Somewhere between the rise of New Labour and the start of the current financial recession, the middle classes seemed suddenly surprised and appalled to discover a new "feral underclass" (Simon Heffer) in the place of the old deferential proletariat.One one level, Jones has written a book about how the dread word "chav" came into being and how it has been bandied about without much thought. Owen Jones If you’re changing your relationship with twitter I guess I gotta actually arrange to meet you for a pint sometime then. He writes frequently for the Guardian, Independent and New Statesman, and has worked in Parliament as a trade union lobbyist and parliamentary researcher, helping Labour plan backbench rebellions on issues ranging from civil liberties to workers' rights.He lives in London.
35% of MPs, including 59% of Tory MPs, went to fee paying schools, as did 55% of top journalists. (The word's origins are unclear: it may derive from the Romany word "chavi", meaning "child", but it is now usually understood as an acronym for "council house and violent".) Trade union sponsored MPs aren’t always manual workers from working class backgrounds any more – often they have come from middle class backgrounds and have acted in white collar research roles within trade unions. Whatever your politics, this book focuses on a variety of issues … Taking his cue from a quote from the Jones is good on the causes of what appears to be a new sense of working-class powerlessness – the waning power of the unions, the destruction of traditional jobs and, with them, the communities they fostered, the reckless rush towards globalisation and the attendant deregulation of the markets, which has bred a kind of helplessness among those left behind.
From Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard to the demonization of Jade Goody, media and politicians alike dismiss as feckless, criminalized and ignorant a vast, underprivileged swathe of society whose members have become stereotyped by one, hate-filled word: chavs.In this acclaimed investigation, Owen Jones explores … His book develops into a sustained polemic about the perniciousness of the British class system.
The book is also right to draw attention to the effect of deindustrialisation on working class communities. His work has appeared in the New Statesman, the Sunday Mirror, Le Monde diplomatique and several publications with lower circulations. Jones, who is 26 and has worked as a trade union lobbyist and parliamentary researcher for a Labour MP, begins by looking at the rise of "chav" culture. This, he argues, was created and then mercilessly lampooned by the middle-class, rightwing media and its more combative columnists. He writes from a left-wing perspective.
Jones gives some vivid examples of just how loaded the term has become: there is a popular self-defence course called "chav fighting", run by the fitness company Gymbox. This compares to only 7% of the population. The book also picks out some horrific pieces of media reporting, caricaturing working class areas and working class people. The title of the book draws attention to an insult that has become all too socially acceptable.Jones mentions a middle class dinner party where somebody asked “where would all the chavs buy their Christmas presents” following the closure of Woolworths. "As inequality has widened it's a way of people saying that the people at the bottom deserve to be there," says Owen Jones, the book's author. For Jones this symbolised the ultimate shift away for many on the left from its working class roots. Done correctly, welfare reform will be fairer on people living in working class areas and will help everybody to make the most of their potential.
This is a gulf that must be bridged. It correctly talks about the importance of housing and job creation to working class communities, but doesn’t really address how these jobs can be created by harnessing the growth potential of the private sector and how the new housing can be built in a way acceptable to local communities (other than a top-down house building programme reminiscent of those of Bevan and Macmillan).
Owen Jones is a writer, commentator and activist. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. While Jones is right that welfare reform without job creation is not enough, he is wrong to suggest that welfare reform is part of a systematic demonisation. The gilded quality of both the media and politics has led to a detachment from working class life, which has led many people in working class communities to complain that politicians and the media do not understand “people like us”. Having said that, ‘chavs’ is also a term used widely in the kind of working class communities in which I grew up (charver was the term of choice in Consett) and Jones should bear in mind that it is a term used as a differentiator in working class areas, as well as a term of abuse from the wealthy. The crimes committed by "chavs" included being too loud, too flash, too drunk, too vulgar and, most inexcusable of all, too disrespectful towards their "betters".
It can represent the powerful and wealthy mocking the poor and powerless.
The columns of Simon Heffer and countless As the author points out, the utter detachment and lack of understanding of working class life is combined with tiny representation of people from non privileged backgrounds in the media and in politics. Chavs charts the political demonisation of this once-noble group through the material transformations of the early 1980s and the collapse of manufacturing work.
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