Writer Kaya Genc, whose work occasionally appears in the Guardian, has written a two-thousand word essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books on the issue of class in the United Kingdom.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1145&fulltext=1&media=
There are a number of errors with this essay which I would like to correct:
Margaret Thatcher did not struggle to make class obsolete – she championed “Victorian values” (no society was more class conscious that Victorian England); she revived baronetcies (hereditary knighthoods), a title which had effectively been abolished in 1965; by the testimony of her opponents (including John Prescott) she waged “class war” against internal enemies such as the miners.
There are far more than three classes in the United Kingdom, and class is one of the main ways in which people define their identity (as opposed to America where race is a primary factor). The socialists ridicule the Etonian “posh boys” in the Cabinet, and yet the true aristocracy will often sneer at parvenus in the Conservative Party (grandee Lord Heseltine was ridiculed as “someone who had to buy his own furniture” instead of inheriting priceless heirlooms). Only an idiot could say that the “upper class” is powerless – the British elite has maintained itself in power by continuously recruiting so that the Anti-Establishment becomes co-opted into the New Establishment and the New Establishment becomes co-opted into the Old Establishment (and are given titles and peerages and profitable positions on the boards of companies so that thrusting newcomers such as Michael Heseltine, Martin Sorrell, Peter Mandelson over a period of time are ennobled and enrich themselves and “almost” become accepted as gentlemen – but only “almost”).
What has changed since 1997 is that the previously expanding comfortable “middle class” has seen standards of living falling so that they are becoming effectively “upper working class” (renting instead of buying property, scrabbling to maintain positions in professional employment even if that means working part-time, seeing their children unemployed and unable to afford university). Perhaps they still self-identify as middle-class, but they no longer have the material lifestyle to justify that claim. Against that reality John Prescott’s description seems like a hollow jibe (and let us note that former firebrand John Prescott is now Lord Prescott, and doing very well for himself and his family).
No journalist, from left or right, today seriously uses the description “chav”. It has entirely lost its meaning. When current commentators use the word “chav” as a verb the context is either historic, ironic or satirical.
Owen Jones may have many qualities as a writer and commentator, but he is not comparable to Charles Dickens.
Eric Hobsbawm may have described Owen Jones’s book Chavs as “a passionate and well-documented denunciation of the upper-class contempt for the proles that has recently become so visible in the British class system” but we should bear in mind that Owen Jones worked for Eric Hobsbawn as a researcher and editor of his papers and so the great historian might understandably be allowed to big-up the work of his protégé without our reading very much into the endorsement.
When discussing the riots that followed the shooting of Mark Duggan, I think Kaya Genç has become confused (not surprisingly, as it was a confusing episode). Although people on Twitter may have used the word “chav” it is not really applicable to the rioters, a large percentage of whom were black (to the best of my knowledge chav has never been applied to black people, who usually have to endure far worse insults). The subsequent court cases included many examples of middle class individuals who were arrested for looting, which indicates that the riots were an upsurge by amoral and opportunist materialists rather than an example of class war per se.
The way historian David Starkey (who is just as eminent as Eric Hobsbawm) was treated on Newsnight was a disgrace, and an example of how anyone attempting to discuss race in the United Kingdom is publicly hounded and silenced – presenter Emily Maitlis should really accept responsibility for not managing the discussion more firmly.
No-one has convincingly demonstrated the etymological origin of the word “chav”, but it appears to be a corruption of the place name Chatham (a working class docks area where, incidentally, some of my maternal ancestors hail from).
The example quoted of Andrew Mitchell’s supposed use of the word “pleb” does not, to me, quite ring true. Is it likely that an experienced politician would be so indiscreet, no matter what the provocation? And Kaya Genç fails to point out that the police have a vested interest in turning opinion against the government in the hope of gaining concessions over pension funding (and as for the claim that the police would not tell lies in writing up their notes, the police have been exposed as liars on numerous occasions to the point where one is astonished now when the police seem to be telling the truth).
I am perplexed by Kaya Genç’s claim that Chavs is a “work of art”. It is many things, some good and some bad, but it is not a work of art. I am sure that Owen Jones does not make this claim, nor does his publisher.
Early in the piece Kaya Genç describes Owen Jones as “an activist from the middle class who had no patience for middle class complacency”.
I am perhaps too lazy to be an activist, but I am from a genuine working class background and I have no patience with middle class intellectuals telling the lower classes what they are and what they should think. I have met many aristocrats and people from the upper classes, including some who were at Eton at the same time as the Prime Minister. On the whole I do not enjoy the company of these people but I do not hate them – my loathing (and it is a loathing based on fear) is reserved for the members of the United Kingdom’s Labour party who, from the best of intentions and with the best of motives, repeatedly bully and enslave the working classes and seek to keep them in their place far more determinedly than Andrew Mitchell MP and his like ever could.
Towards the end of Orwell’s Animal Farm there is a moment when the revolutionary pigs morph seamlessly into the despotic humans. The Anti-Establishment becomes the New Establishment becomes the Old Establishment. You are always safer with the true patricians than you ever will be with the revolutionaries.
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