In defence of the chav
Only a handful of privileged people will ever admit to themselves that they fear and hate poor people. It's a strange phenomenon: individuals consistently act to protect their own privilege and damn the poor, but they do not think about it in such naked terms. Instead, the privileged create subtle myths that suggest the poor are dirty and stupid and lazy, and therefore deserve their poverty.
Think I'm exaggerating? Let's take a look at The Little Book of Chavs, which I found on the counter of Borders this week. "Chavs" are, it explains, "imbeciles" who do jobs like hairdressing, cleaning, bar-work and being a security guard. They live on "Pot Noodles, cheap cider and McDonald's for Sunday lunch". The extremely popular website www.chavscum.co.uk tells us how to spot a chav: "Chavs have such a tribal dress code that you can spot one yards away! Now what makes the Chavs [sic] attire so funny is they think they are at the cutting edge of fashion... In reality they look like a bunch of pikeys!"
Of course, the people who read this book and website will insist they don't hate all poor people. Just all the ones who live on estates and talk about their mobiles and wear tracksuits. This category sounds suspiciously large to me. Indeed, whenever I hear the term chav, I hear naked and defensive class hate; it is a category that now embraces almost all white, working-class people below the age of 40. The lexicographer, Susie Dent, identifies the word as "just one of the many newly popular, blatantly classist labels that have become popular over the past year. Look at 'council house chic', which describes brands like Burberry and Kappa. Or 'the Croydon facelift', where a chav's hair is pulled back so tight it makes the skin taut".
These are words and phrases that make it possible for privileged people to laugh at and hate the poor without admitting to themselves that this is what they are doing. Indeed, one of the things about chavs that seems to anger middle-class people is their loudness and lack of "taste". "Why are chavs so in your face? Why can't they just shut up?" asks one website. They want their poor people to be passive, silent, unseen. They want them to be a kind of trainee middle class, humbly saving up to buy the same labels as decent Middle England folk. If they develop a value system of their own - or if they dare to intrude into middle-class space in any way - then they must be put in their place with this degrading and cruel label.
Many of my relatives do chav jobs: my grandmother cleaned toilets for a living. My dad is a bus driver. My nephews have "Chav names", according to ChavScum. When I hear the children of privilege ranting about chavs, I want to lock them on a council estate with three kids, no education and a hundred quid a week to see how they cope.
The extent to which the chav label hides real social problems can be seen if we look at the story of a young working-class woman who has been described as "the ultimate chav" - Jade Goody. Jade was ridiculed when she appeared on reality TV show Big Brother a few years ago because of her lack of general knowledge and apparent illiteracy. Nobody asked how she had become this way. When she was two, her father dumped her seriously disabled mother and ended up in prison. Jade did not go to school much because she insisted on staying at home to help her mother dress, eat and get around. For showing this degree of compassion in extremely tough circumstances, Jade is slapped down as a "moron".
For every chav, there is a story like this. Growing up on an estate in Britain has been an unusually tough experience over the past 20 years. Britain's biggest social problems - from poverty to addiction to unemployment - have been played out on chavs, and they have coped as best they can. The "underclass" routinely denounced by rich politicians and journalists is the direct product of the decades of Thatcherism that rolled out unemployment and slashed school budgets and provision for the poor across Britain. If one of their coping strategies is to fetishise a few silly fashion labels, isn't that forgivable? I don't hear anybody mocking the rich and middle classes for doing exactly the same thing - or is Nicole Farhi acceptable while Burberry is vulgar?
Not very far from the surface of talk about chavs is the idea that the poor are culturally - or even in some way genetically - deserving of their circumstances. Do you think people are poor because of lousy educational opportunities, wildly unequal social conditions and layer upon layer of middle-class privilege? Think again, say the prophets of chav-hate. ChavScum tells us the real reason: "Stupidity, alas, breeds stupidity." One poster on their message board explains, "They have no shame because they have no brains - it really is as simple as that." No need to worry about redistributing wealth or investing in schools; there is simply a genetic sub-race of stupid, crude chavs who will always eat crap and think crap and can be happily ignored. Sit back and enjoy your privilege - you deserve it. Even in polite liberal company, the white working class are routinely abused in shockingly vicious terms that aren't used about any other minority. How often have you heard people talk about "white trash"? I've even noticed a weird phenomenon where people try to justify their hatred of poor people by saying the poor are racist and homophobic. In fact, the Institute for Public Policy Research conducted extensive research in 1997 into the attitude towards other ethnic groups among British people. It found that the white working classes were - in many important respects - the least racist of all groups. They were more likely to have had sex with members of another ethnic group and more likely to "marry out" than anybody else. It's easy to blather about multiculturalism from a wine bar; on my sister's estate, these supposedly racist chavs are actually doing the real anti-racist work of falling in love with black and Asian people and producing a post-racist generation of "miscegenated" kids.
