Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

‘A bold attempt to rewind political orthodoxies; to reintroduce class as a political variable … It moves in and out of postwar British history with great agility, weaving together complex questions of class, culture and identity with a lightness of touch. Jones torches the political class to great effect’

Jon Cruddas, Independent

‘It is a timely book. The white working class seems to be the one group in society that it is still acceptable to sneer at, ridicule, even incite hatred against … Forensically … Jones seeks to explain how, thanks to politics, the working class has shifted from being regarded as the salt of the earth to the scum of the earth’

Carol Midgley, Times

‘A lively, well-reasoned and informative counterblast to the notion that Britain is now more or less a classless society’

Sean O’Hagan, Observer

‘Impassioned and thought-provoking … I genuinely hope his voice is heard’

Claire Black, Scotland on Sunday

‘A trenchant exposure of our new class hatred and what lies behind it’

John Carey, author of The Intellectuals and the Masses

‘The stereotyping and hatred of the working class in Britain, documented so clearly by Owen Jones in this important book, should cause all to flinch … the stigmatization of the working class is a serious barrier to social justice and progressive change’

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, authors of The Spirit Level

‘Chavs is persuasively argued, and packed full of good reporting and useful information … [Jones] makes an important contribution to a revivified debate about class’

Lynsey Hanley, author of Estates: An Intimate History

‘Jones’s analysis of the condition of the working class is very astute … A book like this is very much needed for the American scene, where the illusion is similarly perpetuated by the Democrats that the middle class is all that matters, that everyone can aspire to join the middle class or is already part of it’

Huffington Post

‘A blinding read’

Suzanne Moore, Guardian

‘[A] thought-provoking examination of a relatively new yet widespread derogatory characterization of the working class in Britain … edifying and disquieting in equal measure’

Publishers Weekly

‘A fiery reminder of how the system has failed the poor’

Peter Hoskin, Daily Beast

‘Seen in the light of the riots and the worldwide Occupy protests, his lucid analysis of a divided society appears uncannily prescient’

Matthew Higgs, Artforum

‘A passionate and well-documented denunciation of the upper-class contempt for the proles that has recently become so visible in the British class system’

Eric Hobsbawm, Guardian Books of the Year

‘Mr. Jones’s book is a cleareyed examination of the British class system, and it poses this brutal question: How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable? His timely answers combine wit, left-wing politics and outrage’

Dwight Garner, New York Times

‘As with all the best polemics, a luminous anger backlights his prose’

Economist

‘Eloquent and impassioned’

Andrew Neather, Evening Standard

‘Everybody knows what a chav is, it seems, but no one is a chav. But then it’s a word unlike any other in current usage … A new book, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, by first-time author Owen Jones … has thrown the word into the spotlight all over again’

Carole Cadwalladr, Observer

‘Passionate, angry and articulate, Chavs rail[s] against the cynical slandering, by politicians and the media, of working people’

Scotsman

‘What makes Chavs a work of art is precisely [its] power of demonstrating the deceptive nature of the premise of an all-encompassing neo–middle class. Far from being classless, British society is defined by an effort to undermine and demonize the underprivileged’

Los Angeles Review of Books

‘A highly readable and very important book’

David Skelton, Total Politics

‘A long overdue look at the state of the class war in Britain today’

Pat Stack, Socialist Review

‘Reminds us of the potential political and economic power that exists largely untapped in British society’

Richard Seymour, author of Against Austerity

CHAVS

The Demonization of

the Working Class

Third Edition

OWEN JONES

This new edition published by Verso 2020

First published by Verso 2011

© Owen Jones 2011, 2012, 2016, 2020

owenjones.org

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-092-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-804-4 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-377-8 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Contents

Preface to the 2020 Edition

Preface to the 2016 Edition

Introduction

1. The Strange Case of Shannon Matthews

2. Class Warriors

3. Politicians vs Chavs

4. A Class in the Stocks

5. ‘We’re all middle class now’

6. A Rigged Society

7. Broken Britain

8. Backlash

Conclusion: A New Class Politics?

