Nobody expected Chavs to attract half as much attention as it did. And if it had been released even three or four years ago, I doubt that it would have done so well. But the book’s impact had less to do with the provocative title and everything to do with the fact that class is back with a vengeance.
During the boom period it was possible to at least pretend class was no more—that ‘we’re all middle class now’, as politicians and media pundits put it. As chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown had pronounced the end of ‘boom and bust’, and it seemed as though a future of rising living standards beckoned for all. At a time of economic chaos, this period looks like a golden age—even if we now know our sense of prosperity was built on sand. Yes, it was true that real wages stagnated for the bottom half and declined for the bottom third from 2004 onwards—that is, four years before the economic collapse began. But the availability of cheap credit helped paper over Britain’s growing class divisions, which, despite the hubris of the political and media elite, were as entrenched as ever.
Chavs was my contribution to ending the conspiracy of silence over class. But, unexpectedly, it pushed at an open door. Economic crisis helped to refocus attention on the unjust distribution of wealth and power in society. Throughout 2011, living standards for the average Briton were declining at the fastest rate since the 1920s. The Child Poverty Action Group warned that poor families faced a ‘triple whammy’ of benefit, support and service cuts, stating that the coalition government’s ‘legacy threatens to be the worst poverty record of any government for a generation’.1
But it remained boom time for the people at the top. In 2011, boardroom pay for Britain’s top one hundred companies soared by 49 per cent; the previous year, it had shot up by 55 per cent.2 The wealth of the richest 1,000 Britons, meanwhile, increased by a fifth, after leaping by 30 per cent—the biggest increase ever recorded—in 2010. Shortly after arriving in office, the Conservatives’ austerity Chancellor George Osborne had claimed ‘we’re all in this together’. As the statement veered between ludicrous and offensive, few were now making the case that class division no longer mattered in Britain
Although I wanted to encourage a broad debate about class, the title I chose proved contentious. For some critics, the book failed to acknowledge that the object of demonization was an identifiable subgroup of undesirables—a workless Burberry-wearing underclass—rather than the working class as a whole. Sometimes, said these critics, I got bogged down in discussing the origins and definition of the term ‘chav’. Given that I had plastered the word across the book’s cover, it would have been brash to refuse to engage in such a debate. But the book wasn’t simply about the word. It aimed to challenge the myth that ‘we’re all middle class now’: that most of the old working class had been ‘aspirational’ and joined ‘Middle Britain’ (whatever that was), leaving behind a feckless, problematic rump. This was often racialized and described as the ‘white working class’. ‘Chavs’ was the term— encompassing a whole range of pejorative connotations—that best summed up this caricature.
Shortly after Chavs was published, a study by polling organization BritainThinks revealed just how demonized working-class identity had become. As Chavs pointed out, most polls have consistently shown between 50 and 55 per cent stubbornly self-identifying as working class, despite the ‘we’re all middle class’ mantra being drummed into us. But BritainThinks revealed that 71 per cent self-identified as middle class, with just 24 per cent opting for working class. Undoubtedly the contrasting results had much to do with the fact that, while only one ‘working-class’ category was offered, there were three ‘middle-class’ options to choose from (lower, middle and upper). But there was a more profound and disturbing explanation. According to BritainThinks’s Deborah Mattinson, a former pollster for Gordon Brown:
There was a strong feeling in the focus groups that the noble tradition of a respectable and diligent working class was over. For the first time, I saw the ‘working-class’ tag used as a slur, equated with other class-based insults such as ‘chav’. I asked focus group members to make collages using newspaper and magazine clippings to show what the working class was. Many chose deeply unattractive images: flashy excess, cosmetic surgery gone wrong, tacky designer clothes, booze, drugs and overeating.
Members of one focus group self-identified as middle class; another opted for working class. Their backgrounds, jobs and incomes were almost exactly the same. The difference was that the ‘middle-class’ self-identifiers were trying to distance themselves from an unappealing identity in favour of one with a strikingly positive image. As Deborah Mattinson put it: ‘being middle class is about being, well, a bit classy’. The working-class label was no longer something people felt that they could wear with pride. Far from it: it had effectively become synonymous with ‘chav’.3
The minority that did describe themselves as working class struggled to come up with positive contemporary images to express their own identity. Focus group participants suggested the 1960s as the heyday of working-class Britain. When asked to define what it meant to be working class, a common theme was it ‘tends to just mean being poor’.4
The BritainThinks studies identified some of the consequences of the social and political forces that Chavs had tried to identify. First, the Thatcherite assault on many of the pillars of working-class Britain, from trade unions to traditional industries. Secondly, a political consensus established by Thatcherism: that we should all aspire to be middle class, and that being working class was no longer something to be proud of. Thirdly, the almost complete absence of accurate representations of working-class people in the media, on TV, and in the political world, in favour of grotesque ‘chav’ caricatures.
