). Publisher: Updated edition used published by Verso 2012. If you have any queries about republishing please contact us. They are the people locked well outside the communities of Middle England and those above such communities, to many of our politicians, journalists and commentators they are natives of a foreign land. Polls show that middle-class people support higher taxes on the rich.”. Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class is a non-fiction work by the British writer and political commentator Owen Jones, first published in 2011. Margaret Thatcher was strong on preaching “personal responsibility”, preferring to attribute her own affluent success to the virtues imbibed in the Grantham shop than to her wealthy marriage. “The old industrial heartlands contain the highest levels of people without work and dependent on benefits. So what do we do about it? And, until the crash, there was widespread acceptance among decision makers and opinion formers that financial services were the future.
Jones has written, not a myth-busting book setting the world right about what is or is not a ‘chav’, but a reminder of the institutional demonization of the working class in general.

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. Will our “chavs” have to scramble forever for poorly-paid work in call centres and supermarkets in a country of growing inequality, separateness and demoralisation? Key Quotes: Chapter 6, 'A Rigged Society': Travel to large parts of Britain today and you will see the hollowed-out husk of communities whose inhabitants struggle to survive. I only read this to chapter 4 but what I did read was enough for me. Owen Jones has taken on a big job documenting the way most of the citizens of these islands are commonly portrayed. Yet you cannot have it both ways. [4] of cover. “Class politics with a green tinge” would see a commitment to rise to the challenge posed by the housing and environmental crises, reform of the tax system and much else that would make our country a home for all. A good education compounded by your parents 'cultural capital', financial support and networks will always see you through. His final chapter offers some well-reasoned remedies, all of which, interestingly, call for a revitalisation of the traditional bodies that underpinned working-class struggles of old. It is that, of course, but British history goes back a bit further than 1979 and the Tory damage to manufacturing and the social fabric of this country he so well describes. Owen Jones' new book documents the changes that have turned the working class into an object of fear and ridicule. Chavs Summary. Whether the new middle classes would countenance such a ground-up revolution remains to be seen, although a period of austerity could well be the motor for the kind of radical shift in consciousness that Marx once urged the proletariat to undertake. Don't LGBTQI Africans have a right to religious freedom, too? No wonder the image of communities teeming with feckless chavs has been so ingrained in recent years.”. Warning: May contain spoilers. “Chavs” - a 21st century acronym for those of our fellow Britons styled Council Housed And Violent - have become representative of the feckless “underclass”. When we briefly honour at Prime Minister’s Questions the dead of our current armed forces, we hear little about those working-class communities who have given many of them life, and to whom their coffins are returned as invisibly as those who come home breathing, but whose maimed lives will never again be the same for themselves or those who love them. Moving through Westminster 's lobbies and working-class communities from Dagenham to Dewsbury Moor, Jones lays bare the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, and reveals a far more complex reality: the increasing poverty and desperation of people left abandoned by the aspirational, society-fragmenting policies of both the Tories and the New Labour. Cameron and company, which may or may not include the Liberal Democracts, may repeat her electroral success.

We encourage anyone to comment, please consult. I couldn't struggle through the last half of the book to find out whether the author had any proposed course of action. "It groups people together and sets them against each other." Copyright LibraryThing and/or members of LibraryThing, authors, publishers, libraries, cover designers, Amazon, Bol, Bruna, etc. This, he argues, was created and then mercilessly lampooned by the middle-class, rightwing media and its more combative columnists.