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Preface to the 2020 Edition

This book was written in what seems like a distant universe. I began work on it barely a year after the 2008 financial crash, while the fag end of New Labour burned ever dimmer in office; the first draft was completed three months after David Cameron’s Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats had assumed office and forged the first post-war coalition, cemented by austerity. When it was published in the spring of 2011, a wave of mass student protests and university occupations had subsided, and relative social peace seemed to prevail on the streets; Ed Miliband was six months into his tenure as Labour leader; and Carly Rae Jepson’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ was topping the UK charts. As a Cabinet of the well-heeled and the prosperous imposed slash-and-burn cuts on the welfare state and public services, forcing the insecure and the struggling to pay for a crisis caused by the financial elite, it was no longer unfashionable to talk about class. The ‘we are all middle-class now’ mantra which Chavs was written specifically to counter had collided with material reality; few now pretend that class divisions do not scar or indeed define British society.

In the intervening period, Britain voted to leave the European Union, unleashing an increasingly embittered culture war and triggering the country’s worst political crisis since the Blitz; Labour’s left flank assumed control of the party for the first time in its history as the previously little-known backbencher Jeremy Corbyn triumphed in two leadership elections; and a right-wing populist insurgency cohered around Boris Johnson, a charlatan whose contrived buffoonery was used to shield him from a long history of lies, racism and homophobia. Corbynism had defied immense odds to deprive the Conservatives of their majority in 2017 and, for a time, seemed destined to gain power at the national level; but two and a half years later Labour was obliterated at the ballot box. As I write these words, Britain remains in the grip of a pandemic which has killed tens of thousands, produced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and plunged much of the world into a grave social crisis.

None of this tumult can be understood without the prism of class. In the first edition of Chavs, nearly a decade ago, I wrote a warning:

The danger is of a savvy new populist right emerging, one that is comfortable talking about class and that offers reactionary solutions to working-class problems. It could denounce the demonization of the working class and the trashing of its identity. It could claim that the traditional party of working-class people, the Labour Party, has turned its back on them. Rather than focusing on the deep-seated economic issues that really underpin the grievances of working-class people, it could train its populist guns on immigration and cultural issues. Immigrants could be blamed for economic woes; multiculturalism could be blasted for undermining ‘white’ working-class identity.

As Chavs explored, the New Right of the 1970s and 1980s wished to exorcise the language of class from political discourse. The notion of class posed a mortal threat to their ideology of unapologetic individualism, because it encouraged people to feel part of a wider collective identity. Eliminating a debate about class meant shutting down scrutiny of who has wealth and power and who does not: extremely convenient as inequalities exploded. Indeed, the distribution of wealth in society was now understood not as the product of an unjust class structure but a reflection of merit and effort: that those who rose to the top did so because they were the most intelligent and hardworking, while those languishing at the bottom were intellectually ill-equipped and workshy. Class was a subversive concept, too, because if those who suffered at the hands of a broken status quo united with those sharing similar economic interests, their collective power could be used to extract concessions from the powerful. Finally, the shift away from class was critical to the process of treating poverty and unemployment not as social problems requiring collective redress, but as individual failings to be fixed with carrots and sticks: in practice, far more of the latter.

The populist right of the 2010s had a different approach. Class, as this book understands it, is an economic relationship: it explains who is compelled to sell their labour in order to live and in doing so produces the collective wealth that ends up concentrated in so few hands. It is not about accents, or how people dress, or what radio stations or music they listen to, or what their leisure pursuits are. What the populist right did was attempt to redefine class as a cultural unit: class wasn’t about economic conflict, but rather a culture war. This was an argument articulated by Theresa May a few months after her ill-fated premiership began in 2016. Shunning Margaret Thatcher’s hostility to the very mention of class, May promised ‘to put the power of government squarely at the service of ordinary working-class people’, adding: ‘Because too often that isn’t how it works today. Just listen to the way a lot of politicians and commentators talk about the public. They find your patriotism distasteful, your concerns about immigration parochial, your views about crime illiberal, your attachment to your job security inconvenient.’