The term ‘chav’ is used by different groups of people throughout British society. Practically nobody, except in jest, self-identifies as a chav. The term is almost always an insult imposed on individuals against their consent, but its exact meaning changes depending on who is wielding it, and the context in which it is used.
That said, as I have shown in the book, the term is undeniably used in a classist fashion.
Take ChavTowns, a pretty nauseating website which—I’m proud to say—has added my name to its roll call of villains. ChavTowns ridicules entire communities. As it happens, my own hometown of Stockport gets a bit of a battering at the hands of anonymous individuals brimming with undiluted class hatred: ‘To be fair, Stockport has some very wealthy areas. Unfortunately, it has more than its fair share of scummy ones too,’ says one. Another moans that ‘I have to admit I feel ashamed to have to write Stockport on my address, despite being from one of its much, much nicer suburbs (yes they do exist).’ Yet another post, written by someone describing themselves as living in the ‘charming village of Cheadle Hulme’, savages people living on Stockport’s council estates.
But that’s not to say this demonization is straightforward. In her review of Chavs, Lynsey Hanley—author of the brilliant Estates: An Intimate History—argued that class hatred wasn’t simply ‘a one-way street’, but a ‘collusive, often subtle, process which demeans everyone. In fact a great deal of chav-bashing goes on within working-class neighbourhoods, partly because of the age-old divide between those who aim for “respectability” and those who disdain it.’
Chav-bashing can often come from working-class people as an expression of frustration at anti-social elements within their own communities. Chavs attempted to put anti-social behaviour in a social and economic context: it was more likely to happen in communities with high levels of poverty and unemployment. But it’s also true that the impact of anti-social behaviour and crime are class issues. Both are statistically more likely to affect working-class people than middle-class people. Those on the receiving end often—unsurprisingly—have little sympathy for the perpetrators, particularly if they share a similar set of difficult economic circumstances but do not themselves resort to antisocial behaviour.
It’s also not the case that hostility to supposed ‘benefit cheats’ is the sole preserve of middle-class Daily Mail readers—the net-curtaintwitching types who rant about gays and Gypsies. If you are someone scraping by in a low-paid job, the feeling that there are people down the street living it up at your expense may well infuriate you more than anything else. It’s an age-old example of the ‘poor against the poor’, and right-wing politicians and journalists exploit such sentiments ruthlessly. Extreme examples of ‘benefit fraudsters’ are hunted down with relish by the tabloids, and are passed off, not as isolated examples, but as representative of an endemic and far bigger problem. The ‘scrounger’ has become the public face of the unemployed in Britain.
That’s not to say there isn’t a widespread understanding about the causes behind the increase in long-term unemployment. As one working-class self-identifier put it in the BritainThinks study, ‘We’ve now got this benefit generation which started when Thatcher closed all of the industries.’ Chavs attempted to present a corrective to these exaggerated tales of benefit fraud. Such fraud, indeed, represents less than 1 per cent of total welfare spending, and up to 60 times less than tax avoidance at the other end of the economic spectrum. Meanwhile, the idea that there are plenty of jobs if only people could be bothered to drag themselves down to the Jobcentre is risible. All the evidence shows that most unemployed people desperately want work: they can’t find any. At the end of 2011, the Daily Telegraph reported that there were twenty-three jobseekers in the UK chasing every job vacancy. For every retail job, there were forty-two applications; in customer services, it was forty-six.5 In some communities, the picture is even bleaker. In Hull, there are 18,795 jobseekers chasing 318 jobs. There are simply not enough jobs to go round. But with this reality largely banished from our newspapers and TV screens, and with tax-avoiding businesspeople a distant, abstract concept for most, it is a challenging case to make.
The demonization of working-class people also stems from insecurity, or ‘social distancing’ from those in superficially similar circumstances. BritainThinks revealed that those belonging to groups most likely to be stigmatized as chavs can often be among the most vociferous in their chav-bashing. One long-term incapacity benefit claimant denounced chavs who were supposedly milking the system; so did two unemployed teenage mothers. This isn’t classist contempt: it comes from a fear of being lumped in with a demonized grouping. Here is one ugly consequence of persistent attacks on the unemployed and teenage mothers: prejudice can even be voiced by those who are themselves targeted.
In large part, the demonization of the working class is the legacy of a concerted effort to shift public attitudes, which began under Thatcher, continued with New Labour and has gained further momentum under the coalition. Poverty and unemployment were no longer to be seen as social problems, but more to do with individual moral failings. Anyone could make it if they tried hard enough, or so the myth went. If people were poor, it was because they were lazy, spendthrift or lacked aspiration.
