Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

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I ask her what jobs there are for young people. ‘There’s nothing! There’s nothing! My son’s twenty-four now and he joined the Army because there was nothing. His dream was to be a barman, and he went to the college, and he did silver service and all the training that’s around for barmen. And he got jobs, but then they laid him off: “Oh, we haven’t got enough work, we haven’t got work”.’ Owen Jones". The Independent. London. Archived from the original on 19 March 2013 . Retrieved 2 March 2013. The notes for the play suggested that the writer wanted it to encourage people to think about the nature of class differences in Australia – but really, you can’t achieve critical reflections upon the basis of a series of clichés and stereotypes. Stereotypes reinforce prejudice and stop people thinking. That’s literally their point, to allow us to not have to think about (or know how to respond to) people we press into the stereotype. Tax credits are a lifeline for many low-paid workers. But, perversely, they make low pay economically viable and create disincentives for employers to do anything about it. After all, why pay your workers more if the state will top up their wages? As the Guardian’s Larry Elliott puts it, tax credits are ‘essentially the state subsidizing poverty wages’.

It is fashionable among Conservative politicians and right-wing commentators to talk of council housing promoting ‘dependency’ among its tenants, but Thomas fiercely rejects this. ‘It’s sometimes suggested that social housing is somehow a cause of deprivation, it’s actually pushing people into poverty and reinforcing dependency. We wouldn’t see it like that. We would see it as a vital safety net that actually provides people with an affordable, stable base from which they can actually go on and prosper, and build up other aspects of their life, without which it’s going to be very, very difficult for them to do so.’

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". The book was selected by critic Dwight Garner of The New York Times as one of his top 10 non-fiction books of 2011, and it was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] I was committed to the left, and trying to make the left a massive political force. So I was thinking “how can I popularise this?” I wasn’t convinced academia was the way forward. So then I decided the best way of getting left ideas out was to write a book and provoke a debate. And the whole point of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class was that left politics, at its root, was class politics. Who’s got wealth and power, and who doesn’t. But my frustration with a lot of left academic books was that they were aimed at quite niche markets and weren’t read by the sorts of people who needed to read them. To get to the heart of these stereotypes, Gingerbread conducted a wide-ranging study into the lives of single parents in modern Britain. ‘What we found bore no relationship to the stereotype in the majority of the cases,’ she says. ‘And what came through is an extraordinary, palpable sense of anger about the stereotyping.’ You would not think it from the way they are popularly portrayed, but 57 per cent of single parents actually have a job.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class is a non-fiction work by the British writer and political commentator Owen Jones, first published in 2011. [2] [3] It discusses stereotypes of sections of the British working class (and the working class as a whole) and use of the pejorative term chav. The book received attention in domestic and international media, including selection by critic Dwight Garner of The New York Times as one of his top 10 non-fiction books of 2011 in the paper's Holiday Gift Guide and being long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] The book explores the political and economic context for the alienation of working-class Britain. It references the impact of British government policy from the Thatcher era onwards and how it has been used as a political weapon to disenfranchise the working class, dismantle societal structures designed to support the working class – such as unions – and pit working class communities against each other. [ citation needed] Owen Jones: What I warned about in the book was that class had been abandoned by the Labour Party, and that left the vacuum, which meant that a savvy right-wing populist could present itself as the champion of an abandoned and demonised working class. And it happened. The BNP won a load of council seats in Barking and Dagenham, and then later you get the UKIP surge. Jones, Owen (24 March 2013). "How the People's Assembly can challenge our suffocating political consensus and why it's vital that we do". Independent. Archived from the original on 26 September 2015 . Retrieved 25 June 2023. So who are today’s incapacity benefit claimants? Beatty and Fothergill discovered that they were ‘typically the poorly qualified, low-skill manual worker in poor health, whose alternative would at best be unrewarding work or close to the national minimum wage.’ That means the type of person claiming incapacity benefit is different than it was even a decade ago, even though the headline figure has remained fairly constant. The researchers looked at the example of Barrow-in-Furness in North West England: a former shipbuilding town hit by industrial collapse. Incapacity benefit claimants in the 1990s were largely laid-off skilled shipyard workers, but now they were low-skill, poorly qualified workers who had dropped out of their last job because of ill-health, and were ‘now disenchanted with the idea of ever returning to work’.The Independent on Sunday named Jones as one of its top 50 Britons of 2011, for the manner in which his book raised the profile of class-based issues. [26] In November 2012, Jones was awarded Journalist of the Year at the Stonewall Awards, along with The Times journalist Hugo Rifkind. [27] Jones' second book, The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, was published in September 2014. [28]

As with all these things, there is always some elements of truth in what is being said, but they are extrapolated for effect or exaggerated to create a better story from the media’s point of view’. Owen Jones cites this quote to support a core element of his argument – that the media, the inevitably middle class journalists, manipulate certain stories (here he refers to the Shannon Matthews case of 2008) to deprecate the working class. Ironically, in his book ‘Chavs: The demonisation of the working class’, Jones is guilty of the same crime. For me this book is fundamentally dishonest. Poorly researched and heavily biased, Jones lambasts the middle class of which, economically at least, he is part. The rest is indirectly observed and a rant more against the media than support for some working class idyll of which he has no experience. I take this personally. My parents were manual workers at the lowest echelon of that grouping and worked incredibly hard yet my dad was a staunch Tory - he just didn't trust people who used politics to elevate themselves whilst proclaiming to support the very working class they were eager to leave behind. It was a very individual opinion. I have lived amongst the traveller community and experienced its own influence on my kids and the rise of the 'chavi' culture, rather than chav. I wouldn't have written this book as I can't really make any of my experiences so conveniently fit a political agenda. None of the the issues that Jones touches so lightly upon are that simple. An evening of Socialism with Owen Jones". Canterbury Labour Party. 26 October 2017. Archived from the original on 13 February 2021 . Retrieved 2 February 2021. Jones describes himself as a democratic socialist, indeed, socialism used to be a term the Labour Party was more than happy to champion.

BBC's Nicholas Witchell slammed over 'tasteless' speculation on Queen's health". The National (Scotland). 8 September 2022 . Retrieved 10 September 2022. Jones spoke at a press conference to launch the People's Assembly Against Austerity on 26 March 2013, and regional public meetings in the lead-up to a national meeting at Central Hall Westminster on 22 June 2013. [31] [32] In November 2013, he delivered the Royal Television Society's Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture, Totally Shameless: How TV Portrays the Working Class. [33] In only a decade or so, Thatcherism had completely changed how class was seen,” Mr. Jones writes. “The wealthy were adulated. All were now encouraged to scramble up the social ladder, and be defined by how much they owned. Those who were poor or unemployed had no one to blame but themselves.” Though definitely not a great work of theory, or academic in nature, Jones is quite capable of using the statistical evidence to underline his points, and includes data on such things as the growing disparities in wealth, the lower proportion of GDP going to wages (as opposed to the increasing share going to owners of capital), the effect of immigration on wages, etc.