Chavs - The Demonization of the Working Class

by Owen Jones

  The rise of the far right is a symptom of a larger crisis: the lack of rep- resentation of working-class people. Purged from politics, their identity trashed, their power in society curtailed and their concerns ignored, it is perhaps surprising that so few working-class people have opted for parties like the BNP. More have sat on their hands and refused to vote; others have voted for Labour with clothes pegs on their noses. A surge of right-wing populism, mass political alienation, cynicism and apathy could have devastating consequences for British democracy. It is not just the future of the working class at stake. It is the future of all of us.

  Conclusion:

  A New Class Politics?

  Rise like Lions after slumber

  In unvanquishable number

  Shake your chains to earth like dew

  which in sleep had fallep on you

  Ye are many-they are few.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Call to Freedom

  The demonization of the working class is the ridiculing of the conquered by the conqueror. Over the last thirty years, the power of working-class people has been driven out of the workplace, the media, the political establishment, and from society as a whole. Ruling elites once quaked at the threat of working-class boots stomping towards Downing Street, of a resolute mass brandishing red flags and dog-eared copies of The Communist Manifesto. Back in the 1970s, right-wingers routinely complained that the trade unions were the real power in the land. Surreal as it now seems, it was the might of the working class that was once mocked and despised. But, today, with their power smashed into pieces, the working class can be safely insulted as tracksuitwearing drunken layabours with a soft spot for Enoch Powell. Feeble, feckless, rude, perhaps--but certainly not dangerous.

  When I asked Carl Leishman, the twenty-eight-year-old call centre worker from County Durham, ifhe felt that working-class people were represented in society, he laughed at the absurdity of the question. 'No. Not at all!' Did he feel that they were ridiculed?

  Well, yeah, because there's nobody who will really stand up to it, because-s-and this is going to sound very cliched=-bur working-class people don't generally have a voice. Do you know what I mean? You can take the mickey out of a working-class person as much as you want, because you know they're not going to get in the papers particularly, they're not going to get on the news, because they're not the people that can influence things, really. So it's kind of pointless listening to them.

  It was a theme that I heard again and again in working-class communities: a crushing sense of powerlessness. 'They don't live among us, do they?' said a Birmingham shop-worker about British politicians. 'They live in a different world to us. And they've lost touch with reality.' As far as many working-class people are concerned, they no longer have a voice. No wonder a BBC poll in 2008 revealed that nearly six out of ten white working-class people felt that no one spoke for them.

  That is not to say class politics is dead and buried. On the contrary, it is flourishing in some quarters. In other words it has become the preserve of the wealthy and their political apologists. Ithas been at the heart of the demonizarion of the working class.

  The first tenet of this class politics of the wealthy is simple: class does not exist. Class denial is extraordinarily convenient. After all, what better way to deflect attention from the fact that huge sums of money are being shovelled into the bank accounts of the wealthy, while the wages of the average worker stagnate? The expulsion of 'class' from the nation's vocabulary by Thatcherism and New Labour has ensured minimal scrutiny of the manifestly unjust distribution of wealth and power in modern Britain.

  Pretending that the working class is no more-'disappearing' it, if you like-has proved particularly politically useful. We have seen how the chav caricature has obscured the reality of the working-class major- ity. As elite class warriors are fully aware, the working class has always been the source of political sustenance for the left. That the left is inex- tricably tied to the aspirations and needs of working-class people is reflected in the very name of the Labour Party. If there is no longer a working class to champion, the left is devoid of a mission. I t no longer has a reason to exist.

  If anyone dares to raise the issue of class, their arguments are ignored and they are slapped down as dinosaurs clinging to outdated, irrelevant nostrums-s-even as their right-wing critics shamelessly promote the sorts of economic theories that flourished in the late nineteenth century. When Labour's deputy leader, Harriet Harman, had the temerity to float the controversial suggestion that someone's class background might just have an impact on the rest of their lives, the liberal Independ- ent newspaper was outraged. 'Britain is simply no longer the sort of class-divided country that Ms Harman paints,' it retorted.

  Another fashionable idea among these class warriors is that people at the bottom deserve their lot in life. It was not for the government to redress inequalities, because the conditions of the poor would only improve if they changed their behaviour. As the Independent editorial went on to acknowledge, ethnic minorities and women still faced discrimination, 'but the country's biggest social blight today is an entrenched group of families and individuals at the bottom of the social pile who are failing to participate in the economic opportunities avail- able in modem Britain.'1 The conclusion was clear. If these people want to get on, they can-but they are foiling to do so. The brutal truth was that those at the bottom only had themselves to blame.