The latest Social Attitudes Survey, published at the end of 2011, shows just how successful this project has been. Even as economic crisis swelled the ranks of the unemployed and poor, attitudes towards them hardened. With nearly 2.7 million people out of work, over half of those surveyed believed that unemployment benefits were too high and were deterring people from getting a job. Of course, few would have known from reading newspapers or watching TV that the Jobseekers’ Allowance was worth just £67.50—and even less for those under the age of twenty-six. Another 63 per cent believed that a factor driving child poverty was parents ‘who don’t want to work’. Depressing stuff, but not surprising given the Thatcherite onslaught, New Labour’s refusal to challenge Conservative dogma on social problems, and the airbrushing in the media concealing the reality of poverty and unemployment.
And of course, such attitudes have political consequences. If you think poverty and unemployment are personal failings rather than social problems, then why have a welfare state at all? The Social Attitudes Survey revealed that support for the redistribution of wealth had fallen to just a third; towards the end of Margaret Thatcher’s reign in 1989, it was over half. Demonization serves a useful purpose in a divided society like our own, because it promotes the idea that inequality is rational: it is simply an expression of differing talent and ability. Those at the bottom are supposedly there because they are stupid, lazy or otherwise morally questionable. Demonization is the ideological backbone of an unequal society.
Another criticism facing Chavs was that it glorified a golden age that never existed, presenting a rose-tinted view of an industrial world that was finished off by the Thatcherite experiment. But I do not believe that this was the argument presented in the book. As Chavs emphasized, industrial work was often backbreaking and dirty. Women were often excluded from these jobs; and when they were not, they did not have the same status as men. There were countless other problems that a dewy-eyed portrait of the industrial past written by an author in his mid-twenties would fail to address.
My point, however, was a different one: that the vacuum left by the massive disappearance in industrial work was often not filled properly, leaving entire communities bereft of secure, well-regarded work. Service-sector jobs are on the whole cleaner, less physically arduous, and are better at including women (even if they are still disproportionately concentrated in the lowest paid and most insecure work). But such work is often less well paid, lacks the same prestige, and is more likely to be hire-and-fire. Call centres and supermarkets do not form the basis of communities in the same way that the mine, factory, or dock did. I was not, though, calling for young men to be sent down the pits again. Just because I was arguing that what replaced these industries was in some important ways worse doesn’t mean that I advocated a return to a vanished world.
It was also suggested that I had a very one-dimensional view of the working class: that what I was actually talking about was a male, white working class. But in fact many of the key examples of demonized figures portrayed as representative of larger groups of people were women—Karen Matthews, Jade Goody and Vicky Pollard, for example. Indeed, class hatred and misogyny often overlap. I also wanted to emphasize the explosion of women in the workforce in the last few decades: indeed, they now account for over half of all workers— though of course it must be pointed out that women have always worked, as well as doing much of the unpaid housework men traditionally refused to do. ‘A low-paid, part-time, female shelf-stacker’ was one of my suggestions for a symbol of the modern working class. We cannot understand class without gender; but that works the other way, too. Women’s liberation must address class: but the retreat from class has often stripped it from the agenda here as everywhere else.
Chavs was sometimes referred to as a book solely about the white working class. One of the purposes of the book was to take on this narrow, exclusive image of the working class. Though chavs are often regarded as ‘white working-class’ figures, it should be noted the book was intentionally titled ‘the demonization of the working class’ rather than ‘the white working class’. After long arguing ‘we’re all middle class’, the media and politicians started talking about the working class again, but in a racialized form. The problems of the ‘white working class’ were ascribed to their whiteness, rather than their class. But Chavs argued against this false portrait. Indeed, working-class communities and workplaces are more likely to be ethnically diverse than their middle-class counterparts. Problems faced by working-class people who are white—like the housing crisis, the lack of good jobs, poor rights at work, declining living standards, safe communities—are to do with class, not race. These are problems shared by working-class people of all ethnic backgrounds.
Where race does come into it is the fact that working-class people from ethnic minority backgrounds suffer from other forms of oppression and exploitation. The majority of British Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, for example, live in poverty, while black people are far more likely to be stopped by the police. Although it is important to address issues common to all working-class people, it would be wrong to ignore the extra oppression suffered by minority groups.
One of the main reasons that politicians and media commentators started talking about the ‘white working class’ was the emergence of far-right populism, as most prominently expressed by the British National Party. But Chavs argued that such movements were, above all, driven by social and economic insecurities. This, of course, does not mean outright racist bigotry isn’t part of the story, too. Despite the great strides made by the struggles against racism in post-war Britain, prejudice, bigotry and discrimination remain massive problems at every level of society.
