Treorchy in the Rhondda is chav-infested. Although here, people don’t even know what a chav is!! The reason being that everyone is a chav! There are no posh folk, as the place is working class and unemployment is rife!
—ChavTowns website
There has never been an age when the working class were properly respected, let alone glorified. From the Victorian era to World War II, working-class people were barely mentioned in books. When they appeared at all, they were caricatures. As one expert on Victorian literature put it, even a middle-class supporter of reform like Charles Dickens presented working-class people as having ‘the two-dimensional qualities of cartoon figures’.1 George Orwell observed: ‘If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole … the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do find their way between the corners of a book, it is nearly always as objects of pity or as comic relief.’2
And yet things did change after World War II. Labour, the party created by working-class people to represent them in Parliament, had won a landslide victory and was there to stay as one of the country’s two major political forces. Sweeping social reforms were introduced to address working-class concerns. Trade unions enjoyed influence at the highest levels of power. Working-class people could no longer be ignored.
‘The war changed everything,’ says Stephen Frears, a film director who often weaves class themes into his work (from early television serializations of Alan Bennett plays to the 1985 classic, My Beautiful Laundrette). ‘Novels started being about the working classes. Plays started being about the working classes. I found all of that very, very interesting.’ For someone from a middle-class background like Frears, this was a profoundly liberating experience –what he refers to as his ‘emancipation’. ‘There was suddenly a whole group of people who’d never been heard before, really … The focus before had been on such a narrow range of subjects in Britain, which was those who live the life of the upper classes or middle classes, whatever. So suddenly the world became more interesting.’
A real milestone was the launch of Coronation Street on ITV in 1960. For the first time a TV series revolved around sympathetic, realistic working-class characters and looked at how they lived their lives. It struck a chord and within months attracted over 20 million viewers. It rode the wave of so-called Northern Realism, a new genre of film that explored the realities of working-class life. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, Room at the Top and Cathy Come Home were classic examples. While working-class people were the stars of favourites such as The Likely Lads, it was middle-class people who could find themselves the butt of jokes in The Good Life and other series. There was even a popular sitcom in the 1970s—The Rag Trade—about female trade unionists who took on their bosses and always won. As late as the 1980s there were classic TV shows being written around likable working-class characters, such as Only Fools and Horses and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
That is not to say that the portrayal of working-class life was always completely realistic. ‘I think there was an awful lot of romanticization of the working class and their communities, say thirty, forty, fifty years ago,’ says historian David Kynaston. ‘If you think about the portrayals of the working class in the films of the immediate post-war period, often they show working-class people as sort of buffoons, but not as villains or unpleasant. It was more kind of one-dimensional. They might be uncouth, but nevertheless not bad people.’ Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock agrees. ‘For a very, very long time, certainly in much of the twentieth century, the working class was idealized by a small number of very influential intellectuals, people in the arts and education. Otherwise it was patronized.’
There was a big leap from being patronized to being despised. The shift would come with the advent of Thatcherism and its assault on what you could call working-classness—working-class values, institutions, industries and communities. ‘The big shift in portrayal is surely—and it’s an obvious point but it’s surely a true point—that from about the 80s, it became possible in the media to, as it were, disparage the working class … in a disrespectful and wholly unkind way,’ as David Kynaston puts it.
Among the earliest examples of these sentiments filtering into popular culture were two characters invented by comedian Harry Enfield, Wayne and Waynetta Slob. First appearing in 1990, they could be regarded as ‘proto-chavs’: feckless, foul-mouthed, benefit-dependent and filthy. When Waynetta (a ‘nightmare prole’, as one journalist put it in 1997)3 becomes pregnant, for example, the couple debate calling their unborn child ‘Ashtray’. Even today, the media enthusiastically use Waynetta Slob as a template when attacking groups of working-class people. ‘Rising toll of “Waynettas” with three times as many women as men signing onto sickness benefits under New Labour’ screamed one recent Daily Mail headline. Underneath a photo of a greasy-looking Waynetta Slob holding her baby was the thoughtful caption: ‘The type of people mocked by Harry Enfield’s character Waynetta Slob have [sic] increased.’4
But it was the emergence of the ‘chav’ phenomenon that brought together previously disparate prejudices against working-class people. The website ‘ChavScum’ was launched at the end of 2003, with a tagline reading: ‘Britain’s peasant underclass that is taking over our towns and cities’. In its current incarnation (‘ChavTowns’) contributors compete over attacking chavs: entries can be simple, like ‘shitty council scum people’ living in ‘shitty council / ex-council housing’, for example. Another targets the chavs of the town of Leek who ‘spend their days on the checkout at Aldi or working in the delightful Kerrigold cheese factory. The most ambition ever seen in the town made the front page of the Leek Post and Times when one 15 year old mother of 17 made a passing comment about maybee [sic] working on the deli counter at Morrisons one day.’
Supermarket employees in Winchester don’t come off much better. According to one account: ‘Even when they are on the checkout, the customer is always invisible as they chat about pregnancies at fourteen, and how “Cristal got drunk on Friday night, and went home with Tyrone—the bastard” etc etc ad nauseam.’
There are entire books dedicated to this genre. For a long time, Lee Bok’s The Little Book of Chavs was perched on the counters of the now-defunct bookshop chain Borders. Its most recent edition boasted that it had sold over 100,000 copies and had been reprinted eight times. It even contains a list of ‘Chav occupations’ to aid identification. If you were a female chav (or ‘Chavette’), you would be a trainee hairdresser, a trainee beautician, a cleaner or a barmaid. Chav men work as cowboy builders, roofers or plumbers; they may also be market stall traders, mechanics or security guards. Both sexes could be spotted at a checkout in low-price supermarket chains like Lidl, Netto or Aldi, or toiling in a fast-food restaurant.5 The equally poisonous follow-up book, The Chav Guide to Life, revealed that as well as being ‘loud and lower class’, ‘Most Chavs come from not well-off, working-class families on council estates, and get their money from the dole.’6
The creators of the Chavscum website published their own literary contribution to chav-hate. In Chav!: A User’s Guide to Britain’s New Ruling Class, Mia Wallace and Clint Spanner offer tips for ‘Spotting a chav in the wild’. Chavs, you see, are like animals. ‘Cutting-edge, fake designer fashion, branded sportswear and accessories to die for, fabulously extravagant 9-carat-gold “bling” (jewellery), it’s all here in this fun-for-all-the-family, point-scoring game!’ A ‘chavette’ was regarded ‘as an infertile freak by her immediate community’ if she had not had a child before the age of seventeen. The chav television channel of choice was ‘ITV Chav … where a chav knows they will never get stimulated or challenged or anyfing.’ Unless they are watching This Morning, because ‘with its slightly middle-class aspirations it can be a bit scary.’ Worst of all, chav kids were in danger of swamping decent children at schools across the country:
There used to be a stigma attached to receiving free school meals and some poorer families would send their kids in with a packed lunch rather than accept such a benefit. However, as the balance has shifted in schools and many of the pupils now come from a chav background, getting the free meal is de rigueur. Non-chav children are now embarrassed to pay for a meal, and may be set about as the ‘posh kid’ if they do.7
As chav-hate began to emerge as a force in mainstream culture in 2004, it found supporters in the mainstream press. Jemima Lewis, a Telegraph journalist, responded to the Chavscum website with a column entitled ‘In defence of snobbery’. ‘Both varieties of snobbery—traditional or inverted—have their perils, but on balance, I prefer the former,’ she wrote, without satire. ‘This is partly because I am middle class and would prefer not to be mocked for it. But it is also because traditional snobbery at least aspires towards some worthy goals: education, ambition, courtesy.’8 Hating the lower orders was good for them, was the crux of her argument: it made them aspire to escape their woeful circumstances and get some manners.
