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  • Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
  • Jason Russell
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 Chavs: 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 Part y governed Britain. [End Page 345] 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 back -grounds. 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 up-bringing 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...

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