Chavs - The Demonization of the Working Class Page 2

  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. Ialso 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 itmust 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 itfrom 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. 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-s-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 dis- tracted 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, inescap- ably, 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 class ism 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 itwas 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 notwas exactly what Ihad intended. But the debate took an unexpected tum a couple of months after the book was published. For a few days in August 2011, itlooked as though England was staring into an abyss of social chaos-s-and the demonization Ihad 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 ofTottenham 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-particularIy 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. 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 tonormality. 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 WorId War II have so many fires raged in London so intensely at one time,' claimed Time magazine.

  Amid the chaos, commentators looked at Chavs in a new light. Partly, I suppose, because the word' chav' was being bandied around to descr
ibe 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, Iwas 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 plannedrant took an even more alarming tum 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 W orld 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 demonizarion, 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 lain 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 Westminsterannounced 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 indisorder, 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 young men were jailed for four years--more of bottled water. Two

  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 1930sand 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 rioters, admittedly televisions that were later carted out of shops by 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. lain 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.