May’s argument was this: the working class was indeed demonized and oppressed, but not by their employers or by a right-wing government, but rather by an out-of-touch effete London-based metropolitan elite. The real fissure in society was between the liberal elitists and a working class whose socially conservative values these urbanites held in contempt. This narrative drove the formation of the so-called Blue Collar Conservatives faction of the Conservative Party, who today claim the support of seventy-eight Tory MPs, and the rhetoric of leading Conservative politicians who declared they were now the ‘party of the workers’.

Nigel Farage—leader of the right-wing populist United Kingdom Independence Party and then the Brexit Party—similarly tapped into this rhetoric. ‘Labour Party are signed up to corporatism and free movement, no wonder so many working-class voters are switching to UKIP,’ as he tweeted, or indeed: ‘The Labour Party used to represent the working class. Now they are the party of Remain. Don’t let them get away with it.’

Brexit itself was portrayed as a clash between the middle-class metropolitan Remainers and working-c lass Leavers. But this was always an oversimplification. Most full-time and part-time workers voted Remain, as did those classified by pollsters as working-c lass and under thirty-five.¹ Meanwhile, most classified as middle-class and over sixty-five voted Leave.² Those that, in common political parlance, qualify as Labour’s working-class ‘heartlands’ generally include the small towns of Northern England and the Midlands, many of which did vote Leave in decisive numbers. But the concept of heartlands generally excludes major urban centres such as Liverpool, Manchester or indeed London, where many working-class communities voted Remain. Indeed, many of the poorest communities in London—like Tower Hamlets and Hackney—voted heavily against leaving the EU. While 56 per cent of private renters nationally voted Remain, 58 per cent of those who owned their home outright voted Leave. Over two-thirds of black and minority ethnic Britons voted to Remain, too.³

All too often, the common image of a working-class Briton is someone who is male, middle-aged, straight, white, lives in a small town and holds socially conservative views: this portrayal became more entrenched as a result of Brexit. Unquestionably, this does represent an important layer of working-class Britain: but there are others, too. It specifically erases younger working-class people, working-class people of colour, those who are not straight, and those who live in major urban centres.

That is not to say that there was not an important working-class element to Brexit. Many communities had suffered the loss of traditional industries—mines, steelworks, factories, docks—which stripped away secure, skilled work which had more status. The jobs that filled the vacuum were often lower-paid and more insecure. After the crash and austerity, many of these communities were hammered by cuts to social security and public services, while workers suffered the most protracted squeeze in wages since the Napoleonic era. Many of these communities voted Leave in large numbers, partly driven by understandable dissatisfaction and fury at a society rigged against their interests. They were often voting more against Westminster than Brussels.

Undoubtedly, many saw their problems—stagnating living standards, a lack of secure well-paid jobs and depleted affordable housing —through the prism of immigration. As one academic who researched the topic found: ‘My analysis shows that voters hit hardest by the cuts were more receptive to the Leave campaign, which shouldn’t be surprising as campaigners promised fiscal windfalls from leaving the EU that could prop up ailing public services.’ He concluded that ‘the tight 2016 EU referendum could have resulted in a victory for Remain had it not been for austerity. Leave won by a margin of 3.8 percentage points.’⁴

From the referendum campaign onwards, there was often a complacency within Labour’s ranks that Brexit would always prove more politically destructive to the Conservatives. It proved far more so for Labour for a few reasons. Firstly, Brexit unleashed an increasingly acrimonious culture war and, as Corbynism tragically discovered, culture wars are poisonous to a left politics founded on class politics. Labour’s slogan in the 2017 election had captured the essence of that class politics: ‘For the many, not the few.’ It provided a narrative for the party’s redistributive policies, such as hiking taxes on the well-off and big business to fund investment in public services. But a culture war cuts across the real divide in society—who has wealth and power, and who doesn’t.

