Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

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While Britons were encouraged to make more of themselves and enter into a middle class ‘norm’, opportunities were becoming fewer, poverty was rising, and stories of mass social mobility were grossly exaggerated. That is until we sat down to reflect on his 2011 book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class , and I made him watch an FKA twigs video. The post-1945 settlement was based on the idea that there were social injustices that needed collective solutions. In 2015, Jones was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of the University (DUniv) by Staffordshire University.

Download Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones in PDF EPUB format complete free.This, he argues, was created and then mercilessly lampooned by the middle-class, rightwing media and its more combative columnists. Lur afwspcpfrs fcgfrby euat klwa elrrlr stlrnfs cmlut ―bndf cjlag tef `ecvs„ cak pcss tefj ldd cs rfprfsfatctnvf ld wlronag-`bcss `ljjuantnfs. There is a tinge of the noble savage here and there, particularly in the over-careful way he presents and interprets quotes by his working-class interviewees.

As twigs stalks a housing estate in the notorious beige check, pushing a pram containing a baby goat, Jones thinks again. However, more could have been made to unpack what relation ‘chav’ has to the working class in general. The word's origins are unclear: it may derive from the Romany word "chavi", meaning "child", but it is now usually understood as an acronym for "council house and violent". Thatcher’s policies as prime minister: her administration’s destruction of unions, its raising of the tax burden on the poor, its allowing if not encouraging industry to fall into ruin. Jones singles out for opprobrium middle-class contempt towards working-class people, those regarded by rightwing commentators such as Simon Heffer as the "feral underclass".In 2011, Jones published his first book, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, dissecting cultural stereotypes of the British working-class as boorish and anti-social " chavs". But by the late 00s, there was a vicious, obsessive anti-welfare onslaught in the mainstream media – and it was indulged by New Labour politicians. ef mbc`o`urrcat `effsf`cof wcs mfnag `crfd ubby sbn`fk cak tef `lavfrs ctnla eck krndtfk tl tef tlpn` ld tef jlj fat , te f ` rfk nt `rua `e.

As Jones clearly notes in the book, ‘chav’ (and ‘chav-bashing’) is the perfect embodiment of how far the class war, waged by the political establishment, and perpetuated by many in the mainstream media, has come. Efrf N wcs, wntafssnag c pefaljfala tect glfs mc`o euakrfks ld yfcrs8 tef wfcbtey jl`onag tef bfss wfbb-ldd. Exposing the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, one based on the media’s inexhaustible obsession with an indigent white underclass, he portrays a far more complex reality.Claiming that people are largely responsible for their circumstances facilitates the opposite conclusion.

One one level, Jones has written a book about how the dread word "chav" came into being and how it has been bandied about without much thought. Jones is good on the causes of what appears to be a new sense of working-class powerlessness – the waning power of the unions, the destruction of traditional jobs and, with them, the communities they fostered, the reckless rush towards globalisation and the attendant deregulation of the markets, which has bred a kind of helplessness among those left behind. Jones – understandably given the book's subtitle – treats class hatred as a one-way street, rather than a collusive, often subtle, process which demeans everyone.The book poses this principled question: How did the salt of the earth come to be viewed as the scum of the earth? In early 2004 I worked briefly for a tabloid newspaper whose offices rang with its daily use (along with its bedmate, "pikey"), directed not towards the paper's readers, but towards those it was assumed would be too "thick" to read any newspaper at all. This was uttered by the host of a dinner party attended by the author in "a gentrified part of east London", at which liberal views are taken as a given and, though everyone present has a professional job, not everyone is white, male or straight. The crimes committed by "chavs" included being too loud, too flash, too drunk, too vulgar and, most inexcusable of all, too disrespectful towards their "betters".