  It is not simply about holding people responsible for where they are in the pecking order. Smearing poorer working-class people as idle, bigoted, uncouth and dirty makes it more and more difficult to empa- thize with them. The people at the very bottom, in particular, have been effectively dehumanized. And why would anyone want to improve the conditions of people that they hate?

  We have seen how 'aspiration' is presented as the means of individual salvation: that is, everyone's aim in life should be to become middle class. Both Thatcherism and New Labour have promoted this rugged individualism with almost religious zeal. Rather than the old collective form of aspiration, based on improving the conditions of working-class people as a whole, the new mantra was that able individuals should 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps' and climb the social ladder. Of course, itis based on a myth: after all, if everyone could become middle class, who would man the supermarket checkouts, empty the bins and answer the phones in call centres? But this glorification of the middle class--by making it the standard everyone should aspire for, however unrealistically-is a useful ideological prop for the class system.

  At the same time, politicians and journalists have sneakily misrepresented what 'Middle Britain' actually is. 'One of the most successful things that the wealthy have done is to almost persuade the middle class that they're middle class, too,' says maverick journalist Nick Cohen. When politicians and journalists have used the term 'Middle Britain' (or 'Middle England'), they have not been talking about people on median incomes-the median being, after all, only around £21,000 a year; they actually mean affluent voters in 'Upper Britain'. This is how modest tax rises on the wealthy can be presented as attacks on 'Middle Britain', even though nine out of ten of us earn less than £44,000 a year. But politicians will argue that it is electorally impossible to introduce progressive policies that upset supposedly crucial, but completely misconstrued, 'Middle Britain' swing voters.

  It even became fashionable among many politicians and commentators to celebrate inequality. Inequality is good because itpromotes competition, goes the theory, and it shows that the people at the top are generating wealth. The corollary of this is the idolization of the rich as 'wealth creators' and entrepreneurs, who have achieved success purely through their own hard work and talent.

  The class politics of the wealthy has proved extraordinarily effective at demolishing its opponents. Itloudly asserts-c-as Margaret Thatcher famously put it-that 'There Is No Alternative'. Policies that promote the interests of the wealthiest are presented as necessary for the wellbeing of society as a whole. A
nd, of course, with the media, think-tanks and much of politics funded by the wealthy and powerful, these ideas have easily achieved domination.

  When' class politics' is mentioned, itis normally understood tomean fighting the comer of working-class people, whether with good, bad or naive intentions. Not any more. Advocates of the class politics of the wealthy largely dominated Tony Blair's New Labour. It was a pretty stunning turnaround for a party specifically founded to represent the working class. How did it happen?

  The legacy of Thatcher's smashing of the unions is certainly a major factor. For a century the trade union movement had been Labour's backbone, ensuring that there was always some sort of working-class voice within the party. But the unions' diminished position within society gave successive Labour leaders a free hand to reduce their internal role. Such is the weakness of the unions that they have ended up repeatedly voting to renounce their own powers within party structures.

  Four successive defeats at the hands of the Tories between 1979 and 1992left Labour demoralized, and willing to accept almost anything to get back into power. Clare Short told me of the despair within Labour's ranks because it 'had lost so often, and felt it had let down the very people it existed to represent, and after losing in 1992 when people thought we were going towin-the whole party was desperate to win.' Tony Blair was elected Labour leader in 1994 with around half of the vote against leadership candidates who, Short believes, simply were not credible.

  Then, through their [New Labour's] ruthlessness, they brought in lots of reforms weakening the power and democracy of the Conference, the democracy of the parry, the way the National Executive Committee was elected-all sorts of things. And people went along with it because they didn't want to make waves early on. And then it was kind of too late, the structures had changed, and the power to resist had gone ...

  Because of this desperation and demoralization, Blair and his followers were able to impose the Thatcherite settlement on the Labour Party. Part and parcel of this settlement was the idea that everyone should aspire to be middle class. Little wonder that, when asked what her greatest achievement was, Margaret Thatcher answered without hesitation: 'Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.'