For those of its readers who were bewildered by the chav phenomenon, the Daily Mail published a handy ‘A to Z’ of chavs. ‘A’ was for ‘A-Level’—‘Something no Chav has ever possessed.’ ‘U’ was for ‘Underage’: ‘What every Chavette is at the time of her first sexual experience.’ The sexual promiscuity of chav women, one of the big obsessions of chav-haters, is encapsulated in the Mail’s ‘joke’ offering: ‘What’s the difference between a Chavette and the Grand Old Duke of York? The Grand Old Duke of York only had 10,000 men.’ And, of course, chavs were to be taunted for their low-paid jobs. ‘What do you say to a Chav when he’s at work? Big Mac and fries, please, mate.’9 Another article by the same journalist suggested that Britain was being overrun by chavs. ‘Some people call them scum. Sociologists call them the underclass. But call them what you like, they’re taking over the country.’10
Those labelled ‘chavs’ became frequently ridiculed for failing to meet lofty middle-class standards in what they wore, or how they ate. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver was rightly applauded for his crusade to bring healthy food to the British school dinner menu. But it was a campaign marred by tut-tutting at the eating habits of the lower orders. On his Channel 4 programme, Oliver referred to parents who failed to sit around a table for dinner as ‘what we have learned to call “white trash” ’. Indeed, his TV series Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners focused on poor estates where mothers struggled to feed their kids with what little money they had.11 Jonathan Ross asked him on BBC1: ‘Well, do you ever think that some people shouldn’t be allowed to be parents? Like people from council estates?’ It was a ‘joke’ met with cheers.12
The same goes for alcohol consumption. When the government’s chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, issued guidelines recommending that children under the age of fifteen should not drink at all, Daily Telegraph journalist James Delingpole became hot under the collar. Sir Liam had had the temerity to suggest that offering young kids small amounts of wine was a ‘middle-class obsession’. But Delingpole thought he was aiming at the ‘wrong target’: ‘We all know where Britain’s most serious child-drinking problems lie: on sink estates and among broken homes where rudderless urchins are routinely downing alcopops and cans of super-strong lager before they’ve reached their teens.’
The middle classes had been attacked because they were a ‘soft target’, while the real culprits had been let off because even if they ‘were capable of reading a newspaper, they wouldn’t give a stuff’. Never mind that a study by the National Centre for Social Research found that children from affluent backgrounds were the biggest drinkers, and teenagers with unemployed parents were less likely to have even tried alcohol. ‘This seems to indicate that young people of very low social position may be less likely to try alcohol, possibly because it is less likely to be available in the home,’ said the researchers.13 But Delingpole was merely fleshing out the stereotype that, while the middle classes consumed alcohol in a respectable, cultured way, the lower orders spent their time rolling around in a drunken stupor. It was their lifestyles that needed regulating, not those of the civilized middle class.
Middle-class journalists were also affronted by the bad manners of the chavs. So much so, in fact, that they used their well-paid columns to launch snooty attacks against people who lack a platform to defend themselves. The Daily Telegraph’s Janet Daley has a particular distaste for the unwashed masses. She cannot even go to the theatre without ‘a gang of boisterous, inebriated chavs who will disrupt the performance and may threaten you with assault if you upbraid them.’ Meanwhile, the National Gallery had been overwhelmed by a ‘human barricade of dossers and fun-loving exhibitionists’.
Of particular concern to Daley were the ‘yobs’ who by going on holiday forced her to ‘flee to those parts of Abroad which the louts ignore’. What perturbed her most was that these people were ‘neither poor nor unemployed. Indeed, most of them had the sorts of jobs that would once have been described as “respectable working class”.’ The truth was that rude working-class people were ruining the holidays of sensitive, superior people like herself. Daley wanted the middle classes to civilize the lower orders—but they were prevented from doing so. ‘It is bourgeois guilt that prevents those who would impose standards from acting: the socially privileged simply cower and refuse to intervene, for fear of appearing contemptuous of those less fortunate than themselves.’14 Manners belonged to the middle classes: and it was high time that they sorted out the impertinent chavs.
Not that the born-and-bred middle classes are the only guilty parties. Some who hail from working-class roots and have achieved wealth and success against the odds have told themselves: ‘If I can make it, then anyone with the talent and determination can too’. Take John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue. ‘I’m middle class. I got out of the working class as quickly as I could,’ he once said. ‘The working class is violent and abusive, they beat their wives and I hate their culture.’15 John Bird is far from the only example of a wealthy, formerly working-class individual who spits at those they have left behind. You have ‘escaped’ purely because of your own exceptional talents and abilities, you can think to yourself—and those who have not got ahead have only themselves to blame.
It would be nice to dismiss chav-hate as a fringe psychosis confined to ranting right-wing columnists. But there is a type of chav-hate that has become a ‘liberal bigotry’. Liberal bigots justify their prejudice against a group of people on the grounds of their own supposed bigotry. The racialization of working-class people as ‘white’ has convinced some that they can hate chavs and remain progressive-minded. They justify their hatred of white working-class people by focusing on their supposed racism and failure to assimilate into multicultural society. ‘It’s one of the ways people have made their snobbery socially acceptable,’ says journalist Johann Hari: ‘by acting as though they are defending immigrants from the “ignorant” white working class.’
