Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (London: Verso 2011)
THE WORKING CLASS has gradually disappeared from social discourse in North America. Referring to the middle class is much more politically acceptable. In Chars: The Demonization of the Working Class, Owen Jones shows that the working class must still be at the forefront of social, political, and cultural analysis. His analysis of the contemporary working class in the United Kingdom, principally de-industrialized northern England, is a cautionary tale that should make North American policy makers pause and realize that class matters as much as it ever did.
The English middle class has traditionally been associated with professional employment, public schools that are really private schools, and deliberately cultivated patterns of social behaviour. Jones opens his narrative by recounting an incident at a typical middle-class social event: a dinner party. A guest made a joke about the imminent closure of venerable British retailer Woolworths, and speculated about where chavs would be able to shop after the firm had closed. It is around this term--chavs--that Jones organizes his discussion. It is a derogatory term used by the media, politicians, and average citizens to describe much of what remains of the British working class.
Jones devotes considerable, and justified, attention to the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s when the Conservative Party governed Britain. The British left has long argued that the Conservative government, as the political committee of the capitalist class, had a clear plan for shifting wealth away from workers and otherwise promoting moneyed interests at the expense of everyone else in the country. Jones appears to have gained remarkable access to major policy makers from the Conservative era --such as former Conservative minister Geoffrey Howe--and confirmed that the left was correct. The rich were idolized, and Britain gradually deindustrialized.
The Conservative and Labour parties in Britain used to have distinct policy platforms, and were led by people with clearly different socioeconomic backgrounds. Moving from a boarding school such as Eton or Harrow to either Oxford or Cambridge, then on to a well-connected profession and into a safety seat as a Tory member of parliament was a common career path for Conservative Party leaders. Labour, at least prior to the last fifteen years of the 20th century, was led by people from much humbler roots. Leadership in both parties changed as the Blair era followed the Thatcher era. Jones reveals current British Prime Minister David Cameron to be even more of a child of privilege than the media has shown. Having flown to a birthday party in New York City on the supersonic Concorde jet (a premier conveyance of the rich and famous) at age 11, Cameron is a quintessential product of the British aristocracy. (75) Tony Blair came from somewhat less exalted roots, but there was ultimately little social difference between him and the Conservative politicians he faced across the aisle in the House of Commons.
Jones spends a lot of time discussing the infamous British tabloid media, and uses notable cases of working-class people being particularly vilified for no other reason than their social status. One particularly tragic episode involved an under-paid dental assistant named Jade Goody. From a mixed-race background, she recalled seeing parts of her own upbringing in the film Trainspotting--a film based on Irvine Welsh's book about drug use in inner-city Scotland. (122) Goody, speaking in her working-class midlands accent, went on the television program Big Brother and was quickly referred to as a pig by the popular press. (123) The working class, as personified by Goody, was an object of derision and ridicule.
The working class has also disappeared from other forms of popular entertainment in Britain. A country that created the music of white working-class alienation--heavy metal--now produces pop bands with middle-class pedigrees. Professional sports, which were once marketed to working-class consumers, are now more of a middle-class leisure outlet. Professional football (soccer) in England is dominated by the Premier League and features highly paid players and costly ticket prices. Football is not accessible to working-class sports fans, who used to support it, but there is still a popular fixation in the British press on so-called working-class football hooligans.
Jones correctly identifies the loss of well-paid industrial employment as the cause for much of the working class's current condition. He describes Birmingham, once the home of Rover's enormous Longbridge automotive assembly plant, as an example of the impact of deindustrialization. The plant closed during the Blair years, and 6000 workers became unemployed. The community around the plant gradually slid into a morass of social and economic despair. Right-wing politicians and reactionary media outlets respond to such conditions by attempting to root out suspected abusers of social assistance, and otherwise blame communities and workers for job losses.
This is not an academic volume, and it would have been helpful if Jones had offered some solutions for the genuinely bad socioeconomic policies that both Conservative and Labour governments promoted in Britain for the past 35 years. Race appears in his discussion, such as in his analysis of reactionary political movements like the British National Party, but including more analysis of race would have made this book even more timely. Jones' narrative is nonetheless compelling and raises many important questions.
The working class in Canada and the United States has also suffered in the past 35 years, especially from deindustrialization. It is not yet socially acceptable to publicly demonize working-class people to the extent that is done in Britain, but Canadians and Americans are getting close to that point. Unemployed blue-collar workers, people who reside in dilapidated inner-city neighbourhoods, and low-income single parents are humiliated and patronized on television programs like Maury Povich and Dr. Phil. Popular media commentators like Don Cherry, who are generally ignored by middle-class media consumers, attempt to stoke working-class biases against progressive social and cultural policies. Canadian and American readers of Chars should thus see the cautionary themes round in its pages. Britain was a country that, although it was historically divided by clear class differences, was a manufacturing power whose wealth was based on working-class labour. Manufacturing industry is now gone, and the working class is marginalized and ridiculed. Canadians and Americans will hopefully not continue to go down the same path.
JASON RUSSELL
State University of New York, Empire State College