Chavs. Owen Jones

‘If we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should all be drawn from different sectors of the community. We should try to introduce what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street.’³⁶

      This laudable principle has been fatally undermined by policies introduced in the Thatcher era which New Labour have been happy to keep in place. Council estates like Dewsbury Moor now display the exact opposite result to that originally intended by Bevan. As the 1970s drew to a close, before the Thatcher government launched the ‘right-to-buy’ scheme, more than two in five of us lived in council housing. Today the figure is nearer one in ten, with tenants of housing associations and co-operatives representing half as many again.³⁷ Councils were prevented from building new homes and, over the last eleven years, the party of Bevan has refused to invest money in the remaining houses under local authority control. As council housing collapsed, remaining stock was prioritized for those most in need. ‘New tenants coming in, almost exclusively in order to meet stringent criteria, will either be single parents with dependent children, [or] people out of institutions including prisons,’ explained the late Alan Walter, a lifelong council tenant and chairman of the pressure group Defend Council Housing. ‘And therefore they are, almost by definition, those without work.’ Many—but not all—of those who remained in council housing were too poor to take advantage of the right-to-buy scheme. ‘A growing number of people who can afford to get out of social housing have done so, and it’s then sold off to someone else not necessarily in a respectable family,’ Polly Toynbee argues. ‘The more people absent themselves from living in a council estate, the worse the divide gets: after all, there’s virtually no rented sector.’ The problems people faced had nothing to do with the fact they lived in council housing, and everything to do with the fact that only the most deprived were eligible to live on estates. The unsurprising result is that over two-thirds of those living in social housing belong to the poorest two-fifths of the population. Nearly half of social housing is located in the poorest fifth of neighbourhoods.³⁸ Things have certainly changed compared to thirty years ago, when a staggering 20 per cent of the richest tenth of the population lived in social housing.³⁹ If places like Dewsbury Moor have major social problems, it’s because they have been made to have them.

      Because of the sheer concentration of Britain’s poorest living in social housing, council estates easily become associated with the so-called ‘chavs’. While it is true that about half of Britain’s poor own their homes, they too tend to live on estates. The increasing transformation of council estates into social dumping grounds has provided much ammunition for the theory that Britain is divided into middle-class society and a working-class chav rump, suffering from an epidemic of self-inflicted problems.

      Government housing policies are not the only cause of the social disadvantages affecting working-class areas. Thatcherism unleashed a tsunami of de-industrialization, decimating communities such as Dewsbury Moor. Manufacturing jobs have collapsed over the last thirty years. When Thatcher came to power in 1979, over seven million of us earned a living in manufacturing. Thirty years later, this was true for less than half as many, a mere 2.83 million—not least because factories had relocated to developing countries where workers cost less.

      The town of Dewsbury was once home to a thriving textile industry. Over the past three decades, these jobs have all but disappeared. At the bottom of the street where Karen Matthews once lived are dozens of disused lock-ups, including abandoned textile mills and expansive industrial estates.⁴⁰ ‘This was known as the heavy woollen area of West Yorkshire. There were also lots of engineering and manufacturing jobs,’ Reverend Pitcher explains. ‘Those jobs have all gone; there’s virtually no manufacturing industry. So what do people do? What choices do people have for work? People depend on the big supermarkets for their jobs. There’s no other place to work for any significant job.’ The impact on local people has been devastating. ‘This has had a destabilizing effect on the community—the sense of community we once had has evaporated.’ The lack of large manufacturing firms made it very difficult for those who had not succeeded in education to find a job.

      The impact of this industrial collapse can be seen on the Matthews family. Both the grandparents and parents worked in local industry, particularly in textiles. And yet, as Karen Matthews’s mother put it: ‘The town has changed now. The textiles have gone and there aren’t the same jobs as there were.’⁴¹ Manufacturing in areas like Dewsbury Moor used to provide secure, relatively well-paid, highly unionized jobs that were passed down from generation to generation.

      ‘The decline of the British manufacturing and industrial base has decimated communities up and down the country,’ says Labour MP Katy Clark. ‘If you just talk about the constituency I represent [North Ayrshire and Arran], we used to have large-scale industrial and manufacturing industries which employed on occasion tens of thousands of people. All those jobs have gone and in their place, low-paid usually service-sector and public-sector jobs have come.’

      Industry was the linchpin of local communities. Its sudden disappearance from places like Dewsbury Moor caused massive unemployment during the 1980s. Today, the official unemployment rate in the area is only a percentage point above the national average. But this statistic is deeply deceptive. If you exclude people engaged in full-time study, well over a quarter of the people in Dewsbury West are classed as ‘economically inactive’. That’s around 10 per cent over the average. The main reason is that many of those who lost their jobs were officially classified as ill or incapacitated, in a process common to all the areas that, like Dewsbury, lost their industries in the 1980s and 1990s. It is difficult to argue that this is because they are lazy scroungers. In late 2008, the government announced plans to push 3.5 million benefit recipients into jobs. At the same time they estimated that there were only around half a million vacancies. That’s the lowest on record. People are out of work in places like Dewsbury Moor quite simply because there are not enough jobs to go around.

      It is clear that the ‘chav’ caricature epitomized by Karen Matthews has sunk deep roots into British society. More and more of us are choosing to believe that the victims of social problems are, in large part, responsible for causing them. Three-quarters of us, for example, thought that the gap between high and low incomes was ‘too large’ in 2006—but only slightly over a third supported spending more on welfare benefits for the poor. While nearly half of us felt that an unemployed couple should be classed as ‘hard up’ in 1986, that level declined to just over a third by 2005. Even more strikingly, while only 19 per cent felt that poverty was caused by laziness or a lack of willpower in 1986, the figure had increased to 27 per cent twenty years later.⁴²

      What is remarkable about these figures is that they have come at a time when inequality has grown as sharply as social mobility has declined. The Gini coefficient—used to measure overall income inequality in Britain—was rated as 26 in 1979. Today it has risen to 39. It is not simply that this growing social division renders those at the top more likely to be ignorant of how other people live their lives. As we have seen, demonizing the less well-off also makes it easier to justify an unprecedented and growing level of social inequality. After all, to admit that some people are poorer than others because of the social injustice inherent in our society would require government action. Claiming that people are largely responsible for their circumstances facilitates the opposite conclusion. ‘We’re developing a culture where it’s acceptable and indeed normal to speak of the white working class in very dehumanized language, and this is a common symptom of a highly unequal society,’ Johann Hari warns. ‘If you go to South Africa or Venezuela—or other Latin American countries with a tiny wealthy elite—it’s common for them to speak of the poor as if they’re not quite normal or somehow subhuman.’

      The Shannon Matthews affair casts a disquieting light on modern Britain. It didn’t spark contempt for working-class people. It simply exposed prejudices that have become rampant in our society. The hysteria around the case shows that it is possible to say practically anything about those caricatured as chavs. Somehow a huge part of Britain has been made complicit in crimes they had nothing to do with. With neither middle-class politicians nor journalists showing any willingness to give a platform to the reality of