Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class – A Review
By Emma.
This is an extremely timely book. Class is just beginning to resonate again in the popular consciousness. The causes of this are varied, but it is the right time to have a full examination of what has happened both to the working class and popular attitudes towards them.
Owen Jones is a very engaging and passionate writer and this is an excellent book. It’s a detailed examination of how the working classes were knee-capped politically, then humiliated for being unable to stand up. It’s easy to read and nod along to and it doesn’t pull its punches where they are needed.
Owen is right to blame the de-industrialisation of the Thatcher era for so much of the state that formerly proud working communities found themselves in by the mid-nineties, and equally right to blame Labour for not doing enough either to rectify or – more worryingly – to recognise it at all.
I have a couple of minor quibbles (and they are very minor, and don’t detract from the overall value of the book). The first is that the author has a tendency to over eulogise every working class character he come across. Possibly this an attempt to rebalance the very imbalance so well illuminated in our media and popular culture, but it is not one that always works.
The most glaring example for me is the authors discussion of the phenomenon of Jade Goody. My confession here is that I was a total Big Brother addict. I never missed an episode. The problem sometimes comes when an author you are looking to as an authority takes on a subject about which you know more and gets it wrong. Jade was a bully, she bullied in every series she was in (including Back to Reality). As were other middle class contestants who have been equally reviled by the public (just look at “nasty” Nick Bateman). There is a great and fascinating book to be written about the class struggle which was evident in a great deal of the tensions that made Big Brother compulsive viewing for some ( I could write a chapter alone on the triumph of working class Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace over spoiled middle class brat Nikki Grahame). But I strongly suspect Owen Jones doesn’t watch Big Brother, and while I can see the ease with which the Jade phenomenon looked like ith should have fitted the “Vicky Pollard” narrative, in fact it was Jade’s very multi-dimensional personality (she could also be terribly sweet) and the access that we got to it that makes them very different. When you do know a ridiculous amount about a subject and it is – in your view – misinterpreted, it can make you question the whole. I don’t think in this case it is justified to judge Owen’s book on the basis of the inclusion of what must have seemed like an obvious case.
Secondly, the author seems to see no differential between elites and the middle class as a whole. He will often use the term “Middle class” while referring to the wages and wealth of the top 10%. While a useful polemical construst, this denies the stratification of the middle class and if we do that, we also deny the fellowship that can exist between the different sections of the classes and must exist and be mobilised to improve conditions for lower middle classes as well as working classes.
Overall though these are minor quibbles. Owen Jones has done an excellent job at outlining the recent history of the war that has been waged against the working classes and the way all parts of the upper echalons of society are culpable. He’s made me think seriously about where I fit in the class spectrum, having always identified as middle class, many of the pressures Owen rightly ascribes as predominantly working class phenomena seem to fit my daily worries, and that sense of there being a party you never get invited to but keep hearing about – so prevalent in Chavs – is certainly an insecurity I face.
In order to know where we are going, we need to know where we are. Owen Jones has set out the challenge with pin point accuracy. I look forward to the next books where we stake out where we are going and how we get there!
Tags: Chavs, class, Owen Jones
Tuesday, June 28th 2011 at 09:31
Of course jade Bullied it was all she had in her folder of life. She knew if she came on as an ordinary person she would lose out, be dumped, so she was brash big larger then life.
I suspect in real life she had problems, but say what you like it worked for her, another from the lower working class who has to act to be treated as normal.
as for the book class, in my area of the country class has always been round it was just dumped by labour.
I went to a meeting a few years ago when my labour MP explained class was over, ten minutes later she extolled that the middle class needed help.
I asked but you said class was over, if you have a middle class then you must have a lower and upper class. No she said the middle class is now the working class, so I said then that makes no sense if the middle class are the working class you still have class.
But I gave up as she told us that class was not really what this was about, somebody else called out Idiot
Wednesday, June 29th 2011 at 23:01
Great article!
Potentially important and significant, too.
I haven’t read the book – though am quite familiar with the author’s blog-posts and writing style – but, going on what you raised modestly as a second minor quibble, I’d say that you’ve raised a most serious and major point!
The class war being waged currently was launched by zealots on behalf of the elite top 10%, and is an assault on the way of life of the rest of society in their entirety.
The middle classes and the working classes (including the non-working) are all under attack.
The targeted groups are the employed middle class, self-employed & small businesses, public sector workers, those who are disabled or sick or unemployed, women, teenagers, children and the elderly
The strategy is clear; same as the Republicans in the USA, the Tories want to weaken and reduce the middle classes and create a far larger number of working class and poor.
I feel it’s crucial for the middle and working classes to be as solid and united as possible, especially in the face of the old Tory “divide and rule” strategy (watch for manipulation of tax before the next Election as a temporary sweetener). Thus, the motto of the overwhelming majority of working and middle class people ought to be “We’re all in this together!”.