References to this work on external resources. In this caricature, peddled by spittle-flecked websites such as chavscum.co.uk and tacitly endorsed by the mass media, "chav" means "underclass", which means working-class … Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class is a non-fiction work by the British writer and political commentator Owen Jones, first published in 2011. Those we see at the cenotaph each year and on WW2 anniversaries, that we venerate for their courage, wisdom and quiet dignity, sprung from the same places that now, we are led to believe, can only produce those lacking in any of these qualities. In modern Britain, the working class has become an object of fear and ridicule. White Christian supremacy vs queer liberation theology. The odds are that you will not be better off than your parents. The weary victor of the Second World War, admiring ally of the United States in the Cold War and its “terror” successor, and home to the City of London seeking new ways to assert its influence after the formal disposal of empire, the United Kingdom needed postwar leadership of an order few nations in decline seem able to muster. 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. This is a solid review of the excesses of Thatcherism, how gravely it damaged working-class culture in the 1980s, and its upshot in Britain today - where a working-class rump has gone from being viewed as 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth'. Owen Jones argues that we are light years from those poor, brave inner-city communities who could take it during the Blitz and who could make it when we were the workshop of the world. Applaudi par la critique, le livre est considéré par Dwight Garner du New York Times comme l'un des 10 meilleurs livres non-fictionnels de 2011, et il est nommé au Guardian First Book Award[6],[7],[8],[9],[10],[11]. Since Margaret Thatcher's divisive reign, he says, the working class have been increasingly disenfranchised politically and economically while simultaneously being caricatured as feckless, lazy, loutish and amoral. But we also need to move a bit deeper than Jones’ characterization of “chaz demonization” as traditional class hatred, “the flagrant triumphalism of the rich who, no longer challenged by those below them, instead point and laugh at them”. In modern Britain, the working class has become an object of fear and ridicule. Some discussion of globalisation would have been useful (after all, Thatcher's economic policies and smashing of the trade unions didn't take place in a national vacuum), but overall this is a fairly convincing read. Yes, the working class is demonised. These policies have often been sold to the electorate on the back of patently untrue assertions that "we're all middle-class now" and accompanied by equally misleading propaganda about "welfare scroungers", "workshy single parents" and so on, echoing a negative stereotype of feckless working-class people as "chavs" propagated by right-wing newspapers, TV game-shows, and the rest. His book develops into a sustained polemic about the perniciousness of the British class system. His point, however, is not that working class people can be reduced to the status of a chav – rather, the mythical ideology of aspiration, from Thatcher through to Blair, has all but rid the working class of its pride. Well researched and aligned with my own political views, but 100 pages in I felt defeated. Trade unionists in engineering led imaginative campaigns for a future not based on arms sales, but they received little support from politicians locked into Cold War orthodoxies. Watching Question Time boils my piss every time - woking class is always prefixed by ' the ordinary' - and what exactly is ordinary about a class of people that literally built Britain? Across the world, churches slam their doors into the faces of LGBTQI congregants. The sheer scale of our economic difficulties presided over by a government of Old Etonians bankrolled by their City friends does not of itself guarantee change: Mrs Thatcher pushed up unemployment to over three million and stayed in power. Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books. This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. Just over a decade later, Thatcher's crude rightwing dogmatism had given way to a kind of all-pervasive centre-right wishful thinking.

If you have a bright child born into a working-class family, you do not have any of these things. A polemic that wears its leftwing politics unashamedly (and largely legitimately) on its sleeve. Mainly, he says, the fact that the working class no longer has work. Taking his cue from a quote from the Observer's Nick Cohen – "To say class doesn't matter in Britain is like saying wine doesn't matter in France; or whether you're a man or a woman doesn't matter in Saudi Arabia" – he ranges far and wide in his research, touching on the changing political landscape of post-Thatcher Britain, the ever-widening gap between the wealthy and the rest, and the ways the middle classes find to justify their selfishness. 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. Jones is more nuanced than this short summary might suggest. "Being born into a prosperous middle-class family typically endows you with a safety net for life. This is not just an agenda for the poor, says Jones: “Most middle-class people cannot afford to go private, and want good, properly funded local schools and hospitals. Title of chapter: Chapters 6 and 7, 'A Rigged Society' and 'Broken Britain'. Their portrayal, rarely flattering in the good times, has become markedly more nastily caricatured in the decades of dog-eat-dog individualism. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our, "In this groundbreaking investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth'. Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Chavs, despite its provocative title, is a lively, well-reasoned and informative counterblast to the notion that Britain is now more or less a classless society. The book in a nutshell there. [3][4][5][6][7], "Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones – review", "Book of the week: Chavs: the demonization of the working class by Owen Jones", "Get Your Bling and Adidas Tracksuit, Wayne, a British Class War Is Raging", "Guardian first book award longlist: fiction takes lead", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chavs:_The_Demonization_of_the_Working_Class&oldid=951900154, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 19 April 2020, at 13:51.