As for homophobia, who is the latest chav icon - the Queen of the council estates - but Nadia Alamada, Big Brother's transsexual winner? If you want to be a snob and sneer at white working-class people, fine, but please don't tell me you are doing it for anti-racist, pro-gay reasons.
The snobbery of the right is, as ever, even worse. One newspaper recently sent Petronella Wyatt - the talentless daughter of the late Lord Wyatt - to East Croydon to meet some chavs. This is a woman who quit Oxford University because the other students were "common", only to walk - after blatantly playing on her father's name and connections - into a string of high-paying jobs. Yet she feels perfectly entitled to mock the "laziness" and "vile food" of chavs. (Memo to Petronella: they can't afford to shop in the Fortnum & Mason's food hall.)
She reports with shock that chavs "take so long over one Big Mac". That's because they don't have any money or anywhere else to go, except back to their cramped houses. Didn't this occur to you, Petsy? Did you imagine they would just pop into Harvey Nicks for a few drinks and a spot of shopping that night?
Give me a chav over a snob any time.
POSTSCRIPT: Lots of responses to this piece:
CJ wrote:
"I don't know if your chav article is predominantely tongue-in-cheek, or possibly some form of catharsis for your own guilty prejudices, but equating "chav" with "poor" betrays your misunderstanding of the concept of a "chav".
Maybe after you've been physically assualted for simply looking at someone, or witnessed a group of tracksuit wearing youngsters verbally abusing and spitting on a long-haired individual dressed in black because they're "a fucking goth cunt", or watched a 20 year old drunk mother swearing at her 5 year old child in public at the top of her voice you'll be better qualified to opine on the chav phenomenon.
Your points about middle class snobbery are valid - such vile snobbery only antagonises the chavs' feelings of exclusion and persecution - but primarily chavs are characterised by their lack of social responsibility. The chav problem is not a class issue but a moral issue."
Dan_a_Dude said:
"tell me have you ever been beaten up by chavs just for walking past and not saying anything, i did and i got my nose broken so you can shut up in defence of the chav"
Mazzdontbother said:
Let's examine Jon Hari's bullshit in more detail.
Right - "Chavs=poverty". When challenged about wearing shitty burberry hats and labelled sportswear, your typical chav on this site defends his clothes by bragging how much he spends on them. People spending £50 on tracky tops and £100 on trainers are not in serious poverty. If they are, I rarely spend more than £30 on a jumper or £40 on shoes so I must be in need of an Oxfam appeal. Sure you get poor ones who buy fakes from the market but you get poor goths, poor skaters. Chavs do not = the poor, unless you are fucking stupid or are trying to twist the argument to suit your own agenda, like Mr Hari. It's a fashion trend.
I don't know about cleaning as a chav job but hairdressing is a career goal for female chavs since they get to spend the entire day gossiping with other female chavs about blokes and celebrities and being a security guard certainly seems to attract the dimmer male and they get to wear a cap. Don't forget the well-paying chav professions such as being a premiership footballer or a soap opera star or being in Blazin Squad.
They do live on pot noodles, Maccy Ds and cheap cider and they do dress in awful pikey clothes. I suppose these are the only food and clothes the working class can afford in Mr Hari's deluded mind.
"whenever I hear the term chav, I hear naked and defensive class hate" - yes, you and everyone else who has a giant chip on their shoulder about being from a working class background and looks for opportunities to rant about it. It's easy to hear what we want to and twist things to suit us. The vast majority of us using the term chav don't think we mean the working class. Of course we're LYING or IN DENIAL aren't we but it's funny that people who use the terms nigger and faggot rarely try to tell you they don't mean black people or homosexuals. I could give a fuck about left wing political correctness - if I hated the working class, I'd say so. I hate journalists.
Chavs don't just live on estates, the suburbs are crawling with them. Go out in Bromley today, the most middle-classiest suburb in Britain and play count the chavs. They do however wear tracksuits and annoy everyone with their fucking toy phones. How are these exclusively working class attributes?
I'm sure Susie Dent's lexicography work is of great benefit to mankind, just like the people who produce surveys telling us what music we like to listen to when we're having sex, but someone ought to point out to her that the terms chav, council house chic and Croydon facelift have been around for years. It's just "over the past year" that out-of-touch knob ends in the media have discovered them, mainly from being emailed the chavscum URL or chancing across the book in Charing Cross Road.
