Chavs. Owen Jones

Karen Matthews.’

      Just because a politician has a privileged background, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they will lack sympathy for those who are less fortunate. Nonetheless, the odds of them understanding the realities of working-class communities are, unavoidably, considerably lower.

      After all, how could someone like Prime Minister David Cameron even begin to understand a community like Dewsbury Moor? Even by the standards of most Conservative MPs, he’s not exactly the sort of bloke you’d bump into in your local pub. He counts King William IV as an ancestor, his dad is a wealthy stockbroker, and his family have been making a killing in finance for decades. His wife, a senior director of one luxury goods business and owner of another, is the daughter of a major landowner and happens to be a descendant of King Charles II.

      Now, it’s true that as Leader of the Opposition Cameron famously hit back at those who challenged his privileged upbringing with the quip: ‘It’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re going.’²⁹ All well and good, but doesn’t where he’s going have an awful lot to do with where he’s from? His belief that the Karen Matthews case is broadly representative makes sense when you look at his feelings towards people who share her background. When his messy daughter once emerged at a social gathering in his £2 million Notting Hill home, he reportedly groaned: ‘You look like you’ve fallen out of a council flat.’³⁰ He’s also admitted to regularly watching the TV comedy Shameless, which, as we’ve seen, has been compared to Dewsbury Moor by the tabloid press.³¹ ‘A lot of working-class people laugh at Shameless,’ Kevin Maguire notes, ‘but I sort of think they’re laughing at it slightly differently than Cameron, who probably sees it as a drama-documentary.’

      One of the Conservatives’ few working-class MPs, Junior Transport Minister Mike Penning, admits that the lack of politicians from working-class backgrounds impinges on their ability to relate to people in communities like Dewsbury Moor. ‘It’s physically impossible for someone to have an understanding of and empathy with the problems that some are having: say, for instance, at the moment, there’s a lot of people being made redundant. You don’t know what that’s like unless you’ve been made redundant.’ Part of the problem, he argues, was the difficulties getting into the political world. ‘It is without doubt, no matter what political party you come from, extortionately difficult to get into this great House unless you have some kind of leg-up the greasy pole.’

      The fact that the British elite is stacked full of people from middle-and upper-middle-class backgrounds helps to explain a certain double standard at work. Crimes committed by the poor will be seen as an indictment of anyone from a similar background. The same cannot be said for crimes where a middle-class individual is culpable. The massmurdering GP Harold Shipman might have gone down as a monster, but did anyone argue that his case shone a light on life in middle-class Britain? Where were the outraged tabloid headlines and politicians’ sound-bites about middle-class communities that ‘really, really have to change’?

      And although cases such as the disappearance of Shannon Matthews are used as launch pads for attacks on so-called spongers, the wealthy do not receive anywhere near the same level of attention from the media or politicians. Welfare fraud is estimated to cost the Treasury around £1 billion a year. But, as detailed investigations by chartered accountant Richard Murphy have found, £70 billion is lost through tax evasion every year—that is, seventy times more. If anything, ‘welfare evasion’ is more of a problem, with billions of pounds worth of tax credits left unclaimed every year. The cruel irony is that poor people who live in communities like Dewsbury Moor actually pay more in tax as a proportion of their wage packets than many of the rich journalists and politicians who attack them. But where is the outcry over middle-class spongers? Given the media’s distorted coverage, it’s hardly surprising that people significantly underestimate the cost of tax avoidance and overestimate the cost of benefit fraud.³²

      Leading politicians and journalists had no interest in allowing the Shannon Matthews affair to go down in history as just another example of the capacity of some individuals for cruelty. A mother’s grotesque ploy to use her vulnerable daughter for financial gain was deliberately inflated into something much greater, for the purposes of journalists and politicians determined to prove that traditional working-class communities had decayed into a morally depraved, work-shy rump.

      But that’s not to say that there are no wider lessons to be drawn from the case. On the contrary, it speaks volumes about class in Britain today. It would be dishonest to say that communities like Dewsbury Moor don’t have their fair share of problems, even if they’re not full of abusive unemployed parents running amok. The important question is, who is to blame: the communities, or the policies of successive governments over the last three decades? And how has Britain become so polarized that derision and contempt for ‘chavs’ has become so deeply ingrained in our society?

      Neither the journalists nor the politicians who manipulated the affair of Shannon Matthews allowed pesky facts to get into the way of their wild claims. That the Matthews household was not a workless family—Craig Meehan had a job, after all—or that accomplice Michael Donovan was a computer programmer did not trouble right-wing pundits and politicians.

      ‘I remember reading one comment about how many people in Southern England, maybe more middle-class England, were fascinated by what they saw as northern, subhuman, deprived communities,’ remarks local Dewsbury vicar Reverend Simon Pitcher. ‘I think there was an element of media porn. The whole of Dewsbury was portrayed as being particularly difficult and, in reality, it’s not like that.’ His statement could be applied to all communities suffering from poverty. In contrast to the sweeping assertions of British politicians and commentators, government figures show that nearly six out of every ten households in poverty had at least one adult in work.³³

      But this coverage was part of an effort to portray our society as divided into Middle England on the one hand and a pack of anti-social chavs living in places like Dewsbury Moor on the other. It’s a myth. You wouldn’t know it from the media coverage, but most of us think of ourselves as working class. As a poll published in October 2007 revealed, that’s how over half the population described themselves. This figure has remained more or less steady since the 1960s.³⁴

      Of course, self-identification is an ambiguous, subjective business and people of all classes might, for various reasons, mischaracterize their place in the social pecking order. And yet the figure has an uncanny relation to the facts. In today’s Britain the number of people employed in blue-collar manual and white-collar routine clerical jobs represents over half the workforce, more than twenty-eight million workers.³⁵ We’re a nation of secretaries, shop assistants and admin employees. The lives of this majority are virtually ignored by journalists and politicians. Needless to say, over half the population has nothing in common with Karen Matthews. And yet the rare appearances made by working-class people on the public stage are more likely than not to be stories about hate figures—however legitimate—such as Karen Matthews.

      Were politicians and journalists wrong to argue that communities such as Dewsbury Moor had particular social problems that set them apart from the rest of Britain? As with most stereotypes, there are grains of truth in the ‘chav’ caricature. It is undeniable that many working-class communities across Britain suffer from high levels of unemployment. They do have relatively large numbers of benefit recipients, and crime levels are high. Yet the blame has been directed at the victims rather than at the policies promoted by successive governments over recent decades.

      Dewsbury Moor is a good example. The ward finds itself in the top 10 per cent for overall deprivation and child poverty. As we have seen with the bile spewed out by journalists during the Shannon Matthews affair, the detractors argue that this is largely due to the fecklessness of the people who live there. They’re wrong. Governments have effectively socially engineered these working-class communities to have the problems that they have.

      We’ve come a long way since Labour’s Aneurin Bevan founded modern council housing in the aftermath of World War II. Above all, his aim was to create mixed communities. He reasoned that this would help people from different backgrounds to understand one another, breaking down the sort of prejudices we see today