Some felt that, in exploring an interesting premise, I had got distracted by an outdated grudge against Thatcherism. As Philip Hensher put it in the Spectator, ‘The spread of contempt for the urban working classes is an important subject, but here it got lost under a welter of old-school moans about Mrs Thatcher, as if anyone still cared.’ I would hardly wish to hide my deeply held antipathy towards Thatcherism, and Chavs can hardly be accused of doing so. But the book is, inescapably, about the legacy of the Thatcherite 1980s. I do not believe it is possible to divorce class contempt from broader social and political trends. One of the book’s key arguments was that this new classism had everything to do with an offensive against working-class Britain, including unions, industries, housing, communities and values. We still live in the Britain that Thatcherism built: a critique of it can hardly be dismissed as ‘old-school moans’.
It was also suggested by some that the book suffered from a lack of theoretical explanation. I make no apologies for this. Although in recent years the idea of class has not been the subject of much discussion among academics and leftists, literature still exists on the subject. Unfortunately, it remains largely unread outside small circles of specialists. One of the purposes of Chavs is to present ideas about class to a wider audience; it also aims to promote left-wing ideas at a time when the left is very weak. That’s why it was written in a way that was intended to be readable—I hope it succeeded in this.
All these criticisms, indeed, were part of a wider debate. Getting people to talk about class—whether they disagreed with me or not— was exactly what I had intended. But the debate took an unexpected turn a couple of months after the book was published. For a few days in August 2011, it looked as though England was staring into an abyss of social chaos—and the demonization I had written about flourished like never before.
August is normally the height of Britain’s silly season. With Parliament in recess, news channels end up featuring extra helpings of fatuous celebrity gossip, when not speculating about one or other embattled party leader’s future or covering stories about talented animals. But 2011 was quite unlike normal years. In a year of upheaval, silly season was cancelled—and communities across England were overwhelmed with rioting, looting and arson.
The unrest began after the police shot dead twenty-nine-year-old Mark Duggan in the London borough of Tottenham on 6 August 2011. Duggan was black, and in Tottenham the relationship between the local black community and the police has a fraught history. In 1985, after Cynthia Jarrett—also black—died during a police raid of her house, Tottenham exploded in the riots that took their name from the estate on which they focused, Broadwater Farm. A policeman, PC Keith Blakelock, was killed during the unrest: it was the first death of a police officer during a riot for over 150 years. Though relations have improved since 1985, many in Tottenham—particularly young black men—harbour resentments against the police, who they feel harass them. Indeed, a black person is thirty times more likely than a white person to be stopped and searched under Section 60 by the police in England and Wales.6 The police kept Duggan’s body from his family for thirty-six hours. Initial reports from the Independent Police Complaints Commission that he had fired on the police were widely disbelieved and later discredited. On the afternoon of Saturday, 6 August, hundreds gathered in a peaceful protest outside Tottenham Police Station, but within hours the mood had turned ugly. People across the UK awoke the following morning to blanket media coverage of mayhem and smoking rubble on Tottenham High Street.
What happened next was for most an entirely unexpected and terrifying disruption to normality. By Monday, the riots had spread to my own London Borough, Hackney. It was my birthday and, with celebratory drinks cut short as nervous friends fled home, I cycled past boarded-up shops on Kingsland Road that were being defended by groups of Turkish men. From Barnet in the north to Croydon in the south, London’s shops were looted and burned; crowds of rioters rampaged through the streets. On Monday and Tuesday, unrest spread to other English cities: Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Nottingham There was a sense, even among more rational observers, that the country was descending into chaos. ‘Not since the blitz during World War II have so many fires raged in London so intensely at one time,’ claimed Time magazine.7
Amid the chaos, commentators looked at Chavs in a new light. Partly, I suppose, because the word ‘chav’ was being bandied around to describe the rioters, particularly on Twitter and Facebook. Fran Healey, lead singer of Scottish soft-rock band Travis, described the unrest as the ‘Chav Spring’ in a Tweet, referencing the Arab Spring. Fitness chain GymBox—which appears in Chavs as the promoter of a ‘Chav Fighting’ class—announced that it would be shutting early due to the ‘chav infestation’.
But, above all, a link was made with Chavs because the riots shone a light on Britain’s fractured, divided society. I was one of the few commentators during that turbulent week asked to challenge the dominant narrative that this was mindless criminality, end of story. Challenging this consensus, especially at the time, was not popular. People felt terrorized in their communities and Britain was in the throes of an angry backlash. Two days into the riots, nine-tenths of those polled supported the use of water cannon; two-thirds wanted the army sent in; and a third supported using live ammunition on rioters. Attempts to understand what was happening were seen as attempts to justify it. There was little appetite for social and economic explanations for the disorder sweeping English cities. People just wanted to feel safe and for those responsible to be punished.