Believe it or not, loudness and lack of taste annoy people besides the Middle England types who have got Mr Hari's back up, along with the backs of every other trendy Guardian and Independent journalist who earn the same salaries as the bankers and stockbrokers and insurance people and have the same priced houses but would hate to be thought of as middle class. Some call them the chattering classes, I call them the middle class in denial. These people hate more than chavs, they hate the average British citizen: the nationalistic prole who distrusts the marvellous EU and is against immigration and wants to be tough on criminals and rallies to nationalistic causes and has an England flag on their car and doesn't really care about Iraq and votes Labour or Tory. Of course THAT wouldn't describe the working class at all, although you could make as much of a case for it as for chavs being the working class.
The bit about his family is very moving but cleaning toilets and driving buses are not chav jobs for the simple reason that they involve hard work. Out of interest, what would Mr Hari do if he heard someone from a council estate ranting about chavs? Of course people from council estates ARE chavs aren't they so that wouldn't happen. People on council estates are all tracksuited, trouble-making scum apparently and it's not their fault, the poor dears. That's the message I take from Mr
Hari's pile of patronising liberal shite anyway.
Jade Goody may well have a perfectly good excuse for being a moron but a moron she is and since she became a highly visible celebrity by her own choice, I have absolutely no sympathy for her. In my opinion, the more abuse reality TV contestants are given, the sooner idiots will stop wanting to be them and the sooner this garbage will be off our screens and twats in Mr Hari's profession will have to find something else to write about in the summer months.
I fear "underclass" is the word that has confused some people and given others an excuse to start their ranting about class prejudice. Chavs are not an underclass because they are poor, they are an underclass because they are scum. Middle class chavs are also the underclass. A chav is still the underclass even if it wins the lottery or becomes a celebrity and has millions of pounds and lives in a mansion. The modded Rolls Royce in the drive is the giveaway. The chav does not display no taste because it is poor, it displays no taste because it is stupid.
I think we've covered the chavs=poor people angle. If that's Mr Hari's opinion of poor people, that's up to him although I think a lot of poor people will be very offended. Yes chavs are stupid and stupidity does breed stupidity, usually behind a bus stop with a Mars bar wrapper as a failed contraceptive. Perhaps if we could persuade him that being a chav is a lifestyle choice made by people who are often working class and are often middle class also, we could talk intelligently about why people choose to be stupid but he prefers to believe that people are automatically chavs because they are poor. I find that more offensive and more indicative of class prejudice than anything on chavscum.co.uk but that's just me.
It's true that middle class white people are afraid to point out the bad things in minority cultures - witness the muted reaction to homophobia in reggae when similar lyrics from white bands would inspire protest marches. However politically correct journalists like Hari should talk - they're the reason for it! It's twats like him who would be the first to cry racism if you did say something about violent black youths or fundamentalist muslims. [Er, I talk about fundamentslist Muslims all the time. And I wrote a whole piece condemning reggae murder music. but never mind... - JH] You can imagine his column on the subject - "how dare we as white, privileged, middle class etc... evil western culture... slavery... Iraq... ohhh feel the guilt!" [He clearly doesn't know anthing about me... - JH] So people talk about
white trash because they feel they aren't allowed to talk about black trash or Asian trash, although of course such people exist in the same proportions in every community.
Of course the white working classes are more likely to have affairs with minorities since minorities generally live in working classareas.
These are also the areas where the BNP win council seats however, while they rarely poll more than a few votes in the middle class white towns.
This is another topic though and nothing to do with chavs.
Nadia is not a chav icon but a source of amusement to them. Big Brother is watched by chavs but it's not a chav show. It's had the occasional chav on it but most of its contestants are dreadful media types like Jon Hari who crave the world's attention to make up for their lack of self esteem. It's well known that the vote on that programme is swung not by chavs but by teenage girls and homosexual men, the only people who view it as more than a freak show and who actually care who wins.
If Jon Hari thinks chavs don't have a problem with gays, then as I said in my email, I'd like him to spend a Saturday night out with them at any chav pub in any home counties town centre.
Petronella Wyatt is one of Mr Hari's sort but she works for a right wing newspaper instead of a left wing one so her editor told her to write a piece about how awful chavs are while Hari's editor told him [Er, my editor never 'tells' me to write anything, ever. All my ideas are my own - JH] to write a piece about how awful people who call "the working classes" chavs are. Naturally neither Hari nor Wyatt know the first thing about what they're writing about. She should indeed stick to writing about Fortnum and Masons and Harvey Nicks and Hari should stick to writing sneery pieces about Bush. (Memo to Hari: you're as bad as each other)."