Instead the British people were driven into two crudely defined boxes: Remainers and Leavers. Working-class communities were divided. Labour represented communities stretching from Hackney— which voted decisively to Remain—to Hull—which voted in large numbers to Leave. The ascendant right-wing populism within the Conservative Party had secured a means to win over older working-class people in the very communities ravaged by Thatcherism.

When Labour deprived the Conservatives of a majority in 2017 against all the odds, triumphalism overwhelmed the Corbyn project and its supporters. But the result—a hung Parliament—sowed the seeds of destruction for Corbyn’s leadership. With Theresa May deprived of a majority to drive through any possible Brexit deal, leading Remainers increasingly abandoned an acceptance of the referendum result and began pushing for its reversal with increasing assertiveness. Leading Leave voices ever more loudly declared that a democratic result was imperilled and exploited the instability to push for an ever more radical break from the EU. Both factions fed each other. The consequence was ever-growing radicalisation over this constitutional issue.

With Brexit conquering the political landscape, Labour’s popular domestic policies—founded in class politics—no longer got a hearing. The party’s attempt to strike a compromise—to leave the EU but maintain a close relationship and then pivot back to domestic issues— was rendered increasingly unlikely; it straddled a divide between two planks which were ever farther apart, and Labour risked falling through the middle. With most of its members and indeed voters having voted Remain, the party’s leadership increasingly zigzagged and pivoted towards supporting a new referendum: in the process, messages of clarity on domestic issues were replaced by confusion over Brexit. The right-wing populists stole the anti-establishment mantle from Corbynism, claiming to be representing the voice of the people against an elite which was conspiring to overturn a mass democratic vote. Corbynism itself could increasingly be cast as part of the establishment.

Brexit both highlighted and exacerbated a new divide which imperilled Labour’s electoral chances: an unprecedented generational gap. Traditionally, there was no great political chasm between older and younger voters. When Margaret Thatcher secured her crushing 1983 landslide, she won a decisive mandate among the young, too.⁵ But in the 2017 election, Labour won more support from younger voters than at any point in its history, including Tony Blair’s landslide victory two decades earlier. Two thirds of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds voted Labour, with less than a fifth opting for the Conservatives. This lead was nearly replicated for the under thirties, and 55 per cent of thirty-to thirty-nine-year-olds also opted for Corbyn’s party, as opposed to 29 per cent for Theresa May’s troops. But among older Britons, Labour had been reduced to a virtual fringe party: 58 per cent of those aged between sixty and sixty-nine years old voted Tory, and just 27 per cent Labour, while a staggering 69 per cent of those over seventy opted for candidates wearing blue rosettes, with just 19 per cent backing the red team.

This matters a lot: around a quarter of the electorate are pensioners, and they are the most motivated to vote. While Labour’s support dropped by a disastrous eight points two and a half years later, it retained a staggering lead among the young and a catastrophic deficit among the old. While its lead among the young had diminished, that was almost entirely due to defections to the Lib Dems and Greens, rather than a Conservative revival, and its advantage in those demographics remained overwhelming.⁶

This generational divide led the eminent psephologist Sir John Curtice to tell one Labour MP during the 2019 election, ‘But of course you are no longer a party of the working class. You’re a party of young people.’⁷ In doing so, he counterposed young people and the working class as discrete, separate categories: that so many from both groups owned no capital and worked for often low wages in precarious circumstances was irrelevant. Indeed, it is worth noting that the demographic who most decisively voted for Labour in 2017 were those classified as working-class people under the age of thirty-five: here, the party had a fifty-two-point lead over the Conservatives, compared to a twenty-two-point lead among those classified as middle-class in the same age group.⁸

For those of us whose worldview is founded in class politics—in a belief that the interests of the majority are not just different but on a collision course with those at the top—this generational divide is discomforting but nonetheless real. That does not necessitate becoming generational warriors. While there are affluent pensioners, 1.9 million live in poverty, a higher rate than in most European countries. There are those who advocate scrapping the ‘triple lock’ that secures generous annual increases in pensions and using the savings to invest in young people. But young people are themselves aspirational pensioners. Stripping back entitlements for older people leaves the young with the worst of all worlds: insecurity not just in youth but in retirement, too.