By defining the white working class in terms of ethnicity rather than social class, liberal chav-haters ascribe their problems to cultural rather than economic factors. It is the way they live that is the problem, not the unjust way society is structured. If white working-class people are oppressed, it is the result of their own fecklessness. While a liberal chav-hater will accept that massive discrimination against ethnic minority groups explains issues like unemployment and poverty and even violence, they do not believe white working-class people have such excuses.
‘The “real” working class is supposed to be white, badly educated, “aspirational for wealth”, bigoted and easily persuaded,’ says prominent trade union leader Billy Hayes, who was born on a council estate in Liverpool. Many of these caricatures appeared in the BBC’s White season, a supposedly sympathetic series of programmes dedicated to the white working class that aired in 2007. In reality, it simply boosted the image of white working-class people as a race-obsessed, BNP-voting rump. Their problems were not portrayed as economic—things like housing and jobs that affect working-class people of all colours did not get a look-in. They were simply portrayed as a minority culture under threat from mass immigration. ‘The White season examines why some feel increasingly marginalised and explores possible reasons behind the rise in popularity of far-right politics in some sections of this community,’ the BBC announced.16
But the trailer for the series said it all: a white man’s face being scribbled over by dark-skinned hands with a black marker pen until he disappeared into the background. Accompanying the trailer was the question: ‘Is the white working class becoming invisible?’ Here it was—all their problems being reduced to the issue of race. Among those angered by this bias was the BBC reporter Sarah Mukherjee, a woman of Asian origin who grew up on a largely white council estate in Essex. The series left a ‘nasty taste in the mouth’, she said. ‘Listening to the patronizing conversations in some newsrooms you’d think white, working-class Britain is one step away from anarchy, drinking themselves senseless and pausing only to draw benefits and beat up a few Asian and black people.’
As an example of how chav-bashing can be justified on anti-racist grounds, take a column written by journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. ‘Tax-paying immigrants past and present keep indolent British scroungers on their couches drinking beer and watching TV,’ she claimed. ‘We [immigrants] are despised because we seize opportunities these slobs don’t want.’17 In another column entitled ‘Spare me the tears over the white working class’, she slams those who resist calling them racist.
Working-class white men provoked race riots through the Fifties and Sixties; they kept ‘darkies’ out of pubs and clubs and work canteens. Who were the supporters of Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell? The disempowered have used us to vent their natural-born hatred against the powerful.18
Alibhai-Brown regards herself as a writer of the left—and yet she happily uses a perversion of anti-racism to slam white working-class people. This is chav-bashing as liberal bigotry in full swing. A BBC series presented by Evan Davis tapped into similar sentiments. The Day the Immigrants Left had the worthy aim of proving that immigrant workers were not, in fact, ‘coming over here and taking all our jobs’. But, after making eleven long-term unemployed people sign up to do jobs (often badly, or failing to turn up at all) favoured by immigrant labourers, the programme portrayed this as a case study of how unemployed working-class people in Britain are slovenly and feckless. The hour-long programme with its selective examples ultimately seemed to show that, actually, people in Britain did not have jobs because of their own abject laziness.
Columnist Janet Daley is among those who have perversely justified chav-bashing as a defence of ethnic minority people. Recounting a run-in with what she described as an ‘English working-class sociopath’ (their cars clipped each other and he shouted a bit before driving off), she launched into a tirade against ‘working-class violence’. British working-class people were, she said, a ‘self-loathing, self-destructive tranche of the population’ who lacked ‘civic culture’. In contrast, she celebrated the ‘religion, cultural dignity and a sense of family’ brought by ethnic minorities. The only thing holding them back, she claimed, was ‘the mindless hatred of the indigenous working classes, who loathe them precisely for their cultural integrity … I fear long after Britain has become a successful multi-racial society, it will be plagued by this diminishing (but increasingly alienated) detritus of the Industrial Revolution.’19 It is certainly a creative way of justifying hatred of working-class people. But then again, Janet Daley is not simply a snob: she is a class warrior.
Another myth used to sustain chav-hate is the idea that the old, decent working class has died away, leaving a rump with no moral compass. In one Daily Mail column, Amanda Platell, a former speech-writer for the present Coalition foreign secretary, William Hague, blamed the ‘shabby values’ of this rump for their situation. ‘When it comes to looking for the real cause why so many of the working class do worse at school, earn less and die younger, the blame must be placed elsewhere—on the countless number of feckless parents.’ She even called the mothers of working-class children ‘slum mums’. As part of her argument that they were personally responsible for their situation, she argued: ‘The working class of the past had enormous self-respect. Men, however poor, wore suits and ties. Women scrubbed front steps. Mothers wouldn’t have been seen dead wearing pyjamas in their own kitchen, let alone in public.’20
As Rachel Johnson (editor of the Lady and sister of Boris Johnson) puts it: ‘What we’re having is a media which is run by the middle classes, for the middle classes, of the middle classes, aren’t we?’ She is spot on. The journalists who have stirred up chav-hate are from a narrow, privileged background. Even papers with overwhelmingly working-class readerships join in the sport. Kevin Maguire told me of a Sun away day in which all the journalists dressed up as chavs. Chuckle at their venomous columns by all means, but be aware that you are revelling in the contempt of the privileged for the less fortunate. In the current climate of chav-hate the class warriors of Fleet Street can finally get away with it, openly and flagrantly: caricaturing working-class people as stupid, idle, racist, sexually promiscuous, dirty, and fond of vulgar clothes. Nothing of worth is seen to emanate from working-class Britain.
This chav-hate has even become a fad among privileged youth. At universities like Oxford, middle-class students hold ‘chav bops’ where they dress up as this working-class caricature. Among those mocking the look was Prince William, one of the most privileged young men in the country. At a chav-themed fancy dress party to mark the end of his first term at Sandhurst, he dressed in a loose-fitting top and ‘bling jewellery’, along with the must-have ‘angled baseball cap’. But when the other cadets demanded he ‘put on a chavvy accent and stop speaking like a Royal,’ he couldn’t do it. ‘William’s not actually the poshest-sounding cadet, despite his family heritage, but he struggled to pull off a working-class accent,’ one cadet told the Sun.21 Welcome to twenty-first-century Britain, where royals dress up as their working-class subjects for a laugh.