Chris wrote:
"thanks for your interesting piece 'In defence of the Chav'. I agree that it is a classist derogatory term with little depth or insight. I agree with your assertions of all the shit that the poor have to deal with. However, to suggest that those labelled 'Chavs' (who exactly are they anyway?) are amongst the most tolerant people in our society with regards to issues of race and sexuality is surely a case of eulogising the 'working class'. Maybe they are relatively when one takes into account their situation but surely not practically. Poverty, unemployment and lack of education breeds ignorance I'm afraid. It's hardly a scientific study but I grew up in Dagenham, Essex all my life (my family worked on the Ford plants, I'm a primary school teacher).
Now there's no way I'm going to look down my nose at my family who I think are an awesome bunch of people but their opinions on race and sexuality are, in my opinion, uneducated ones. Pop round the pubs of Essex Johann and ask them what they think of 'coloureds', 'pakis' or 'asylum seekers' or 'irons' (gays). Even your admirable tolerance might be a bit tested. I remember as a child being praised and given sweets by the people who worked in my dad's car spares shop (and the punters) for giving a 'paki' a black eye in playground fight. My dad's opinions are as racist or as homophobic as you could imagine. There is, I'm afraid still the 'nicking our jobs' or the 'god made adam and eve not adam and steve' mentality. Surely, it's no suprise that in a society where the poor have (intentionally) been completely depoliticiesd, they vent their anger at imagined threats such as asylum seekers or ethnic immigrants. A question: who is it that carries out the racist and homophobic assaults in this country?"
Jeremy wrote:
"Dear bleeding heart liberal Islington media cunt,
I see you are standing up for chavs against us toffee-nosed middle class types. Here at the chavscum forums, we're used to people making similar arguments although they usually phrase it more like "FUK OF U SNOBS OR IL STAB U" so you do win points for literacy.
You lose points however for not knowing what the fuck you are talking about. Of course this is to be expected from a British newspaper columnist. Not a single fucking one of you - from Richard Littlejohn to Polly Toynbee - has ever known what the fuck they were talking about on any issue they've ever written about. I doubt they'd have hired you if you
did. You're not there to know anything, you're there to latch onto the latest news story, bit of gossip or in this case buzzword and write five hundred words of utter bollocks related to it. If it's provocative, self-righteous and tiresomely unfunny, all the better. Oh and while you might once have stood out for having a platform to spout your bullshit, these days you're just a glorified blogger. There are 15 year olds on this forum whose own bollocks is virtually indistinguishable from yours.
How do I know you don't know what the fuck you're on about? In your article you defend chavs by using the celebrity Jade Goody as an example and you mention you have family in allegedly "chavvy" professions like bus driving. All the while you skirt around the obvious fact that you don't know any chavs. I bet you've never even met a chav and I reckon if a wimpy, cocaine-snorting media cunt like yourself were confronted by a gang of them on your way to the latest chic eatery in Soho, you would run a fucking mile.
By not knowing any chavs, you miss the reason why they're hated. It's not because of their burberry hats or their stupidity or their tastelessness, even though we mock them for that. There are plenty of tasteless, badly-dressed idiots about who no one hates. We hate them because they're also aggressive, violent, bullying, trouble-making thugs, who bring fear and misery to millions of people in this country who don't live in fucking posh parts of London. [I live in the dazzlingly posh area of... err... Whitechapel, East London... - JH] If you ever left your little "village" in Zone 1, you'd learn it's virtually impossible to go for a pleasant Friday or Saturday night out in most towns in this country. Pick any commuter belt town in the Home Counties and go out there next Saturday night, I dare you. [I have done this often - JH] Take your anorexic 21 year old "research assistant" to the Wetherspoons in the middle of town and stay there till chucking out time, then wander the town centre for a while before getting a taxi home. Then write another column about how poor, oppressed chavs have it tough.
Oh and by the way, we're not the "middle class", we're from a very broad cross section of society, from the well off to students to
alternative lifestyles to ordinary working class council estate dwellers, who incidentally resent cunts like you implying they're chavs. Chavs are not only working class, they're also from all sections of society. It's a lifestyle you twat, not a class. You'll find them on estates yes, but also in the nice, leafy suburbs and in quaint olde English villages. East Kent, where I live, is infested with them from Bromley and Bexley all the way down to Margate. You don't see them so much in central London because even chavs don't want to live next door to media twats like you.
Do you know who IS the middle class? Wankers like you in the media who earn upper middle class salaries and live in homes with upper middle class property prices but think they're excluded from being labelled middle class because they live in an £400,000 urban apartment in Clapham [I wish! - JH] and not a £400,000 semi-detached house in Slough. Wow, you're practically down with the working man aren't you. Reality check, arsehole!
You're as middle class as Richard Briers in a 1970s sitcom. [Okay, you've got to admit: that's a good line - JH] And you're a media wanker to boot.
Please fuck off and die."
