and have little ability to spell or write. They love their pit bull dogs as well as their blades. And would happily ‘shank’ you if you accidentally brush past them or look at them in the wrong way. They tend to breed by the age of fifteen and spend most of their days trying to score ‘super-skunk’ or whatever ‘gear’ they can get their sweaty teenage hands on. If they are not institutionalized by twenty-one they are considered pillars of strength in the community or get ‘much respect’ for being lucky.
It is no surprise that, when asked if so-called chavs were getting a hard time in Britain, his response was blunt: ‘No, they deserve it.’
Apparently the class was a hit with gym-goers. Describing it as ‘one of the most popular classes we have ever run,’ he claimed that: ‘Most people related to it and enjoyed it. A few of the PC brigade were offended by it.’ And yet, intriguingly, Mr Hilton does not think of himself as a bigot—far from it. Sexism, racism and homophobia, for example, were ‘completely unacceptable’.
An extremely successful businessman, Richard Hilton has tapped into the fear and loathing felt by some middle-class Londoners towards the lower orders. It is a compelling image: sweating City bankers taking out their recession-induced frustrations on semi-bestial poor kids. Welcome to Gymbox, where class war meets personal fitness.
It is easy to gasp at Hilton’s unembarrassed hatred, but he has crudely painted a widespread middle-class image of the working-class teenager. Thick. Violent. Criminal. ‘Breeding’ like animals. And, of course, these chavs are not isolated elements: they are, after all, regarded as ‘pillars of strength in the community’.
Gymbox isn’t the only British company to have exploited middle-class horror of large swathes of working-class Britain. Activities Abroad is a travel firm offering exotic adventure holidays with price tags often upwards of £2,000: husky safaris in the Canadian wilderness, Finnish log cabin holidays, that sort of thing. Oh, but chavs need not apply. In January 2009, the company sent a promotional email to the 24,000 people on its database, quoting a Daily Mail article from 2005 showing that children with ‘middle-class’ names were eight times more likely to pass their GCSEs than those with names like ‘Wayne and Dwayne’. The findings had led them to wonder what sort of names were likely to be found on an Activities Abroad trip.
So, the team had a trawl through their database and came up with two lists: one of names you were ‘likely to encounter’ on one of their holidays, and one of those you were not. Alice, Joseph and Charles featured on the first list, but Activities Abroad excursions were a Britney, Chantelle and Dazza-free zone. They concluded that they could legitimately promise ‘Chav-Free Activity Holidays’.
Again, not everyone was amused—but the company was unrepentant. ‘I simply feel it is time the middle classes stood up for themselves,’ declared managing director Alistair McLean. ‘Regardless of whether it’s class warfare or not, I make no apology for proclaiming myself to be middle class.’2
When I spoke to Barry Nolan, one of the company’s directors, he was equally defiant. ‘The great indignation came from Guardian readers who were showing false indignation because they don’t live near them,’ he said. ‘It resonated with the sort of people who were likely to be booking holidays with us. It proved to be an overwhelming success with our client base.’ Apparently, the business enjoyed a 44 per cent increase in sales in the aftermath of the furore.
Gymbox and Activities Abroad had taken slightly different angles. Gymbox were tapping into middle-class fears that their social inferiors were a violent mob, waiting to knife them to death in some dark alley. Activities Abroad exploited resentment against the cheap flights which allowed working-class people to ‘invade’ the middle-class space of the foreign holiday. ‘You can’t even flee abroad to escape them these days’—that sort of sentiment.
But both of them were evidence of just how mainstream middle-class hatred of working-class people is in modern Britain. Chav-bashing has become a way of making money because it strikes a chord. This becomes still more obvious when an unrepresentative story in the headlines is used as a convenient hook to ‘prove’ the anti-chav narrative.
When ex-convict Raoul Moat went on the run after shooting dead his ex-lover’s partner in July 2010, he became an anti-hero for a minority of some of the country’s most marginalized working-class people. One criminologist, Professor David Wilkinson, told Sky News Moat was ‘tapping into that dispossessed, white-working-class, masculine mentality, whereby they can’t make their way into the world legitimately so behaving the way that Moat has behaved, as this kind of anti-hero, has, I think, touched a nerve.’ White working-class men had, at a stroke, been reduced to knuckle-dragging thugs lacking legitimate aspirations. The internet hosted a vitriolic free-for-all. Take this comment on the Daily Mail site:
Look around the supermarket, the bus and increasingly now on the road, you will encounter ever-growing numbers of tattooed, loud, foul-mouthed proles, with scummy brats trailing in their wake, who are incapable of acknowledging or even recognising a common courtesy, and who in their own minds can never, ever, be in the wrong about anything. These are the people who are getting sentimental about a vicious killer; they have no values, no morality and are so thick that they are beyond redemption. You are better off just avoiding them.3
This form of class hatred has become an integral, respectable part of modern British culture. It is present in newspapers, TV comedy shows, films, internet forums, social networking sites and everyday conversations. At the heart of the ‘chavs’ phenomenon is an attempt to obscure the reality of the working-class majority. ‘We’re all middle class now’, runs the popular mantra—all except for a feckless, recalcitrant rump of the old working class. Simon Heffer is a strong advocate of this theory. One of the most prominent right-wing journalists in the country, he has often argued that ‘something called the respectable working class has almost died out. What sociologists used to call the working class does not now usually work at all, but is sustained by the welfare state.’4 It has given way to what he calls a ‘feral underclass’.
When I asked him what he meant by this, he replied: ‘The respectable working class has died out largely for good reason, because it was aspirational, and because society still provided the means of aspiration.’ They had moved up the social ladder because ‘they’ve gone to university, and they’ve got jobs in white-collar trades or professions, and they’ve become middle class.’ Where the millions who remain in manual occupations, or the majority of the population who have not attended a university, fit into all this is an interesting question. According to Heffer, however, there are really two main groups in British society: ‘You don’t have families any more that live in sort of respectable, humble circumstances for generation after generation. They either become clients of the welfare state and become the underclass, or they become middle class.’
This is the model of society as seen through Heffer’s eyes. Nice, middle-class people on one side; an unredeemable detritus on the other (the ‘underclass’ who represent ‘that section of the working class that not only has no ambition, it has no aspiration’); and nothing in between. It bears no relation to how society is actually structured—but then why would it? After all the journalists producing this stuff have little, if any, contact with the people they disparage. Heffer has a thoroughly middle-class background, lives in the country, and sends his kids to Eton. At one point, he admits: ‘I don’t know a great deal about the underclass’, a fact that has not deterred him from repeatedly slagging them off.
There are some who defend the use of the word ‘chav’ and claim that, actually, working-class people are not demonized at all; ‘chav’ is simply used to designate anti-social hooligans and thugs. This is questionable. To begin with, no one can doubt that those on the receiving end are exclusively working class. When ‘chav’ first appeared in the Collins English Dictionary in 2005, it was defined as ‘a young working-class person who dresses in casual sports clothing’. Since then, its meaning has broadened significantly. One popular myth makes it an acronym for ‘Council Housed And Violent’. Many use it to show their distaste towards working-class people who have embraced consumerism, only to spend their money in supposedly tacky and uncivilized ways rather than with the discreet