Inadvertently, I found myself at the centre of one of the ugliest episodes of the backlash. Along with author Dreda Say Mitchell, I was put up against Tudor historian David Starkey on the BBC’s current affairs programme Newsnight. In a now infamous intervention, Starkey began by quoting Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which warned that immigration into Britain would plunge the country into violent chaos. Powell was—as Starkey accepted—wrong in his prediction that it would bring inter-communal violence. Instead, what Starkey called ‘black culture’ had turned white people into rioting thugs. ‘The whites’, he pronounced, ‘have become black.’
Attempting to scapegoat black people for the rioting, Starkey used a tortured argument to navigate around the fact that most rioters were not black. His increasingly baffling—but clearly carefully planned— rant took an even more alarming turn when he argued that if someone were to hear prominent black Labour MP David Lammy without seeing him, they would conclude he was white. Almost paralysed by the scene unfolding before me, I responded that he was equating black with criminality and white with respectability.
What unnerved me most about Starkey’s rhetoric were the possible consequences. Could David Starkey become a new Enoch Powell, with critics like me dismissed as a liberal elite trying to crack down on a brave historian for telling the truth? Would badges and t-shirts be produced proclaiming ‘Starkey Is Right’? Would there be marches in his support, like there was in 1968 when Powell was sacked from the Conservative Shadow Cabinet for his racist bigotry? My fear was that he had introduced race at a time of intense anxiety, when people were angry and scared. But what sympathy there was for him was not particularly strong or deeply felt. Since World War II, struggles against racism had transformed how people looked at race: for example, just over fifty years ago, a Gallup poll found that 71 per cent were opposed to interracial marriage. The number admitting such a prejudice today is virtually non-existent. Although racism was far from being purged from British society, Britain had changed and the public ramblings of a TV historian were not going to reverse that.
As the riots subsided following a surge of police officers onto Britain’s streets, the Government pledged a crackdown on those responsible. With a mood of widespread fury, a furious right-wing backlash followed, carefully nurtured by senior Conservatives. One traditional target of right-wing moralizers was singled out for particular opprobrium: the single mother. ‘Children without fathers’ was one of the factors identified by Tory Prime Minister David Cameron; it was a point echoed by right-wing commentators. The Daily Express appeared to find no contradiction in claiming that ‘we have bred feckless, lawless males who pass on to their own children the same mistakes’ and, in another paragraph, that ‘fatherlessness is the single most destructive factor in modern society’.
It smacked of the arguments of US right-wing pseudo-sociologist Charles Murray, who claimed that rising illegitimacy among the ‘lower classes’ had produced a ‘New Rabble’. This was classic demonization, reducing complex social problems to supposed individual failings and behavioural faults.
Pervading the backlash was the talk of a ‘feral underclass’. This was the idea of the Victorian ‘undeserving poor’ taken to a new level: the rioters and their families weren’t just undeserving, they were barely human. Some commentators took this rhetoric to its logical extreme: right-wing journalist Richard Littlejohn used his Daily Mail column to describe rioters as a ‘wolfpack of feral inner-city waifs and strays’, calling for them to be clubbed ‘like baby seals’. The idea of a ‘normal’ middle-class majority versus a problematic underclass was ubiquitous in post-riot commentary. According to Conservative Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith, ‘Too many people have remained unaware of the true nature of life on some of our estates. This was because we had ghettoised many of these problems, keeping them out of sight of the middle-class majority.’
In the febrile atmosphere that followed the riots, the government proposed that rioters living in council homes should be evicted, along with their families: in other words, collective punishment. It ‘should be possible to evict them and keep them evicted’, Cameron told MPs, and local councils—such as Nottingham, Salford and Westminster— announced their intention to do precisely that. Further plans were unveiled to dock the welfare benefits of those convicted of committing crimes during the riots. In this way, a link was made between the rioters, council tenants and people on benefits as a whole—all of which reinforced the notion of a feral underclass. But a precedent was set in Cameron’s Britain: if you were poor and if you committed a crime, you would be punished twice—once through the justice system, and again through the welfare system.
Cases were rushed through the courts, but the sentences handed down were, it seems, as much about retribution as justice. ‘Mum-of-two, not involved in disorder, jailed for FIVE months for accepting shorts looted from shop’, boasted Greater Manchester Police’s Twitter feed. ‘There are no excuses!’ The police force in question was subsequently forced to apologise. Twenty-three-year-old Nicholas Robinson, a man with no previous convictions to his name, was imprisoned for six months for stealing £3.50-worth of bottled water. Two young men were jailed for four years—more than many manslaughter sentences—for using Facebook to incite riots in their local towns. Riots that never happened.