To get a more detailed sense of what the ‘chav’ phenomenon means to young people from privileged backgrounds, I had a chat with Oliver Harvey, an Old Etonian and president of the Oxford Conservative Association. ‘In the middle classes’ attitudes toward what you would have called the working-class, so-called chav culture, you’ve still got to see class as an important part of British life,’ he says. ‘Chav’ is a word Harvey often hears bandied around beneath the dreaming spires of Oxford. ‘You’d think people would be educated here, but it’s still something people find funny.’ Unlike other students, he dislikes the term because of its class meaning. ‘I think it shows a patronizing attitude and is rather offensive. It’s a word used by more fortunate people towards less fortunate people … Unfortunately it’s now a popular term that has been transplanted into people’s everyday consciousness.’
A place like Oxford is fertile ground for chav-hate. Nearly half of its students were privately educated, and there are very, very few working-class people attending the university at all. It helps unlock the truth behind the phenomenon: here are privileged people with little contact with those lower down the scale. It is easy to caricature people you do not understand. And indeed, many of these students owe their place at Oxford to the privileged circumstances that bought them a superior education. How comforting to pretend that they landed in Oxford because of their own talents, and that those at the bottom of society are there because they are thick, feckless or worse.
And yet such open mockery is a recent development, not least because until quite recently, many students felt embarrassed about privilege. ‘To be a middle-class student just twenty years ago carried such a social stigma that many graduates in their forties recall faking a proletarian accent for their entire university education,’ says Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead. ‘Nowadays, however, a popular student party theme is dressing up as “chavs”—working-class types with a taste for Burberry, but not the budget, whose ideas above their station provide material for half the jokes on campus today.’22
Scouring the internet reveals the disturbing levels anti-chav hatred has reached in society at large. A YouTube video with around half a million hits proposes sending chavs to the moon. ‘But who’d care anyway if every chav goes to where there’s no KFC, no McDonald’s, no high street,’ the singer croons cheerfully. Before it was finally removed, a Facebook page with nearly three-quarters of a million members was entitled ‘4000 chavs a year die from tesco cheap booze. Every little helps :).’ Type in ‘kill chavs’ into Google and you get hundreds of thousands of results: like ‘5 Ways to Kill a Chav’ and ‘The Anti Chav—Kill Chav Scum Now’. There is even a game called ‘Chav Hunter’ where you can shoot chavs. ‘Chav Hunter is about killing those pikey fucks who dress like 80’s rappers. In a sniper fashion, aim for the head,’ it recommends.
But the chav phenomenon has sinister implications beyond revealing the growing hatred within the British class system. In early 2009, Ralph Surman, a teacher from Nottingham, launched into a tirade against what he called ‘a class of uber-chavs. They are not doing anything productive and are costing taxpayers a fortune.’ He knew exactly who to blame: ‘The offspring of the first big generation of single mothers were children in the 1980s. Now they are adults with their own children and the problems are leading to higher crime rates and low participation in the labour force.’23 This dismissal of large swathes of young people may well have dire results. ‘The birth of “chavs”, as parodied by comedians such as Catherine Tate, can leave working-class people feeling patronized and laughed at,’ writes journalist Hannah Frankel in a thoughtful piece on the education system’s approach to working-class people.24
Catherine Tate’s comic character, a lazy teenage girl with an attitude problem and an annoying catchphrase (‘Am I bovvered?’), was just one example of how chav-bashing has become national entertainment. Reality TV shows, sketch shows, talk shows, even films have emerged dedicated to ridiculing working-class Britain. ‘Chavtainment’ has reinforced the mainstream view of working-class individuals as bigoted, slothful, aggressive people who cannot look after themselves, let alone their children. ‘On the one hand they’re served up as entertainment, you know, Wife Swap, whatever,’ says Labour MP Jon Cruddas. ‘And simultaneously they’re something to be feared through this notion of a lawless ASBO nation which is at the gate.’ The bigots of privileged Britain have truly put an entire class in the stocks.
The world of reality television must have been a bewildering experience for the late Jade Goody, a twenty-one-year-old dental nurse from Bermondsey. Before she entered the Big Brother house, her life had been one of gut-wrenching hardship. When she was one, her mum threw out her junkie father for hiding guns underneath her cot. When she first saw the film Trainspotting at the cinema, she threw up when Ewan McGregor’s character injected himself with heroin. ‘Those faces that he pulls are the same faces I’ve seen my dad pull, you see,’ she recalled. She remembered the first time she rolled a joint for her mother—when she was just four years old. When her mother was disabled by a motorcycle accident, Jade was forced to look after her. ‘Losing the use of her arm was infuriating for my mum, and as a result she often beat me.’
Because she was born to a mixed-race father—‘which is why I’ve got such big lips’—she suffered racist abuse both at school and in her local community. ‘My mum got into fights with a lot of women who lived in our block because she thought they were prejudiced,’ she said, and her mum took her out of school for similar reasons. She worked in various shops before getting the job as a dental assistant. But, with £3,000 of unpaid rent, she faced eviction from her council flat and possible imprisonment for unpaid tax. That was until 2002, when she sent a promotional video of herself to the new Channel 4 reality TV show, Big Brother.25
There can be few more shameful episodes in the British media’s recent history than the hounding of Jade Goody. The youngest contestant, she reacted badly to the claustrophobic pressure of the TV programme. She ate and drank to cope with the stress; she fooled around with one of the contestants; and she was bullied into getting naked on national television (which the producers made sure to feature in the edited highlights). The media despised her. Labelled a ‘pig’, she was mercilessly ridiculed for not knowing what asparagus was (the horror!) and for asking if ‘East Angular’ was abroad. ‘Vote the pig out!’ demanded the Sun, which also referred to her as an ‘oinker’. Others taunted her as a ‘vile fishwife’ and ‘The Elephant Woman’. As the campaign became a hysterical witch-hunt (indeed, one of the headlines was: ‘Ditch the Witch!’), members of the public stood outside the studios with placards reading: ‘Burn the Pig!’
It is remarkable that anyone could have turned this avalanche of hatred around. But she did. Her disarming, almost boundless honesty, her disregard for the social graces of ‘respectable’ society and her tortured background gradually endeared her to millions. When she returned to the world of reality TV, it was in the celebrity version of Big Brother. Then came the next wave of anti-Jade spite.
