Chav-hating is not always about class

The word chav is used less and less frequently in the British media these days. Just a few years ago it was a term thrown around by almost everyone – from A-list celebrities to comedy Z-listers. The success of a certain book, along with a corresponding recognition that the word is often an expression of naked class hatred, have gradually and by consensus banished it from most forms of popular entertainment. The term still lurks around certain corners of course – often in places where one finds a cacophony of other unreconstructed attitudes – but there is increasingly an element of shame attached to the word that equates it with more than a degree of social prejudice.

Outside of journalism and the commentariat, however, the word remains in wide circulation. Not only in the vocabulary of the sort of person who uses it to disparage what their grandparents might have called “the lower orders”, but for people of a distinctly working class background, who associate it with behaviour that increasingly blights the areas where they live. For them, the word relates not so much to income or social class, but to the negation of a basic level of decency expected of their fellow human beings.

Without the luxury of gated communities and private security guards, it’s often the working class who bear the brunt of the anti-social behaviour most commonly associated with ‘chavs’. To them, the word is associated not with working-class culture, but rather with the violent, work-shy louts who plague their otherwise peaceful neighbourhoods. Put another way, one need not condone the unpleasant undercurrent the word sometimes has to recognise that it’s not always an expression of unadulterated class hatred. During last Augusts’ riots, it was poor immigrant families and the elderly – the most vulnerable – who were in many instances barricaded inside their homes while a whirlwind of tracksuited youth swept the streets outside in the hunt for consumer goods. If they had dismissed those rioting as chavs, would they really have been expressing “class hatred”?

Interestingly, new data has found that the highest level of support for a petition to remove benefits from those who took part in last Augusts’ riots came from areas affected the most by rioting. That is, in the areas where, according to some of the more crude analysis, there was so much deprivation that lots of people decided to riot. The postal districts contributing over 500 signatures to the petition were:

SW11 (Clapham) – 1,102
CR0 (Croydon) – 998
E14 (Canary Wharf) – 935
SW18 (Wandsworth) – 897
SW19 (Collier’s Wood) – 892
SW6 (Fulham) – 865
N1 (Islington) – 743
SW15 (Putney) – 675
SE1 (Southwark) – 664
SW17 (Tooting) – 620
SW16 (Streatham) – 557
SW4 (Clapham) – 549
SW12 (Balham/Clapham) – 514
SE16 (Bermondsey) – 500

What the data seems to show is that those who wished to see the greatest sanction for the rioters were themselves just as likely to be from socially deprived areas as the rioters themselves. It is, after all, highly unlikely that a person who has just watched their livelihood go up in flames will be spewing out euphemisms about “uprisings”, nor view someone who has just robbed them as a victim. Which raises the question: is it not possible that those who, according to Owen Jones, were demonised as chavs on the back of the rioting were given this label, to an extent at least, by people who live in close proximity to them? In other words, by people just as working class as they are?

A friend recently relayed to me how during the riots he was unceremoniously set upon by a group of youths. The man who attacked him was part of a larger group, and jumped out of the shadows and hit my friend in the face as he walked home from a night out. On the back of the attack, my friend required an operation to re-align the bone around his eye socket, which had sunk back several millimetres through the force of the punch. He asked the attacker before he fled why he had done this to him; why he had hit him, and for no apparent reason. The attacker explained to my friend that he was mistaken. He had hit him for a very good reason; my friend was on his “patch” – in other words, he had walked through “his” estate. Speaking to me recently, my friend, who works as refuse collector, described his attacker as a “chav”. He wasn’t, as far as I am aware, expressing any sort of class hatred, but rather recoiling from a type of person who, he said, was increasingly prevalent on the estate where he lived – aggressive, violent individuals who were simply incapable of civilised behaviour. The people he really despised, he said, were not the huddles of threatening-looking teenagers and those who drove up and down the streets every night with booming music playing in their cars, nor the people who engaged in “postcode wars” and once put a burning newspaper through his letterbox while his two year old son was asleep upstairs (“the kids round here do it for a laugh”, he told me nonchalantly), but the parents of these people. “Where exactly are they in all of this?” he asked.

That is not to say that social class does not matter. I do not think it would even be going too far to suggest that a small proportion of the weekly television entertainment schedule is given over to laughing at the poor. What many people use the word chav for, however, is to express frustration at the gradual disappearance of basic decency. All too often anyone who recoils at the sort of boorishness commonly ascribed to the chav is lazily dismissed as a snob. And let’s not forget, chavs can also be incredibly wealthy – when a celebrity is labelled a chav it is not their poverty that is being mocked so much as their unabashed materialism and often proud ignorance. Many (usually those who themselves live in affluent areas) will instinctively scoff at even the concept of decency and dismiss it as “bourgeois”, well aware that it will not be their locality that is ransacked the next time it all kicks off.

By all means despise those who use the term to express their nasty little prejudices, but don’t, in the process, forget that lots of working class people also detest what they would call chavs. They’re not expressing class hatred, but rather rejecting the very people who give their social class a bad name.

Originally posted @The Independent
(Image: The Independent)