How did this generational divide become so entrenched to the extent it has severely disrupted class politics? A million pensioners were lifted out of poverty by New Labour in the noughties, and their living standards have been protected by the triple lock, increasing and already very high levels of homeownership, and booming house prices thanks in part to post-crash quantitative easing.⁹ Older Britons are the most socially conservative on issues such as immigration, Islam, LGBTQ rights and feminism.

Younger Britons, meanwhile, have suffered one of the worst wage squeezes in the industrialised world, as well as collapsing levels of home ownership combined with a depletion of social housing, driving them into an unregulated and rip-off private rented sector.¹⁰ They are saddled with debt for daring to aspire to a university education which benefits all of society; services they rely on have been decimated; and cuts to social security have hammered low-paid young workers. They have the most progressive social norms of any generation, articles of faith they quite understandably believe are under attack. It is this divide in economic security and social values that surely explains the political chasm separating the generations.

Younger Britons have not all become radicalised socialists. Thatcherism promised that they would be liberated from the deadweight of the state and collectivism, allowing them to freely realize their potential and prosper. But rather than finding freedom, their lived experience is insecurity, which is a prison. That insecurity does not just define the lives of those born into working-class families but many of those born into what would traditionally be described as middle-class backgrounds. The young are not separate from today’s lived working-class experience; they are integral to it.

When Labour faced electoral devastation in 2019, the understandable focus was on the so-called Red Wall, the constituencies in the North and the Midlands represented by the party, in some cases, for generations. This specific electoral calamity was portrayed as the mass defection of working-class voters. Again, an understanding of class must intersect with age. The last available data from British censuses is 2011; the trends they picked up have surely only accelerated since. What they reveal about the seats Labour lost is instructive.

In Kirkby-in-Ashfield, the over-sixty-fives population increased by 41.3 per cent between 1981 and 2011, while the under-twenty-fives population fell by 15.5 per cent. In the same period in Bishop Auckland, the older population jumped by 34.8 per cent; the younger population fell by 24.9 per cent. In Redcar, the figures were respectively 29.6 per cent and 24.3 per cent.¹¹ The very regional inequalities nurtured by Conservative policies ended up benefiting the party: because while younger voters from working-class communities still overwhelmingly supported Labour, they took their votes with them to safe urban seats.

That is one reason why, in 2019, Corbyn’s Labour secured a higher share of the vote than Ed Miliband in 2015 or Gordon Brown in 2010 but significantly fewer seats. Any progressive project whose objective is political power must win over more older voters without sacrificing the aspirations of a younger generation who have been increasingly proletarianized: that is, ever more defined by the insecurity of modern wage labour.

There have been other trends since this book was published which encourage some hope. Attitudes towards the welfare state favoured a slash-and-burn approach: 55 per cent believed social security benefits were too generous in 2011, compared to just over 40 per cent who believed cuts would damage too many people’s lives. By 2017, 56 per cent believed cuts would damage too many lives.¹² While in 2014, 34 per cent believed most unemployed claimants were ‘fiddling’ that figure had fallen to 22 per cent by 2016.¹³ By 2020, 47 per cent believed that a majority of people receiving benefits were in need and deserving of help, with another 11 per cent opting for all or almost all; just 6 per cent opted for a minority being deserving and in need.¹⁴ Acquiescence to the cuts in public spending had been nurtured by encouraging millions to believe that taxpayers’ money had been frittered away on the undeserving and the lazy. But as those cuts broadened out to include in-work benefits for low-paid workers, and as Labour under Corbyn stopped playing the game of competing with the Conservatives in demonizing benefit claimants, attitudes shifted.