Appearing alongside Jade Goody was Shilpa Shetty, an Indian Bollywood actress from a wealthy background. Jade took an evident dislike to her, and there was open war between the two. It was a much misunderstood dispute. Shilpa suggested that Jade needed ‘elocution lessons’. When Jade infamously told the Indian actress to ‘go back to the slums’—a phrase wrongly taken to be racist in intent—she was attacking her for being what Jade described as ‘a posh, up-herself princess’ who should see what real life was like. ‘Ultimately, we were fighting because we were from different classes,’ she would later claim. ‘Who the fuck are you? You aren’t some Princess in Neverland,’ she screamed at Shilpa when she tried to flush a cooked chicken down the toilet. Other celebrities on the show, such as model Danielle Lloyd, suffered less media opprobrium despite calling Shetty a ‘dog’ and telling her to ‘fuck off home’. But Goody’s undoubtedly stupid and racially tinged references to the actress as ‘Shilpa Poppadom’ helped unleash a vitriolic media campaign.
‘CLASS V TRASH’ bellowed the Daily Express. The paper slammed ‘the porcine Jade Goody’ and mourned the fact that ‘Miss Shetty, a huge star in India, has been forced to endure the kind of bullying usually heard around sink estates … We are being disgraced around the world by the likes of semi-literate Jade and her unpleasant associates.’ The Express was outraged because it felt that a thick, ugly girl from a poor background was attacking a beautiful rich woman. ‘Jade and her allies clearly feel threatened by the presence of a woman from a very different strata [sic] of society from their own,’ it claimed.26 Simon Heffer assailed Goody for indulging ‘in the only form of bigotry the law now permits to go unpunished: that of hating your social superiors.’ He questioned why Channel 4 had to use Big Brother to broadcast the ‘repulsive aspects’ of society ‘when we can see them so easily for ourselves, if we wish, by wandering on to the nearest council estate for half an hour.’27 Even Stuart Jeffries in the liberal Guardian could not resist portraying the clash as ‘between ugly, thick white Britain and one imperturbably dignified Indian woman’. He even attacked Jade’s garbled English, suggesting she use her fortune for ‘remedial education’.28 But then Stuart Jeffries was being educated at Oxford University while Jade Goody’s heroin-addicted father was hiding guns underneath her cot.
On the BBC, Andrew Neil suggested she was just one of ‘a bunch of Vicky Pollards’ and ‘thick bitches’ cluttering TV screens. Richard Littlejohn described her as ‘the High Priestess of the Slagocracy’, and others offered her as ‘proof of Britain’s underclass’. In one BBC phone-in, she was described as ‘just another chav, the estates are full of them’. The host laughed and suggested ‘hosing them down’.29 Meanwhile, Hamant Verma, the former editor of Eastern Eye magazine, attributed ‘the open display of racism’ to ‘Channel 4’s decision to give near-illiterate chavs such as Jade Goody so much airtime’.30 One writer in the Nottingham Evening Post described Shetty’s tormentors as resembling ‘nothing more than a pack of slavering chav estate mongrels spoiling for a scrap’.31 It was not just Jade Goody under attack in these contributions: it was everybody who shared her background. Those at the bottom of the pile in British society were being presented as little more than animals. ‘They smell, they’re dirty’, was how literary critic John Carey described attitudes towards the poor in interwar Britain. How much have things changed?
As the journalist Fiona Sturges was to later put it: ‘Goody once again found herself vilified by the red-tops and held up as a terrible archetype of the white working class.’32 But when Jade Goody was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2008, there was genuine and widespread sympathy for her. It was as if the media were trying to atone for their guilt. Well, parts of the media, anyway. When she was initially diagnosed, Spectator columnist Rod Liddle penned a column entitled: ‘After Jade’s cancer, what next? “I’m a tumour, get me out of here”?’ Referring to Jade as ‘the coarse, thick, Bermondsey chav’, he suggested that the cancer had been invented by her publicist, Max Clifford.
Or again, it is not inconceivable, I suppose, that written into Goody’s contract was a demand that at some point she be seen to be suffering from a potentially fatal illness, given that without one she isn’t very interesting any more. A stroke would have made for more dramatic television, but cancer, you have to say, has a certain cachet.33
Just days before Jade Goody’s death, some journalists continued to take a pop at her as a proxy for those on the bottom rungs of society. ‘A vulgar loudmouth, she initially appeared on the show as a kind of token Hogarthian lowlife,’ wrote Jan Moir, a Daily Mail columnist. ‘First we have this godforsaken wedding, then the christening of her children, then an ungainly, lickety-split spring to death and the ultimate chav state funeral.’34 Moir was not alone in attacking Jade’s decision to allow television cameras to film her last weeks. When a figure such as celebrated journalist John Diamond recorded his own death from cancer through newspaper columns in The Times, he was applauded: but then again, he was a middle-class man writing for a middle-class newspaper.
What does the case of Jade Goody show us, other than the capacity of the British media for crassness and cruelty? Above all it demonstrated that it is possible to say practically anything about people from Jade’s background. They are fair game.
Big Brother was not the only reality TV show to lift the lid off class hatred. Wife Swap is a long-running Channel 4 programme where two wives with different backgrounds swap families for a couple of weeks. As Polly Toynbee has remarked, it should really be called ‘Class Swap’. Invariably, one of the parties is portrayed as a ‘dysfunctional’ working-class family: feckless, unable to look after kids, bigoted, fag-smoking, beer-swilling and so on. One former fan complained in an internet review that it was guilty of ‘soon deteriorating into fat uncouth working-class people slagging each other off between cigarettes and swigging canned lager, inviting a more sneering viewer to tune in.’ The journalist Toby Young felt sorry for Becky Fairhurst, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three whose marriage fell apart following the programme. ‘She’s an uneducated, white, working-class woman, and the programme’s makers left no stone unturned in their efforts to depict her as “council trash”,’ he wrote. He could not help but conclude that the programme ‘is designed to appeal to the snob in us. Here was a prime example of that urban species known as “the chav”.’35
The Jeremy Kyle chatshow has a similar purpose. Week after week, dysfunctional individuals from overwhelmingly working-class backgrounds are served up as daytime entertainment fodder. Vulnerable people with complex personal troubles are thrown in front of baying audiences: a ‘human form of bear-baiting’, as one British judge was to describe it. Intensely emotional problems like suspicions of infidelity and ‘who’s the real father?’ scenarios are exploited for the viewer’s vicarious thrills. Little wonder it was lambasted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation ‘as a rather brutal form of entertainment that is based on derision of the lower-working-class population.’ By portraying them as ‘undeserving’ it undermined support for anti-poverty initiatives, the Foundation claimed.36
And then, of course, there are the comedy chav caricatures. None has caught the popular imagination like Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard, created by comedians Matt Lucas and David Walliams. Pollard is presented as a grotesque working-class teenage single mother who is sexually promiscuous, unable to string a sentence together, and has a very bad attitude problem. In one sketch she swaps her baby for a Westlife CD. In another, when reminded to take her baby home she replies: ‘Oh no it’s OK, you can keep it, I’ve got loads more at home anyway.’ Johann Hari points out that we are laughing at two ex-private-school boys dressing up as working-class single mothers. Matt Lucas’s old school, Haberdashers’ Aske’s, charges around £10,000 a year. ‘But of course, when Jim Davidson dressed up as a black man to say all black people were thick, we quite rightly said how stupid and outrageous it was,’ says Hari.