Steal bottled water and end up in prison for six months. But help push the world into the most catastrophic economic crisis since the 1930s and expect to face no legal sanctions whatsoever. Even as much of the West’s bankrupt financial system remains propped up by trillions of taxpayers’ pounds, dollars and euros, not a single banker has ended up in the dock. What is more, many of the British politicians baying for justice post-riots had, in the very recent past, helped themselves to millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. Two years before the riots, MPs had been found systematically milking the expenses system. Only three ended up behind bars. Some had embezzled funds to pay for the same sorts of widescreen televisions that were later carted out of shops by rioters, admittedly in a more disorderly fashion. When Labour MP Gerald Kaufman was found to have claimed £8,750 of public money for a Bank & Olufsen television set, he was simply asked to pay it back. Post-riot Britain trashed the myth that Britain’s justice system is blind to wealth and power.
Just as an economic crisis caused by the market was transformed into a crisis of public spending, the post-riots backlash demonstrated just how effective the right is at manipulating crises for its own advantage. The riots were once again used to reinforce the view that social problems were the consequences of individual failings, and that there was an out-ofcontrol feral underclass that needed to be brought firmly under control.
I felt that the riots magnified a number of the issues explored in Chavs. Weeks after calm had returned to England’s streets, facts emerged that challenged the dominant narrative. Iain Duncan-Smith had blamed gang culture, yet only 13 per cent of those arrested were members of gangs. But, according to the government’s own figures, 42 per cent of the young people involved were eligible for free school meals, more than two and a half times the national average. The adults arrested were almost three times as likely to be on out-of-work benefits as the population as a whole. Nearly two thirds of the young rioters lived in England’s poorest areas. Here, then, was a sliver of Britain’s burgeoning young poor.
It would be simplistic to argue a straightforward cause and effect: that unemployment and poverty had provoked the unrest. After all, the vast majority of people who were out of work or poor did not riot. But there are growing numbers of young people in Britain with no secure future to risk. Youth unemployment is running at over 20 per cent. There is a crisis of affordable housing, the biggest cuts since the 1920s, and falling living standards; university tuition fees have trebled and the Educational Maintenance Allowance for students from poor backgrounds has been scrapped. Many young people have been left with very little to hope for. For the first time since the World War II, the next generation will be worse off than the generation before it. Of course, we all have agency: we don’t all respond to the same situation in the same way. But it only takes a small proportion of young people who have nothing much to lose to bring chaos to the streets.
It is also impossible to ignore the fact that men featured so prominently among the rioters. Nine out of ten apprehended rioters were men. Britain’s rapid de-industrialization and the disappearance of so many skilled middle-income jobs were particularly disruptive—given that such work often excluded women—to the lives of working-class men. Over a generation ago, a young working-class man could leave school at the age of sixteen and have a decent prospect of getting an apprenticeship, training that might open a gateway to a skilled, respected job that could give life some structure. But when the jobs and the apprenticeships that supported them disappeared, there was nothing to take their place.
Although the old industrial heartlands are generally associated with mining and manufacturing areas in the North, industry disappeared in parts of the South too. Hundreds of thousands of mostly light industrial jobs disappeared in London and southern England. In October 2011, the Government’s Cabinet Office published a report on the riots, based on interviews in five of the worst-hit areas. In Tottenham, for example, the report found that ‘Decline in local industry and subsequently in retail on its high street were factors seen as being responsible for the lack of jobs. Interviewees described the hopelessness of some young people in the face of limited opportunities.’8 Again, this disappearance of opportunities has affected a large proportion of young working-class men, the overwhelming majority of whom did not riot. But with so many leaving school with nothing much to look forward to, it should not be all that surprising if a small minority should respond to their bleak prospects in this way.
A toxic combination of inequality and consumerism also undoubtedly played its part. In 1979, Britain was one of the most equal Western societies. After three decades of Thatcherism, it is now one of the least equal. The Gini coefficient—which measures levels of inequality in a society—has shot up from .25 to .40 in three decades. London is one of the most unequal cities on earth: the richest 10 per cent is worth 273 times more than the poorest 10 per cent.9 London is not—yet—like Paris, where the affluent are concentrated in the centre, and the poorest are more likely to be found in the banlieues (the suburbs). In London, the rich and the poor live almost on top of each other. On a daily basis, the least well-off are able to see what they will never have. Take Clapham Junction, one of the scenes of August 2011’s riots. A railway separates the affluent south from deprived estates to the north. ‘If they [young people] ever wanted reminding of what they don’t have, this is a good place to be,’ one ‘community stake-holder’ told the Cabinet Office investigators.10
Britain is a hyper-consumerist society. Status has so much to do with what we own or wear. The vast majority of young people want to be part of this consumerism, but many face huge financial obstacles. What surprised me least of all about the looting was the targeting of trainers. When I was growing up, they were a huge status symbol: to have an unfashionable pair could bring ridicule. No wonder, then, that Foot Locker was looted, while more upmarket stores were simply burned to the ground. The goods may have been worth more, but they had no relevance to the lives of young people: they brought no status.
