Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
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Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
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He adds fuel to the fire by adding: "Karl Marx once described religion as 'the sigh of the oppressed creature': something similar could be said about the rise of the far right today. Stories about the lazy unemployed became a commonplace, while Labour politicians like James Purnell spent more time appeasing Tory attitudes and less time addressing the deep rooted problems that Britain inherited from Thatcherite destruction. Exposing the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, one based on the media’s inexhaustible obsession with an indigent white underclass, he portrays a far more complex reality. In 2015, Jones was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of the University (DUniv) by Staffordshire University.
People on benefits generally are desperate, the majority stuck in a cycle of low-paid work, then being in a period of unemployment for a few weeks, and then back into low-paid work. Jones' second book, The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, was published in September 2014. And unless the left can formulate an accessible form of class politics – that resonates, that’s relevant to how society is actually structured, that people can identify with and then make that popular – then, unfortunately, we’re screwed. He leans forward in his seat, frowning a little as he tries to make sense of the images flitting past on the screen: twigs in a Burberry bikini, draped over a motorbike, in a carpeted living room. In our new Class Ceiling series, we unpack how class actually affects young people today – from our jobs, to the way we have sex, to our general experience of the world.Ash Sarkar: You don’t really hear the word chav anymore, and the symbols of chavviness – like hoodies and sportswear – have become the garb of tech billionaires. The global crisis of Covid-19 has laid bare the deep social and economic inequalities which were the toxic legacy of austerity. In November 2012, Jones was awarded Journalist of the Year at the Stonewall Awards, along with The Times journalist Hugo Rifkind. This is a bit dramatic, so firstly I'm fine, but last night – when I was celebrating my birthday – I was attacked, along with my friends, in a blatant premeditated assault" (Tweet) . In November 2013, he delivered the Royal Television Society's Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture, Totally Shameless: How TV Portrays the Working Class.
And that’s why the right has made such a play in trying to tap into it, and redirect it in a very reactionary way. At a time when a cabinet of millionaires has set about cutting public service budgets, while making massive rearrangements to the welfare state, it was only going to be so long before class was back on the agenda. 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. You’re left, she said, with the result of individual behaviour and personality defects, people not being able to budget.So rather than poverty and unemployment being seen as social injustice, due to the structure of society (which therefore needed a collective correction), these are individual problems, being encouraged and subsidised by the welfare state. But while it's always right to argue, and to keep arguing, that the balance of power in our social and economic structure is hopelessly, immorally off-whack, there is a cost to denying the personal volition of working-class individuals. Jones singles out for opprobrium middle-class contempt towards working-class people, those regarded by rightwing commentators such as Simon Heffer as the "feral underclass".
There’s a kind of reclamation you see with every oppressed group, like ‘queer’ for LGBTQ+ people, where they take the insults of the oppressor and spin them around.Or a former miner with a disability, who voted leave, has the same political interests as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson.
How the People's Assembly can challenge our suffocating political consensus and why it's vital that we do". lu„rf cjlag c grlup ld drnfaks lr c`qucnatca`fs wefa sukkfaby sljflaf scys sljftenag tect sel`os ylu8 ca csnkf lr c dbnppcat `ljj fat jckf na pllr tcstf .For Jones, the British class system is "an invisible prison" from which, increasingly, there is little escape for those born into working-class families.
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