All of this might be explained away as a bit of harmless fun. But consider the fact that a YouGov poll at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2006 revealed that most people working in television thought Vicky Pollard was an accurate representation of Britain’s white working class.37 Matt Lucas himself has attacked critics ‘who resent the fact that he and David are white, middle-class men, implying that they shouldn’t be allowed to create characters that are working-class single mums because they’re not from that world.’ His defence? ‘But if the observation rings true and is funny, then why should it matter who is making the observation and what their background is?’38 It’s OK for a privileged individual like him to mock working-class people—because working-class single mums really are like this.
No wonder Vicky Pollard has caught the imagination of right-wing class warriors. According to Richard Littlejohn, ‘Matt Lucas and David Walliams’ Burberried chavs captured perfectly the gruesome reality of so much of our modern landscape.’39 James Delingpole—who farcically argued that he was a member of the most discriminated-against group in society, ‘the white, middle-aged, public-school-and-Oxbridge-educated middle-class male’—was satisfied that ‘the Vicky Pollards and the Waynes and Waynettas of our world have got it coming to them. If they weren’t quite so repellent, we wouldn’t need to make jokes about them, would we?’ Indeed, Little Britain was funny because it was true:
The reason Vicky Pollard caught the public imagination is that she embodies with such fearful accuracy several of the great scourges of contemporary Britain: aggressive all-female gangs of embittered, hormonal, drunken teenagers; gym-slip mums who choose to get pregnant as a career option; pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who’ll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye; dismal ineducables who may not know much about English or History, but can damn well argue their rights with a devious fluency that would shame a barrister from Matrix Chambers.
Above all, ‘these people do exist and are every bit as ripe and just a target for social satire as were, say, the raddled working-class drunks set up by Hogarth in Gin Lane.’40 It was all right for privileged people like James Delingpole to stick it to working-class girls, because they really were ugly, thick and sluttish.
It is not just right-wing pundits who think working-class Britain is populated by Vicky Pollards: even the Beeb is guilty. An online news feature entitled ‘What is working class?’ was illustrated with a photo of Vicky Pollard and some of her friends. Below was the caption: ‘Does Vicky Pollard sum up the working class?’ The article did not answer the question, leaving the possibility open for the reader.41 As LSE researcher Deborah Finding says, ‘in laughing at Vicky Pollard—a fat, chain-smoking, single mother—we are expressing our fear and hatred of a group by projecting onto her stereotypical body the perceived qualities of all working-class single mothers—feckless, stupid and promiscuous.’42
The problem is not always that TV programmes deliberately set out to smear working-class people. Take Shameless, the long-running Channel 4 series focusing on the chaotic Gallagher family, which lives on the fictional Chatsworth Estate in Manchester. The dad is a drunken layabout who has fathered eight kids with two women. Their lives revolve around sex, benefits, crime and drugs. And yet the creator of Shameless is Paul Abbott. He is not some bigot from a pampered background who thinks it is funny to point and laugh at the ‘oiks’. In fact, he bases the series on his own experiences as a working-class boy growing up in Burnley. In the programme, one of the children ends up going to university; another is in the gifted and talented stream at school.
The problem with the series is that it fails to address how the characters ended up in their situation, or what impact the destruction of industry has had on working-class communities in Manchester. Class becomes a lifestyle choice, and poverty becomes a bit of a joke—not something that imprisons people and shatters their life chances. The series gives a middle-class viewer who has had no real contact with people from different backgrounds little opportunity to understand the broader context behind the issues raised. When I asked journalist Rachel Johnson who she thought the ‘underclass’ were, she immediately suggested Shameless. ‘But aren’t they fun! Doesn’t their life look more fun than our life?’ But why is it fun? ‘They’re just always having a great big paaaaarty!’ (For the last bit, she puts on a Mancunian accent).
Paul Abbott’s original plan for the series was rather different to how it actually panned out. According to George Faber, the co-founder of Company Pictures which produces Shameless, Abbott’s original idea ‘was substantially autobiographical, and he wanted to write it as a single film for television. He wrote about half of it. The tone was very downbeat and grim and he said, “This isn’t right, is it?” ’ So Abbott reworked the script so that, instead of being a gritty adaptation of his experiences, its main purpose was to make people laugh. ‘He was able to return to that period of his life and view it through a comedic prism,’ says Faber. “And in so doing, Shameless was born.’ The danger with the finished version is that the viewer is encouraged to laugh at, rather than understand, the lives of the characters.
You can see the confusion that arises among its middle-class viewers. ‘Do the real working-class people of this country watch Shameless?’ asks Kate Wreford on Channel 4’s Shameless website. ‘I am sort of middle class, but I wonder what the real working classes think of it?’43 On a student forum, one contributor asks if the series is ‘an accurate representation of British working-class people today?’ One of the replies was straight to the point. ‘Yes, many wc [working-class] people are scum. Many drink too much, smoke, steal and lack ambition.’44 Little wonder that when Robin Nelson, a professor of theatre and TV drama, interviewed working-class viewers of the series, they ‘declared their discomfort in watching Shameless because they feel they are being invited to laugh at their own class.’45
But modern entertainment does not encourage us only to laugh at the chavs. It also wants us to be afraid of them. There is no more extreme example of this than the film Eden Lake. The plot is fairly simple. An affluent, photogenic couple from London flee to the countryside for a romantic weekend holiday break. When they see that the idyllic Eden Lake is being transformed into gated communities, they make some right-on comments, wondering whom they are trying to keep out. They find out the hard way why the middle classes have every reason to fear the lower orders.
After the couple stand up to some local, semi-feral, aggressive dog-owning kids, they are mercilessly hunted down and tortured. Under the direction of a psychopathic ringleader, the kids use their mobile phones to film the boyfriend being slashed with knives before his body is burned. But perhaps most disturbing is the role of the parents—waitresses, painters and decorators and so on—who routinely swear and slap their kids about. In a shocking finale, it is they who apparently torture the girlfriend to death after she kills a couple of the ‘chavs’ in revenge.
