Chavs

"Owen has written an outstanding book that is doing extremely well at the moment. It is seminal in the sense that it has captured the zeitgeist and is reaching deep places. That is because he taps into what is going on in Britain. More and more people define themselves as middle class, and as a consequence there is what appears to be an emerging “other” class. Class remains the unresolved wound that runs throughout British history, in the same sense that in the US, race is the subtext. Class is that for us. In Chavs Owen defines this idea and how the word “chavs” is entering our lexicon as an underclass. He says it is becoming de facto acceptable to treat and talk about a certain kind of person in a certain kind of way. I agree this is not about a feral underclass, and it’s not about “sick Britain” as it was described by the prime minister. When David Cameron used the phrase “broken Britain” that was fine, because it meant all of us. When he started talking about “sick Britain” he was basically saying that a group of people at the bottom of society are sick. I think what we’re really talking about is the workless poor. The best way to think about this is to remind ourselves of the housing estates and tower blocks in our major cities. They were built after the [Second World] War to accommodate people whose homes had been burnt out or destroyed in the bombing, and they were largely made up of the working class. What has happened is that because of the huge inequality in our society – because of the way that economic liberalism has worked and because we haven’t managed to give people a stake in society – they have largely become estates of the workless poor. We’ve got to be careful when we talk about class not to enter into a class war. We must face up to class divisions and inequality, but avoid a politics of them and us. I’m interested in giving the working class a stake in capitalism, and restoring a middle class trust in the welfare state. I do think that we’ve had a real emphasis in politics on Middle England, on the centre ground, on soundbite politics, on spin and on being a politician – ie the art of argument in the amphitheatre that is the House of Commons. So Owen touches on something when he talks about representational politics. The most successful democracies have that sense of representation, that you are representing all people. That is a challenge for our democracy at this point. It’s not just about class – there are subcultures, young people, regional issues. Instead we have a politics that has become very technocratic, very bureaucratic, very policy wonk and that has lost a kind of authenticity. That’s not to say you have to be poor to represent somebody poor, or rich to represent somebody rich, but empathy is essential. I’m concerned that hyper-individualistic society affects politicians as much as anybody else. It’s easy to become detached because we’re no longer relational. We’re not encountering one another, and trust is breaking down as a consequence."

"Yes, it’s a British acronym. No one quite knows what the acronym stands for. There are various hypotheses: Council House And Vile is one. They tend to wear baseball caps in reverse order so the cap faces over their neck, and ultra baggy trousers, and eat fast food excessively. Absolutely. I’m not claiming any great knowledge – Owen Jones wrote a whole book about it – but the demonisation of the working class was a centre point of my own chapter on British society. The sneering and contemptuous way in which chavs are referred to – going to “chav bops” or dressing as a chav to go to some charity ball – is slightly less acute now than it was five years ago, when prosperity was high and people thought they were all doing well. Now people feel newly precarious that they might actually find themselves with similar incomes to chavs. But if you demonise them then you’re saying that it is their due desert to be in that place. That somehow they deserve their circumstance, and that we who are better off have no obligation to offer leadership for them to be better, or to design systems in which they can develop their capabilities. We’re saying, in a sense, that we are the deserving rich and they are the deserving poor. Owen Jones very successfully describes the ways in which that takes place, gets fiercely angry about it and says that working class people have been demonised right throughout British history. I know David quite well, and I know why he says that. But actually there are 30 million working class people of working age in Britain, and only a lamentable three or four million of them have no work because they’re unemployed, incapable of working or have somehow opted out of the labour market. There’s another great swathe – as many as 10 million – who make less than £15,000 [$23,000] a year. They are in work but it’s the kind of work that doesn’t attract benefits, holidays, employment rights and pensions, and is very precarious. So our working class – which in the 19th century used to be alienated in mills and factories – in the 21st century is exploited in much subtler forms, by working in a nice place but without control over the shifts, or by being asked to work standing up in a fast food chain. Exactly. There are enormous salaries and remunerations at the top. People understand that those who run huge organisations deserve to be paid more than they are, because it’s a big responsible job and when you get it wrong many people’s livelihoods will go down with your own. But the question they ask is that if in the 1980s someone at the top of a big British company was being paid 30 or 40 times the middle in that organisation, what has happened to make that 150 times today? What are CEOs doing that’s different? Are the decisions tougher and the responsibilities greater? Obviously they’re not. Nor is the country noticeably richer, or to the extent that the country is richer it’s not solely due to the efforts of the top 1%. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And it’s not even the top 1%, incidentally. My only disagreement with the Occupy movement is that it’s not the top 1%, it’s the top 0.01% really who are making these extravagant gains. Proportionality. Responsibility. A sense of obligation to others. An acknowledgement that relationships are reciprocal and trust has to be earned. If you want your workers, customers and those around you to trust you then it’s theirs to give and not yours to demand, and if you want it you have to earn it. You earn it through acknowledging those reciprocities and obligations, and recognising that no man is an island. You’re interviewing me in Hertford College [Oxford] where I’m Principal. John Donne was a student here and that’s his line: “No man is an island”. It’s an appropriate thing to say in this room. “If you want your workers, customers and those around you to trust you then it’s theirs to give and not yours to demand.” So those are the values. And given all that, reward has to be proportional to its due desert. I think the British know that, but also know that in 2012 all those values are more observed in the breach. Consequently they feel that their society is in flux and they lash out against authority, like the looters in the summer riots did. They lash out against foreigners. They’re eurosceptic. Scotland could leave the UK and England could leave the European Union. These are not easy times."