Hostility towards the police was an important factor, too. Since the riots, I have spoken to a number of young black men about their experiences with the police. Like me, they have never been charged with an offence. But there was one major difference: while I have never been stopped and searched by the police, it was an experience they have all endured throughout their lives. One told me that he was first stopped and searched at the age of twelve when he was on his way to buy milk for his mother. Sometimes the police officers were sympathetic, or even almost apologetic; at other times they were aggressive or threatening. Some officers acted as if ‘we’re the biggest gang around here’—a sentiment that cropped up in interviews with convicted rioters. Indeed, interviews with rioters conducted by the Reading the Riots study—a collaboration between the LSE, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and the Guardian—found that rioters identified anti-police sentiment as the biggest single cause of the unrest.11
Of course, many of the rioters got involved because they saw an opportunity to steal with impunity. For others, it was a vicarious thrill; a chance to show off in front of friends, and to be able to boast that they were a part of the action. Some just got caught up in a crowd, sensing that accepted social norms had temporarily been suspended. Others looked at the shameless greed of the bankers and politicians, feeling that if those at the top could get away with it, why couldn’t they? And there were others who felt frustrated, angry, disillusioned, or bored. The specific motives varied from case to case; for some, there was a combination of reasons. But what united the rioters and looters of England’s hot August was there was not much for them to put at risk, and a lack of faith in—or outright antipathy towards—the local police.
No one can predict whether there will be a new wave of riots. But it is certain that the most drastic cuts since the 1920s will have a devastating impact on Britain’s social fabric. Growing numbers of people (of all ages) will inevitably have a mounting sense that there is a bleak future ahead. In those circumstances, anger and frustration will surely only increase—and unless it is organized and given political direction, it could manifest itself in the ugliest of ways.
2011 was a year of turmoil across the globe: not least because of a deepening economic crisis, and the courage and determination of millions of Arabs in rising up against the brutal, senile tyrannies that ruled over them. This new era of unrest represented another shift taking place, one with profound implications for my arguments. Chavs is, in large part, a story about the legacy of defeat: that is, the consequences of the pounding suffered by the British labour movement and many working-class communities in the 1980s. I argued that the demonization identified was ‘the flagrant triumphalism of the rich who, no longer challenged by those below them, instead point and laugh at them’. But even as Chavs was published, this triumphalism was under attack.
At the end of 2011, Time magazine named ‘The Protester’ as its ‘Person of the Year’. Indeed, whether it was uprisings against murderous despots or mass demonstrations against austerity, the protest made one of its biggest comebacks since the 1960s—including in Britain, which experienced waves of demonstrations, occupations, and strikes. Although, as yet, there has been no sustained challenge to the position of the wealthy elites, it has once more become clear that it is possible to resist.
In Britain, the new age of dissent arrived on 10 November 2010, when the National Union of Students called a demonstration against the proposed trebling of tuition fees. Only 20,000 or so were expected to turn up; the actual number on the day was around 52,000. Most of those who had taken to the street were newly politicized, and they found the experience of marching alongside young people both exhilarating and empowering. A section of the demonstration occupied Westminster’s Millbank Tower, where the Conservative Party has offices. Although the scenes became the focus of a self-righteous media eager to condemn ‘violence’—even though there was hardly any—the Millbank occupation became a symbol of resistance for many radicalized young people. Despite the lack of support from the National Union of Students leadership, the following weeks saw a series of protests, while dozens of occupations were staged at universities across the country.
Amid all the moral outrage and focus on smashed windows, the media missed one of the most interesting elements of the protests. Many of the most vocal, determined protesters were not middle-class students, but working-class teenagers who were furious at the scrapping of the Educational Maintenance Allowance—means-tested government subventions given to those from poorer backgrounds to keep them in education. Many of them felt that a government of millionaires was slamming the door in their faces. Previously they had been dismissed as, at best, an apathetic mass with few interests outside X-Factor and iPhones; and, at a worst, a social threat that had to be contained. But here they were: politically astute, indignant, and determined to make their long-ignored voices heard.