When I asked the director, James Watkins, for an interview, I was told that he was ‘very flattered … but he doesn’t want to impose any authorial interpretations on Eden Lake, preferring instead the widely divergent reactions to the film.’ But it is difficult to imagine any other interpretation than that of the Sun’s movie critic, who condemned Watkins’s ‘nasty suggestion that all working-class people are thugs’. Or, for that matter, the Telegraph’s conclusion that ‘this ugly, witless film expresses fear and loathing of ordinary English people.’ Here was a film arguing that the middle classes could no longer live alongside the quasi-bestial lower orders. I cannot put it better than Stephen Pound, one of the few Labour MPs with a background in manual work, who told me:
I genuinely think that there are people out there in the middle classes, in the church and the judiciary and politics and the media, who actually fear, physically fear the idea of this great, gold bling-dripping, lum-penproletariat that might one day kick their front door in and eat their au pair.
It may not come as a surprise that the Daily Mail treated Eden Lake as though it was some sort of drama-documentary, quavering that it was ‘all too real’ and urging every politician to watch it. One reader of Time Out commented that the film ‘hits too close to home and will only grow and spread the anger that society holds for the lower classes. I myself and many of my friends have felt the violence from ignorant “children” … I have to say this without an ounce of regret if the death penalty ever came to this country … I would support it.’46 If you have a society as segregated along class lines as our own, and you show films portraying the working class as a bunch of psychopaths, do not be surprised if middle-class people start believing it.
When I asked Stephen Frears if he thought there was a lack of accurate working-class portrayals on our screens, he replied: ‘No, because isn’t that what soap operas do?’ But the soaps have travelled a long way from their origins. Rather than realistically showing how most people live their lives—with drama thrown in, of course—they have become sensationalized and caricatural. Already in the early 1990s, former EastEnders scriptwriter David Yallop savaged the show, arguing that it was ‘created by middle-class people with a middle-class view of the working class which is patronizing, idealistic and untruthful. It is a dreary show run by dreary people.’47
Has it really changed since then? What relationship is there between EastEnders—or Coronation Street for that matter—and the lives of millions of people working in shops, call centres and offices? Indeed, both soaps have a disproportionate number of small business people, like pub landlords, café owners, market stallholders and shopkeepers. The soaps compete with each other over frankly ludicrous plots: take the effective resurrection of Dirty Den in EastEnders, for example.
The film director Ken Loach thinks that, although soaps are set in working-class communities,
there’s a patronizing view of it in that here are people who are quaint and a bit raw and a bit rough and a bit funny. But you sense there is—and I don’t think this was the original intention of Coronation Street—but there’s now a kind of implied middle-class norm which views them and their antics and their fallings out and their fallings in love … as, well, ‘characters’. It’s like they’re the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when there’s always an implied other set of characters who look down on them.
The working class might not get a proper look-in on telly, but the wealthy are spoilt for choice. Switch on Britain’s Dream Homes or I Own Britain’s Best Home and watch Melissa Porter and Rhodri Owen saunter round rural Britain ogling country mansions; watch grand properties being restored in Country House Rescue; zap over to A Place in the Sun and let Amanda Lamb give you a guided tour of wealthy Britons fleeing to buy up in Greece or Crete. Indeed, property programmes like Relocation, Relocation and Property Ladder are two-a-penny. Above all, posh is mostly certainly in. Watch Old Etonian chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall rustle up an organic treat; be dazzled by the public-school charm of other TV chefs like Valentine Warner and Thomasina Miers; then enjoy the aristocratic Kirstie Allsopp encouraging you to gaze starry-eyed at unaffordable homes.
Too much of our television consists of promotional spiel for the lifestyles, desires and exclusive opportunities of the rich and powerful. It is all part of the redefining of aspiration, persuading us that life is about getting up that ladder, buying a bigger house and car and living it up in some private tropical paradise. It is not just that ordinary people watching these shows are made to feel inadequate. Those who do not strive for such dreams are thought of as ‘non-aspirational’ or, more bluntly, failures. The hopes and fears of working-class people, their surroundings, their communities, how they earn their living—this does not exist as far as TV is concerned. Where working-class people do appear, it is generally as caricatures invented by wealthy producers and comedians that are then, in turn, appropriated by middle-class journalists for political purposes.
Chav-hate has even trickled into the popular music scene. From the Beatles onwards, working-class bands once dominated rock, and indie music in particular: the Stone Roses, the Smiths, Happy Mondays and the Verve, to take a few popular examples. But it is difficult to name any prominent working-class bands since the heyday of Oasis in the mid 1990s: it is middle-class bands like Coldplay or Keane that now rule the roost in music. ‘There has been a noticeable drift towards middle-class values in the music business,’ says Mark Chadwick, the lead singer of rock band the Levellers. ‘Working-class bands seem to be few and far between.’ Instead there’s an abundance of middle-class impersonations of working-class caricatures, such as the ‘mockney’ style of artists like Damon Albarn and Lily Allen.
The Kaiser Chiefs made a name for themselves with the sort of repetitive indie anthem that lends itself to drunken chanting in a club. Listen carefully to their lyrics, however, and you discover pure class bile. Take ‘I Predict a Riot’: ‘I tried to get to my taxi / A man in a tracksuit attacked me / He said that he saw it before me / Wants to get things a bit gory / Girls scrabble around with no clothes on / To borrow a pound for a condom / If it wasn’t for chip fat, they’d be frozen / They’re not very sensible.’ The last lines reproduce the caricature of the undignified, ‘slapper’ chav girl.
Working-class people have become objects of ridicule, disapproval and, yes, hatred. Welcome to the world of British entertainment in the early twenty-first century.
The contempt for working-class people that built up under Thatcherism had reached its terrible zenith in the Hillsborough Disaster. Today, football continues to offer clues to the dramatic change in attitudes over the past three decades. By looking at what has happened to the traditional sporting passion of working-class Britain, we can get a good idea of the cultural impact of chav-hate. The ‘beautiful game’ has been transformed beyond recognition.
Although major clubs shifted away from their origins long ago—for example, Manchester United was founded by railwaymen—they remained deeply rooted in working-class communities. Footballers were generally boys plucked from the club’s local area. Unlike the spoiled plutocrats that some Premier League players have become, for much of the twentieth century ‘footballers were often worse off than the crowds watching them from the terraces on a Saturday,’ as footballer Stuart Imlach’s son has written.48 Back in the early 1950s, there was a maximum salary for players of just £14 a week during the season—not very much over the average manual wage—and only one in five players were lucky enough to earn that. Players lived in ‘tied cottages’—houses owned by clubs from which they could be evicted at any moment. Little wonder one footballer, speaking at the 1955 Trades Union Congress, complained that ‘the conditions of the professional footballer’s employment are akin to slavery.’
