Damned either way

As someone who was born ‘the other side of the tracks’, I really wanted to like Owen Jones’s book, which sets out to expose how in recent years the working classes have become ‘objects of fear and ridicule’. It’s true; they have. The problem is, however, that he implores us to pity them rather than fear them. And as the proverb goes: ‘Friends help; others pity.’

Jones catalogues media and political assaults on ‘chavs’ — those fake-Burberry-clad no-marks covered in bling, who hang around street corners with scary-looking dogs and bottles of alcopops. They are now wearily familiar symbols in the Daily Mail and on Channel 4 of all that is decadent about modern England.

We are told of the travel firm that offers middle-class trekkers ‘chav-free holidays’; of the London gym that provides ‘chav-fighting classes’ for bankers, who are taught to box the ears off those feckless youths who ‘tend to breed by the age of 15, and spend most of their days trying to score super-skunk’, as the gym manager puts it. And we scarcely need reminding of most politicians’ disdain for teenage mums and leery lads and other council-estate bogeymen.

Yet Jones himself, a former researcher for a Labour MP, has a patronising way of referring to working-class communities as ‘the poor’, and as ‘victims of social problems’. Sadly, he says, there is ‘no sympathy’ for these ‘vulnerable groups’, who ‘lack many of the things others take for granted: toys, days out, holidays, good food’.

Jesus wept! I know plenty of working-class people and I can inform Owen Jones that they do manage to scrape together enough pennies to buy their soot-covered kids toys and days out. In fact, working-class families tend to have many more toys than middle-class ones, since they don’t bother to veto ‘violent’ or ‘sexist’ ones.