  International politics played a part in it, too. After the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, it seemed as though there was simply no alternative to free-market capitalism. I asked former Labour Cabinet minister James Purnell ifhe thought New Labour adapted to Thatcherism just as, decades ago, the Tories were forced to capitulate to the post-war welfare state settlement left by Clement Attlee's Labour government. 'Yeah, I do. The combination of 1979 (Thatcher's first election victory] and 1989 [the collapse of the Berlin Wall] meant that a little bit of the left's optimism and confidence about itself died ... Somehow, post 1989, a whole bunch of things were defined as, if not insane, then at least as slightly far-fetched, and therefore people on the left had to argue very, very hard to win arguments about overcoming market outcomes or reducing inequality ... '

  In such an ideological atmosphere, itis no wonder that New Labour got away with abandoning the party's role as the political voice of working-class people. The calculation of its political strategists was, in the words of New Labour spin-doctor Peter Mandelson, that they 'would have nowhere else to go'. After all, commentators often refer to working-class loyalty to Labour as 'tribalism'. With all of its implications of primitive, unthinking loyalty, this is a word used pejoratively and almost always towards what is patronizingly described as Labour's 'core vote', rather than being applied, say, tothe Tory electoral base in the Home Counties.

  It is certainly true that, partly out of fear and hatred of the Tories, huge numbers of working-class people thought of Labour as 'their' party, come what may. When campaigning on the doorstep, Labour canvassers often report working-class voters talking about the party as kind of an errant relative who was testing their patience, but, after all, it was family. Yet as the wheels began falling off the New Labour project, growing numbers of disillusioned working-class voters began to dis- prove the 'nowhere else to go' assumptions of Blair and Brown's strategists.

  New Labour's bright young things did not factor in what in Sweden is called the 'sofa option'-working-class people sitting on their hands rather than reluctantly dragging themselves out to vote for their tradi- tional party. In the 2010 general election, over three-quarters of voters in the top, disproportionately Tory-voting social category went out to vote. But only around 58 per cent of working-class voters in the social groups C2 and DE turned out. The turnout gap between professionals and skilled or semi-skilled workers was a whopping 18 per cent. It is almost as though universal suffrage is being pulled down by stealth. More voters overall identified Labour rather than the Conservatives as their natural political home, but the depth of disillusion was such that this was not reflected in votes.

  Refusing to come out and vote was one option: putting an 'X' in a different box was another. In Scotland and Wales, huge numbers of working-class voters defected to the welcoming arms of nationalist parties. In the 2008 Glasgow East by-election, Glaswegians turfed Labour out for the first time since the 1920s and voted in the Scottish Nationalist candidate as a protest. In England, as we have seen, the racist BNP picked up the votes of hundreds of thousands of tradition- ally Labour voters.

  The theory that Labour's prospects for remaining in office were tied to keeping the middle classes onside has decisively been proven to be a myth. According to pollsters Ipsos MORI, the decline in support for Labour between 1997 and 2010 in the top social categories (the ABs) was only five percentage points. Among the bottom two social categories (the C2s and DEs), on the other hand, a fifth of all supporters went AWOL. Indeed, while only half a million AB voters abandoned Labour, 1.6 million voters in each of the C2 and DE social groups evaporated.

  Even some of New Labour's leading lights are waking up to the party's loss at the hands of working-class disaffection. During his successful campaign for the Labour leadership following the 2010 general election, Ed Miliband described 'a crisis of working-class representation'-a phrase normally confined to left-wing conferences. 'Put itat its starkest, if we had enjoyed a 1997 result in 2010 just among DEs, then on a uniform swing we would have won at least forty more seats and would still be the largest party in Parliament,' he observed.

  Maverick Blairite Jon Cruddas calls for a return to what he describes as 'early New Labour': that is, the period between 1997 and 2001. Butof all the voters that New Labour ended up losing, half vanished in precisely those four years. of the five million voters that Labour has lost, four million abandoned ship when Tony Blair was at the helm. These voters did not drift to the right. After all, the Tory vote only went up by a million between 1997 and 2010. The rot had set in early, but it was New Labour's relentless sidelining of working-class Britain that led to its thorough defeat in 2010.

  The defeat was not just electoral: it was political on a far more profound level. All the gains New Labour achieved for working-class people-modest as they are compared to previous Labour governments--relied on funding public services and social programmes with the cash flowing from the City. But, following the collapse of financial services and the installation of a Tory prime minister in Downing Street intent on slashing public spending, this model has been swept away forever. In Clare Short's view, New Labour triumphantly believed that: "'We're a great success because we're market-friendly, we're business-friendly, but we're spending lots of money on poor people, so we've cracked it!" And of course it was a boom, and lots of the projections of the cuts that are going to come suggest that most 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 year
s. 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'.

  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 up promoting middle-class women with professional backgrounds rather than candidates sharing the backgrounds of millions of workingclass women: in low-paid, part-time, service-sector jobs.