Football has gone from one extreme to another. The cold winds of free-market economics had largely been kept out of the football world during the 1980s. In the 1990s, they hit with a vengeance. In 1992, the twenty-two clubs of the old First Division broke away to establish the Premier League, freeing them from the requirement to share revenues with clubs in the rest of the League. Part of the new commercial ethos was to keep many working-class people out of the stadium. In its Blueprint for the Future of Football, the Football Association argued that the game must attract ‘more affluent middle-class consumers’.49
When the old terraces were abolished after the Hillsborough Disaster, the cheaper standing tickets disappeared. Between 1990 and 2008, the price of the average football ticket rose by 600 per cent, well over seven times the rate of everything else.50 This was completely unaffordable for many working-class people. But some senior football figures were not only aware of this—they even celebrated it. As former England manager Terry Venables put it:
Without wishing to sound snobbish or to be disloyal to my own working-class background, the increase in admission prices is likely to exclude the sort of people who were giving English football a bad name. I am talking about the young men, mostly working-class, who terrorized football grounds, railway trains, cross-channel ferries and towns and cities throughout England and Europe.
The demonization of working-class people was being used to justify hiking up ticket prices and, in the process, to keep them out.
At the same time, football became big money—and big business. In the early 1990s, Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB signed an agreement to pay £305 million for exclusive rights to the new FA Carling Premiership. In 1997 they signed another four-year deal, with a £670 million price tag. Not only are huge numbers of working-class people financially barred from stadiums: many cannot even watch their team play unless they splash out on a Sky box. Meanwhile, the huge amount of money sloshing about in the game has severed football teams from their local communities. Huge transfer fees mean that players from hundreds or thousands of miles away dominate the major teams. Clubs have become the playthings of American asset-strippers and Russian oligarchs. And, with players paid up to £160,000 a week, they are completely divorced from their working-class roots. Labour MP Stephen Pound mourns the loss of this working-class icon. ‘If you look at the working-class heroes—people like Frank Lampard and David Beckham—what’s the first thing they do? They move out of the working-class areas into Cheshire or Surrey. The role models don’t have the confidence to stick with it.’
It is the ultimate insult. A game that was at the centre of working-class identity for so long has been transformed into a middle-class consumer good controlled by billionaire carpetbaggers. Caricaturing all working-class fans as aggressive hooligans intent on mindless violence has provided the excuse to keep them out.
Football was identified as a potentially lucrative piece of working-class culture, so it was taken away and repackaged. But in today’s Britain, nothing about working-class life is considered worthy or admirable. ‘“Working class” is no longer a term that can be qualified with the word “respectable”, because it is now almost wholly a subtly loaded insult,’ wrote the journalist Deborah Orr. ‘The term carries with it implications of the worst sort of conservative, retrogressive values.’51
None of the chav-bashing we’ve explored can be understood in isolation. It is part and parcel of an offensive against everything associated with the working class, started by Thatcherism and cemented by New Labour. ‘I think culture reflects politics,’ says Ken Loach. ‘There was a major shift… during the Thatcher years. … It was the era of “loads of money”, it was the era of “look after number one”, all the jewellery, the City Boys with their red braces—it was a worship of capital.’ This vanquishing of working-class Britain had inevitable cultural consequences. ‘So, after that, the trade unions were diminished, working-class culture was diminished, celebration of working-class culture was diminished—but it stemmed from that political moment,’ Loach says.
A great hero of working-class culture was [left-wing theatre director] Joan Littlewood. And she put on plays at Stratford East, they were probably some of the best theatre we’ve ever produced. Original, anarchic, humorous, humane, funny, rumbustious; but a great sense of empowerment for working-class people in politics. It’s impossible to imagine something like that in the aftermath of the Thatcher regime.
Everything is to be judged by middle-class standards because, after all, that is what we are expected to aspire to. The working class is therefore portrayed as a useless vestige made up of ‘non-aspirational’ layabouts, slobs, racists, boozers, thugs—you name it.
It is both tragic and absurd that, as our society has become less equal and as in recent years the poor have actually got poorer, resentment against those at the bottom has positively increased. Chav-hate is a way of justifying an unequal society. What if you have wealth and success because it has been handed to you on a plate? What if people are poorer than you because the odds are stacked against them? To accept this would trigger a crisis of self-confidence among the well-off few. And if you were to accept it, then surely you would have to accept that the government’s duty is to do something about it—namely, by curtailing your own privileges. But, if you convince yourself that the less fortunate are smelly, thick, racist and rude by nature, then it is only right they should remain at the bottom. Chav-hate justifies the preservation of the pecking order, based on the fiction that it is actually a fair reflection of people’s worth.
To what extent is chav-hate just a new wave of old-style snobbery, rebranded for the twenty-first century? Snobbery certainly comes into it. Just look at the mocking of the tracksuit-and-bling style popular among some working-class people, especially teenagers. It is true that people’s backgrounds often define how they dress. Walk into the bar of Oxford University’s debating society, the Oxford Union, and you will see a crowd of public-school types wearing bow ties, tweed jackets and pink cords. There is even a chance you will spot the odd one with a pipe in hand. You might think that people in tracksuits or people in tweeds look pretty silly—but who cares? Or, alternatively, why should we care?
But the reality is that chav-hate is a lot more than snobbery. It is class war. It is an expression of the belief that everyone should become middle class and embrace middle-class values and lifestyles, leaving those who don’t to be ridiculed and hated. It is about refusing to acknowledge anything of worth in working-class Britain, and systematically ripping it to shreds in newspapers, on TV, on Facebook, and in general conversation. This is what the demonization of the working class means.
The caricatures thrown up by chav-hate have other consequences. Coupled with the ludicrous mainstream political view that Britain is now a classless society, the ‘chav’ phenomenon obscures what it means to be working class today. The myth that British society is divided between an affluent middle-class majority and a declining working-class rump has airbrushed the reality of class in Britain today. An overwhelmingly middle-class political and media establishment has been more than happy to foster this image. That is not to say that the working class has not been changed dramatically by the Thatcherite crusade. It’s time to look beyond the Vicky Pollards, chav bops and reality TV shows, and ask: ‘What is the working class in twenty-first century Britain?’