population fell by 24.9 per cent. In Redcar, the figures were respectively 29.6 per cent and 24.3 per cent.11 The very regional inequalities nurtured by Conservative policies ended up benefiting the party: because while younger voters from working-class communities still overwhelmingly supported Labour, they took their votes with them to safe urban seats.
That is one reason why, in 2019, Corbyn’s Labour secured a higher share of the vote than Ed Miliband in 2015 or Gordon Brown in 2010 but significantly fewer seats. Any progressive project whose objective is political power must win over more older voters without sacrificing the aspirations of a younger generation who have been increasingly proletarianized: that is, ever more defined by the insecurity of modern wage labour.
There have been other trends since this book was published which encourage some hope. Attitudes towards the welfare state favoured a slash-and-burn approach: 55 per cent believed social security benefits were too generous in 2011, compared to just over 40 per cent who believed cuts would damage too many people’s lives. By 2017, 56 per cent believed cuts would damage too many lives.12 While in 2014, 34 per cent believed most unemployed claimants were ‘fiddling’ that figure had fallen to 22 per cent by 2016.13 By 2020, 47 per cent believed that a majority of people receiving benefits were in need and deserving of help, with another 11 per cent opting for all or almost all; just 6 per cent opted for a minority being deserving and in need.14 Acquiescence to the cuts in public spending had been nurtured by encouraging millions to believe that taxpayers’ money had been frittered away on the undeserving and the lazy. But as those cuts broadened out to include in-work benefits for low-paid workers, and as Labour under Corbyn stopped playing the game of competing with the Conservatives in demonizing benefit claimants, attitudes shifted.
But while the latter half of the 2010s were experienced as the gravest crisis since the war, the pandemic of 2020 shifted the goalposts of upheaval. Here was a crisis defined by class. As a national lockdown was belatedly imposed, middle-class professionals could work from home, protecting themselves from a potentially deadly virus, while low-paid workers such as cleaners were compelled to risk their health by continuing to travel—often by public transport—to their workplaces. Given statutory sick pay was a derisory £95.85 a week, many low-paid workers afflicted by the symptoms of coronavirus with bills to pay and families to feed simply chose to keep working. That the government was compelled to implement a furlough scheme was testament to the fact that millions of workers are always just one pay packet away from extreme hardship. Each Thursday at 8pm, millions clapped key workers from windows, doorsteps and balconies: but it became increasingly noted that those applauded were underpaid and badly treated.
While the relatively well-to-do could make savings during this crisis—they were no longer forking out significant sums in restaurants or on leisure pursuits or foreign holidays, for example—the low-paid found themselves spending a greater proportion of their squeezed incomes on essentials. Those in precarious self-employment and the gig economy—an ever-growing proportion of the modern working class —were hardest hit. Homeowners were offered mortgage holidays, while private tenants were only granted a stay of eviction, often meaning a build-up of rent in arrears.
There was a profound class dimension to those who became infected or who would die from coronavirus, partly due to who was most likely to be exposed: such as care workers, security guards, shop workers, chefs, and taxi drivers. The underlying health conditions which most imperilled those who contracted coronavirus—such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease—were most likely to affect the poor. By the beginning of May, those in the poorest English and Welsh communities were more than twice as likely to die as those in the most affluent.15 Coronavirus was a public health crisis, a social crisis and an economic crisis: and each had profound class dimensions.
There are two other emergencies which relate to class, too. As I write these words, protesters in the US are being teargassed, batoned and assaulted by police officers following the killing of George Floyd. Mass demonstrations inspired by Black Lives Matter have erupted on the streets of Britain and other countries, too. At the forefront are courageous working-class people of colour. It is a reminder of how an understanding of class must always intersect with an understanding of other forms of oppression. Working-class black people on both sides of the Atlantic are more likely to be concentrated in low-paid and insecure work, to suffer from poverty and unemployment, and to face systemic discrimination at the hands of a racist justice system. There is no one single working-class experience: economic exploitation can intersect with oppression and discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, or a combination of some or all. No genuine emancipatory movement is worthy of the name if it erases the multiplicity of lived realities among the working class.
The other burgeoning crisis is the existential threat of the climate emergency. As it is, 9 million die prematurely each year because of pollution, fatalities which are distributed disproportionately among the poor and minorities.16 Poorer communities are more likely to be flooded.17 In every crisis, it is the affluent who are best placed to protect themselves and their property. As the risk of extreme weather, flooding, droughts and destabilised food supplies increase, it will be working-class communities who suffer most, while the wealthy shield themselves from danger. But staving off the emergency will not only protect working-class communities but transform lives, too. The mass insulation of homes and the installation of solar panels on roofs will slash emissions and reduce fuel poverty. The mass expansion of renewable energy industries will create skilled jobs, particularly in areas economically devastated by deindustrialization, austerity, and potentially the pandemic. Investing in affordable public transport will reduce dependency on cars and improve living standards.
When this book was written, the funeral rites for class politics had been conducted. That is certainly no longer the case. The new danger is of a populist right positioning itself as the champions of a besieged working class on the battlegrounds of a culture war. If Labour—a party founded to represent the working class in its broadest sense—abandons class as a guiding political principle, its opponents on the right will not. In this age of crisis, tumult and chaos, the interests of a diverse working class must be unapologetically championed: young and old, white and BAME, straight and LGBTQ. It is only through struggle, through collective action, by asserting that more unites the working class than divides it that social progress and, in time, emancipation will be achieved. In these traumatic times, victory is certainly not assured: but it remains our only hope.
London, June 2020
Chavs, written more than five years ago, is a polemic about a society that was unnecessarily unjust, cruel and divided; since its original publication in 2011 Britain has only become more unjust, cruel and divided. The book appeared in print less than twelve months after the Conservatives returned to Downing Street, after thirteen years in the political wilderness, and it had three central purposes: to refute the myth that Britain is a classless society, when in fact huge amounts of wealth and power are concentrated in very few hands; to tackle the poisonous mantra that social problems like poverty are actually individual failings; and to encourage the idea that social progress comes about by people with similar economic interests organizing together to change society.
In the 1980s, when I was growing up, Thatcherism remodelled British society. Since 2010, despite Tory leader David Cameron’s initial avowals of moderation, his government has busied itself with an ambitious project for rolling back the state in an effort to complete Thatcher’s work.
On one hand, for the sorts of people who tend to fund the Conservative Party—not least those in the financial sector that plunged Britain into an economic mire—the last few years have been a boomtime. During one of the great economic traumas of modern British history, the fortunes of the wealthiest 1,000 Britons more than doubled.1 On the other, the plight of working people stands in stark contrast. Workers suffered the longest fall in pay packets since the 1870s. And then there was the hunger. Britain is one of the richest societies ever to exist and yet hundreds of thousands of Britons depend on food banks for their meals.
A central plank of the government’s programme