Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class
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Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class Chavs, written more than five years ago, is a polemic about a society that was unnecessarily unjust, cruel, divided; since its original publication in 2011 Britain has only become more unjust, cruel and divided. The book appeared in print less than twelve months after the Conservatives returned to Downing Street, after thirteen years in the political wilderness, and it had three central purposes: to refute the myth that Britain is a classless society, when in fact huge amounts of wealth and power are concentrated in very few hands; to tackle the poisonous mantra that social problems like poverty are actually individual failings; and to encourage the idea that social progress comes about by people with similar economic interests organizing together to change society. In the 1980s, Thatcherism remodelled British society. Since 2010, the Tory government has busined itself with an ambitious project for rolling back the state in an effort to complete Thatcher’s work. On the one hand, for the sorts of people who tend to fund the Conservative Party – not least those in the financial sector that plunged Britain into an economic mire – the last few years have been a boomtime. During one of the great economic truaumas of modern British history, the fortunes of the wealthiest 1000 britons more than doubled. On the other, the plight of working people stands in stark contrast. Workers suffered the longest fall in pay packets since the 1870s. And then there was the hunger. Britain is one of the richest societies ever to exist and yet hundreds of thousands of Britons depend on food banks for their meals. A central plank of the government’s programme was to reduce the welfare state. In order to justify this, a campaign of myths, distortion and demonization was employed. The nation’s finances were out of control, said the government, blaming excessive Labour spending on schools and hospitals during the 1990s. Here was a deliberately misleading conflation of spending in different branches of government to create one single image of desperation. In fact most of the money within the welfare budget goes on pensioners who have paid in all their lives; and, indeed, the government was quick to assure voters that tehir pensions and entitlements would be protected. In contrast, the amount spent on unemployed people is only a relatively small fraction of social security spending. yet this group took a disproportionate amount of the blame for the welfare crisis. Support for the government’s efforts to cut back on spending depended on portraying the recipients of social security as workshy, feckless freeloaders. It required the ruthless and unapologetic application of the politics of envy to hammer its point home. Low-paid workers faced having their in-work benefits slashed and were getting wages that could in no way sustain a comfortable existence. But when they should have directed their ire at the government or their employers, they were encouraged to resent the unemployed people supposedly living it up at their expense. Since the 2008 crisis, rather than helping the poor, Tory ministers have openly condemned them as ‘skivers’ and ‘shirkers’ to exploit divisions within the working class. In the House of Commons, David Cameron announced, “We back the workers, they back the shirkers.” The Chancellor, George Osborne, asked, “Where is the fairness… for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?” Jones, Owen (2016). Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. Verso, London UK. Demonization has become an ever more powerful instrument of divide-and-rule. Government attempts to stir up resentment against benefit claimants targeted in particular those low-paid workers who were struggling in large part because of coalition policies. This was calculated to reinforce the myth that beneift claimants were often better off than those slogging their guts out at work. To drive this message home, at the beginning of 2013, the coalition unveiled the Welfare Benefits Uprating Bill, a piece of legislation that imposed a real-terms cut in benefits. This was British politics at its most base and cynical. For the first time since 1931, a government was intentionally slashing the incomes of the poor. Charities projected that hundreds of thousands of children would be driven into poverty as a result. Throughout the Parliamentary debate, Tory MPs – many of whom were millionaires – jeered and guffawed as they prepared to plunge people they would never meet below the poverty line. “TODAY LABOUR ARE VOTING TO INCREASE BENEFITS BY MORE THAN WORKERS’ WAGES”, claimed a Tory poster. But in actual fact the majority of those affected were in working households. Low-paid workers faced a double whammy of real-terms pay cuts and reduced tax credits thanks to the Tory government, too. Worker and unemployed alike were being mugged. The so-called bedroom tax was another example. In this proposed legislation social tenants deemed to have a ‘spare bedroom’ would suffer a cut in their housing benefit, forcing them to pay more to stay in their own homes. These were disproportionately people living in poverty with little money to spare; it was estimated that two-thirds of households affected had disabled residents. So-called spare bedrooms were often rooms for carers, or customized for disabilities. If bedroom-tax victims wished to avoid losing money, they had to downsize properties: but with a national shortate of one-bedroom social houses, this was simply not a f easible proposition for most people. In other words, those living in overcrowded homes, or trapped on a 5-million-strong social housing waiting list, were encouraged to resent disabled people with a little extra living space rather than attack the government for failing to build enough homes. At the same time, work assessments of disabled people were drastically expanded under the Cameron government. This process of testing people to see if they are able to work was initially overseen by the French corporation Atos, and led to many sick and disabled people being deemed fit for work and having their benefits taken away. Journalists and politicians vilified those put-upon individuals, suggesting that they were falsely claiming disability payments, and this had very real consequences. In the years of the Cameron era, disability charities warned that media and political rhetoric had driven a disturbing jump in the abuse of disabled people. The mental health charity, Scope, for example, found that two-thirds of disabled people reported abuse in September 2011, a jump from 41 percent just a few months before. It was not just politicians and newspapers, who began to attack the poor. In an atmosphere of near hysteria, television producers wanted a piece of the action too. Channel 4 announced that they were to broadcast Skint, described as an observational documentary focusing on a co mmunity in Scunthorpe hammered by de-industrialization. Jones, Owen (2016). Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. Verso, London UK. When the show materialized however, it foregrounded chaotic life-styles and larger-than-life carticatures for viewers’ voyeuristic pleasure. In similar fashion, another Channel 4 programme, Benefits Street, hunted down unsympathetic benefit claimants on a street near Birmingham. The audience’s reaction triggered a wave of demands on social media for the participants to be hanged or gassed. These are programmes that aimed to turn the poor against the poor, commissioned and produced by the privileged. Then there was BBC 3’s People Like Us, a show revolving around an estate in Harphurhey, Manchester, which had the same approach. Local residents staged a furious meeting, attacking a “biased and distorted” view of the community, and a local council worker, Richard Searle, whose daughter appeared in the programme, argued that “the BBC should not be propagating this harmful and misleading image of the working class”. Channel 5 staged a three-part series focusing on criminal behaviour: Shoplifters and Proud, Pick Pockets and Proud, and finally, On Beneifts and Proud. Again, the focus was on extreme examples of the socially excluded, particularly from unusually large families, like heather Frost’s, a woman with eleven children who had already been widely featured in the mainstream media. Many of these programmes barely gestured toward objectivity or accuracy. Take The Future of the Welfare State, presented by veteran BBC interviewer John Humphreys, which claimed that Britain was living in an ‘age of entitlement’. The programme was later found by the BBC Trust to have violated impartiality and accuracy rules. This out-and-out propaganda relied on the usual box of tricks: unearthing extreme examples, relying on interviews from biased sources, and not backing up audacious claims with statistics or facts. The Trust ruled that the programme left viewers ‘unable to reach an informed opinion’. Another line of attack was to encourage private sector workers to turn on public sector workers. In this way real-terms government cuts to public sector pay were justified in the light of the cuts private sector workers had suffered. Attacks on public sector pensions were defended on the basis that private sector pensions had been ravaged. Indeed, private sector pensions had been decimated, but that was the fault of private sector bosses, not dinner ladies and bin-collectors. Throughout the 1990s, for example, companies save 18 billion pounds in pension holidays even as their workers continued to contribute. Rather than turn on the boss, the shelf-stacker and call centre worker, encouraged by the government and media, turned instead on the nurse and the teacher whose pension was intact.