But while the latter half of the 2010s were experienced as the gravest crisis since the war, the pandemic of 2020 shifted the goalposts of upheaval. Here was a crisis defined by class. As a national lockdown was belatedly imposed, middle-class professionals could work from home, protecting themselves from a potentially deadly virus, while low-paid workers such as cleaners were compelled to risk their health by continuing to travel—often by public transport—to their workplaces. Given statutory sick pay was a derisory £95.85 a week, many low-paid workers afflicted by the symptoms of coronavirus with bills to pay and families to feed simply chose to keep working. That the government was compelled to implement a furlough scheme was testament to the fact that millions of workers are always just one pay packet away from extreme hardship. Each Thursday at 8pm, millions clapped key workers from windows, doorsteps and balconies: but it became increasingly noted that those applauded were underpaid and badly treated.

While the relatively well-to-do could make savings during this crisis—they were no longer forking out significant sums in restaurants or on leisure pursuits or foreign holidays, for example—the low-paid found themselves spending a greater proportion of their squeezed incomes on essentials. Those in precarious self-employment and the gig economy—an ever-growing proportion of the modern working class —were hardest hit. Homeowners were offered mortgage holidays, while private tenants were only granted a stay of eviction, often meaning a build-up of rent in arrears.

There was a profound class dimension to those who became infected or who would die from coronavirus, partly due to who was most likely to be exposed: such as care workers, security guards, shop workers, chefs, and taxi drivers. The underlying health conditions which most imperilled those who contracted coronavirus—such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease—were most likely to affect the poor. By the beginning of May, those in the poorest English and Welsh communities were more than twice as likely to die as those in the most affluent.¹⁵ Coronavirus was a public health crisis, a social crisis and an economic crisis: and each had profound class dimensions.

There are two other emergencies which relate to class, too. As I write these words, protesters in the US are being teargassed, batoned and assaulted by police officers following the killing of George Floyd. Mass demonstrations inspired by Black Lives Matter have erupted on the streets of Britain and other countries, too. At the forefront are courageous working-class people of colour. It is a reminder of how an understanding of class must always intersect with an understanding of other forms of oppression. Working-class black people on both sides of the Atlantic are more likely to be concentrated in low-paid and insecure work, to suffer from poverty and unemployment, and to face systemic discrimination at the hands of a racist justice system. There is no one single working-class experience: economic exploitation can intersect with oppression and discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, or a combination of some or all. No genuine emancipatory movement is worthy of the name if it erases the multiplicity of lived realities among the working class.

The other burgeoning crisis is the existential threat of the climate emergency. As it is, 9 million die prematurely each year because of pollution, fatalities which are distributed disproportionately among the poor and minorities.¹⁶ Poorer communities are more likely to be flooded.¹⁷ In every crisis, it is the affluent who are best placed to protect themselves and their property. As the risk of extreme weather, flooding, droughts and destabilised food supplies increase, it will be working-class communities who suffer most, while the wealthy shield themselves from danger. But staving off the emergency will not only protect working-class communities but transform lives, too. The mass insulation of homes and the installation of solar panels on roofs will slash emissions and reduce fuel poverty. The mass expansion of renewable energy industries will create skilled jobs, particularly in areas economically devastated by deindustrialization, austerity, and potentially the pandemic. Investing in affordable public transport will reduce dependency on cars and improve living standards.

When this book was written, the funeral rites for class politics had been conducted. That is certainly no longer the case. The new danger is of a populist right positioning itself as the champions of a besieged working class on the battlegrounds of a culture war. If Labour—a party founded to represent the working class in its broadest sense—abandons 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

Preface to the 2016 Edition

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,