any or making any.'

  It would be wrong to caricature communities like Barking and Dagenham as stuffed with angry white working-class people frothing at the mouth about immigrants. There are many who are disgusted with the BNP and have gone out of their way to welcome immigrants hailing from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

  When I asked Leslie, a home carer, and her friend Mora, a pensioner, what the main issues in the community were, they came up with the usual answer: 'That same old thing-housing.' But that did not mean they had automatically rushed into the BNP camp. 'They're bad. They're trouble. Very bad,' they both say. 'I mean, I'm quite happy in Barking and Dagenham,' says Leslie, and Mora agrees: 'We were born here. And I would never move out of Dagenham.' They are both deeply scornful of 'the crap that the BNP are coming out with ... At the moment they're frightening people, they're saying old people can get chucked out of their house, and it's given to the "illegals". If they can say where the illegals are, fine. But there are no illegal immigrants inthis borough. There's not. I mean, there's good and bad in everybody. But the BNP are very bad.' 'They're very racist, aren't they?' asks Leslie, drawing a quick response from Mora: 'Very, yery racist, they are.'

  Although neither had faith in politicians at the national level, they did trust their local Labour councillors. But their impression of the BNP was of total incompetence. 'They have done nothing. You try and get hold of them, you can't get hold of them. And yet they have the cheek tostand and say that Labour's doing nothing ... You can get in touch with the Labour Party, they do listen to you, they sort out your problems, but the BNP-no!' Both are insistent that they mix with people of all backgrounds in their community. Leslie works with black managers and carers, for example. 'We've got an Indian family across the road from us,' adds Mora. 'Every now and then they bring over a meaL Very, very nice.'

  These were the sorts of sentiments that anti-racist campaigners built on in the run-up to the 2010 general and local elections. The 'HOPE not hate' campaign built a formidable network of campaigners, developed literature targeted at particular groups in specific localities and exposed the incompetence of BNP councillors. Community organizing was the backbone of the campaign, and trade unions played a central role in funding the effort and spreading the word among local workingclass people.

  The campaign paid offbeyond the wildest expectations of anti-racist activists. The fear was that the BNP would pick up at least one MP in the two local constituencies; the nightmare scenario was that it would take control of the council. In the event the BNP was completely wip
ed out, losing all twelve of their councillors. Labour may have faced a disastrous rout at the polls in the May general election, but the local Labour Party took every single seat on Barking and Dagenham Council. BNP leader Nick Griffin responded by throwing his toys out of the pram, claiming that the 'English' had been driven out of London.

  Yet there are no grounds for complacency. The BNP was defeated above all by vastly increased voter turnout, itself the product of an extremely effective campaign. In the Barking parliamentary constituency, the BNP vote went up from 4,916 votes in 2005 to 6,620 in 2010: but at the same time overall turnout dramatically increased from 28,906 to 44,343, meaning the BNP vote share dropped. BNP council candidates did lose votes, but only around one hundred votes in each ward; indeed, many candidates topped 1,000 votes. Even before the impact of the most sweeping public sector cuts in modem history had been felt, the BNP had retained a solid base within Barking and Dagenham.

  The reality is that the grievances that spurred on the BNP upsurge are greater than ever. There is still a critical lack of affordable housing, and well-paid, secure jobs remain thin on the ground. Working-class people in Barking and Dagenham, as elsewhere in the country, will continue to demand answers. The future of our communities depends on who gives them.

  The rise of the BNP is just the tip of the iceberg of the great antiimmigrant backlash of the early twenty-first century. There is no avoiding the difficult truth that the vast majority of Britons believe immigration levels are too high. Take one poll for the Sun in October 2007; nearly two-thirds of the population wanted immigration laws toughened. But, while only 6 per cent of people in the top three social categories wanted immigration stopped altogether, three times as many in the bottom third wanted the borders completely sealed. These sentiments are not confined to areas that have experienced large influxes from abroad like Barking and Dagenham. Across the country, antiimmigration has become the rallying cry of people who would never dream of voting for the BNP.