class as a guiding political principle, its opponents on the right will not. In this age of crisis, tumult and chaos, the interests of a diverse working class must be unapologetically championed: young and old, white and BAME, straight and LGBTQ. It is only through struggle, through collective action, by asserting that more unites the working class than divides it that social progress and, in time, emancipation will be achieved. In these traumatic times, victory is certainly not assured: but it remains our only hope.
London, June 2020
Chavs, written more than five years ago, is a polemic about a society that was unnecessarily unjust, cruel and 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, when I was growing up, Thatcherism remodelled British society. Since 2010, despite Tory leader David Cameron’s initial avowals of moderation, his government has busied itself with an ambitious project for rolling back the state in an effort to complete Thatcher’s work.
On 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 traumas of modern British history, the fortunes of the wealthiest 1,000 Britons more than doubled.1 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, yes, 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. Britain’s huge deficit, so the allegations went, arose from reckless Whitehall largesse, not the global financial meltdown. The ‘welfare’ bill—standing at £251bn2—needed to be slashed.
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 their pensions and entitlements would be protected. In contrast, the amount spent on unemployed people—which is what the electorate was encouraged to understand by ‘welfare’—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.’3 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?’4 Demonization has become an ever more powerful instrument of divide-and-rule.
I began Chavs by detailing the story of Shannon Matthews, a young girl who was kidnapped by her own mother in a perverse attempt to extort money from the tabloid press. The media and politicians alike hijacked the case, hoping to persuade their audience that this wanton, aberrant act was emblematic of a broad swathe of society: the chavs.
The handling of this story foreshadowed an even more sinister manipulation of individual cruelty. At the beginning of April 2013, Derby resident Mick Philpott and his wife were sent to prison for life for the manslaughter of six of their children. It was a sickening crime. Philpott had set fire to the family home, hoping to blame his mistress, who had left the house she shared with him and his wife, taking several children with her. It was a story of habitual violence and misogyny: Philpott had tyrannized his wife and mistress, both of whom worked while he was unemployed. When he was a soldier in the late 1970s, he had shot his then girlfriend with a crossbow, claiming her skirt was too short, before he eventually stabbed both her and her mother.5
But the Daily Mail knew an opportunity when it saw one. Just hours after Philpott was sentenced in court, the newspaper plastered ‘VILE PRODUCT OF WELFARE UK’ across its front page.6 Here, it stated, was a damning insight into a welfare state that subsidised shirkers (even though much of the Philpotts’ income came from in-work benefits: this was, after all, a working household). This atrocity was thus twisted into an indictment of government assistance. It was the sort of faulty logic and wilful use of omission that had been previously used to create an erroneous connection between mass-murdering GP Harold Shipman and ordinary doctors, or to obscure the unfairness of inheritance in reporting the case of forty-six-year-old fraudster Stephen Seddon, who murdered his parents in 2013 for their £230,000 estate.7 Philpott’s large family was portrayed as somehow typical of benefit claimants, despite statistics showing that out of 1.35 million families claiming at least one out-of-work benefit, just 190 had ten children or more.8
The Daily Mail served an important function here. The paper helps to fan anger and resentment toward benefit claimants with every issue. It creates a climate in which the political elite can join in, too. Never wilfully missing an opportunity for political gain, George Osborne waded into the debate stirred up by the Mail’s coverage of the Philpotts, suggesting that it was right to ‘ask questions as a government, a society and as taxpayers, why we are subsidising lifestyles like these’.9 The Mail’s campaign as a whole was an instructive lesson; a reminder that even the killing of six little children could be transformed into political fodder, their names barely even mentioned as their suffering was manipulated as propaganda.
The truth, however, is no less shocking. According to the government’s own estimates, around 0.7 per cent of social security spending is lost to benefit fraud. But the Conservatives have created a system that drips extreme examples of such wrongdoing to the media, fuelling the myth that there exist huge numbers of dishonest benefit claimants. Examples gleefully fed to journalists include a claimant pretending that officials had got him mixed up with his ‘evil twin brother’ and another trying to pass off his wife as his sister. This is bad behaviour, to be sure, but actions typical of only a tiny minority.10 Examples of unemployed people desperate to work, sending countless CVs to employers without eliciting a response, don’t make for good copy on this government’s press releases.
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 benefit claimants were often better
