Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
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,