The students did not stop the government forcing the trebling of tuition fees through Parliament, but the myth of British passivity was shattered. Trade unions—still drastically weakened and lacking in confidence—looked on at the protesting students with more than a little interest. In the words of Len McCluskey, leader of Unite—the biggest trade union in the country—the students had put trade unions ‘on the spot’. In 2011, the unions’ turn came.
As austerity began biting into jobs and living standards, the trade union movement called on people to ‘March for the Alternative’ on 26 March 2011. It was the biggest workers’ protest for over a generation. Here was a cross-section of the modern British working class, hundreds of thousands strong, standing up to a government that was forcing them to pay for a crisis they had no role in causing.
The protest marked the beginning of a new wave of trade-union resistance. After assuming office, the Conservative-led government announced so-called reforms to public sector pensions—‘reforms’ being a term that had long since changed in meaning from ‘social progress’ to ‘rolling it back’. Arguing that public sector pensions were becoming unaffordable, the government unveiled plans to make workers pay more and work longer for their pensions and receive less. Yet a recently commissioned Government report written by ultra-Blairite ex-Labour Minister John Hutton revealed that public sector pensions would fall as a proportion of Britain’s economy: in other words, they were set to become more affordable. In any case, the extra money raised was not intended to bolster pension funds, but to flow straight into the Treasury’s coffers. This was in fact a deficit tax being imposed on public sector workers from dinner ladies to teachers.
Exploiting the fact that private sector pension coverage had collapsed over the previous decade, the government attempted to play divide-and-rule politics, a strategy amplified across the media. Why, the argument went, should private sector workers with comparatively meagre pensions subsidize the generous settlements of the public sector? There was no doubt that there had been a collapse in private sector pension provision. At the beginning of 2012, the Association of Consulting Actuaries warned that nine out of ten private sector– defined benefit schemes were closed to new entrants. But what was being proposed was a race to the bottom: public sector pensions should be dragged down, not private sector pensions dragged up.
The majority of public sector workers saw this rhetoric for what it really was: on 30 June 2011, hundreds of thousands of teachers and civil servants went on strike. But with the Government still refusing to make significant concessions, trade union ballots across the public sector delivered overwhelming support for industrial action. On 30 November, lollipop ladies, bin collectors, nurses and other workers went on strike. It was the biggest wave of industrial action since the 1926 General Strike. After all the many obituaries written about the trade union movement, the collective power of working people was back on the agenda.
Other movements, too, helped put class back on the agenda. In October 2011, anti-austerity protesters occupied Wall Street in the United States. They were, in part, inspired by the Spanish indignados (outraged) who had occupied Madrid’s main square the previous May in protest at the Spanish government’s response to the banking crisis; they, in turn, had followed the example of Egyptian revolutionaries who had taken Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The New York protests spawned a global ‘Occupy’ movement, as similar camps were set up in hundreds of cities across the globe—including London, where tents were erected outside St Paul’s Cathedral. The key slogan of the Occupy movement, ‘We are the 99 per cent’, reflected that the interests of the overwhelming majority of people conflicted with those of the elite 1 per cent at the top.
It may not have been an accurate figure, but that wasn’t the point: the slogan tapped into a deep sense of injustice that had taken root since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Above all, it served as a reminder of who had caused the economic crisis and who was actually being made to pay for it. And it resonated. A poll conducted by ICM in October 2011 revealed that 38 per cent believed ‘the protesters are naïve; there is no practical alternative to capitalism—the point is to get it moving again’. But another 51 per cent agreed that ‘the protesters are right to want to call time on a system that puts profit before people’.
Britain remains in the middle of an apparently intractable crisis. As things stand, the position of the wealthy elite remains strong the world over, and the future looks incredibly bleak for millions of working people. But I passionately believe that hope lies in a return to class politics—that is, a rejection of the fiction that ‘We’re all in this together’, and a recognition that while working people share basic common interests, they are on a collision course with the interests of those at the top.
Chavs wasn’t about pity or nostalgia. It was about power. Above all else, it sought to highlight the central crisis of modern—the lack of working-class political representation. Only an organized movement of working people can challenge the economic madness that threatens the future of large swathes of humanity. But such a movement is impossible unless a number of myths are debunked: that we’re all essentially middle-class; that class is an outdated concept; and that social problems are the failings of the individual.
My book is one contribution to taking on those myths. However, social change does not come through the scribblings of sympathetic writers, but through mass pressure from below. As an ideologically charged austerity programme inflicts hardship on communities across the country, there will surely be a growing determination to fight for an alternative. The Tories, unreconstructed Blairites and their wealthy backers would be reckless to imagine they have already won. There is still all to play for.
February 2012