[matilda] Bottom of the class!

[dan thomas]

HI, i thought i would post this article by the writer
John Harris, in tody's Guardian. it really blew me
away and imo says so much about the sort of society we
live in today, the working class, everywhere but
nowhere!. Its very long, but really merits reading

regards

audio  




Bottom of the class

The news that Prince William has been dressing up as a
member of the working class shouldn't surprise us,
says John Harris. From sneering comedy shows to
elitist politics, class snobbery is alive and well

Tuesday April 11, 2006
The Guardian

The headline inside was "Future Bling of England"; the
strapline screamed, "Wills wears Chav Gear in Army
Snap." Over two pages built around a snap of 30
trainee officers at Sandhurst, yesterday's Sun
gleefully recounted how the heir to the throne "joined
in the fun as his platoon donned chav-themed fancy
dress to mark the completion of their first term".
Wills, we were told, "went to a lot of trouble
thinking up what to wear" (white baseball cap,
sweatshirt, two gold chains), and was challenged to
"put on a chavvy accent and stop speaking like a
royal". Apparently, he struggled to sound quite as
proletarian as required, though he was said to be
"making hand gestures and swaggering from side to side
as he walked across the parade square".

Article continues
If the Sun's coverage of the wheeze suggested nothing
more worrying than innocuous hijinx, one might wonder
how a fair share of their readership responded not
only to the news, but the way it was delivered. Within
four paragraphs, Wills's "working-class accent" had
mutated into a "silly accent"; by way of hammering
home the Sandhurst chaps' close resemblance to what
the Sun called "any bunch of lads from your
neighbourhood street corner", they printed a shot of
Michael Carroll, a man from Norfolk who won the
lottery but is now serving nine months for affray - as
if he were the typical representative of the working
class. The snobby tone of the coverage, in fact, was
much like the underlying spirit of the episode itself.
An episode in which the Eton-educated heir to the
throne - along with some aristocratic mates - has a
right old laugh dressing up as a member of the working
class surely provided conclusive proof of the blatant,
shameless return of snobbery.

There is a lot of this kind of stuff about, as proved
by a conversation with Matthew Holehouse, an
18-year-old A-level student from Harrogate and
occasional Times Education Supplement columnist. Last
year, he found himself dispatched by his state school
to a debating seminar organised by the English
Speaking Union. It was staged at Oakham, a private
school in Rutland, whose website lays claim to
"forward-looking educational thinking". The fact that
he was from a comprehensive put him in a noticeable
minority, he tells me, a sense of disorientation
compounded by a set of pictures he found hanging on
one of the school's walls.

"There were various things on display," he says.
"Pictures of rugby teams, of parties and discos. But
the one that really jumped out was of a chav-themed
school disco: all these rosy-cheeked, foppish-looking
public schoolkids dressed in baseball caps and Adidas
tracksuits. It looked a bit pathetic; at first I
suppose I felt slight pity for them. But then I
thought about it another way: here were the most
privileged kids in Britain pretending to be poor
people."

Holehouse is preparing to take up a place at Oxford
University, where he will study history. His perusal
of the entertainment currently offered to
undergraduates has only confirmed that the so-called
"chav bop" - a disco where you dress up as a
working-class person - is an immovable fixture not
only at public schools, but also throughout Oxford's
colleges. Google the phrase and you receive instant
pictorial proof that such events have taken place at
Lady Margaret Hall, Trinity and St Peter's:
predictable snaps of well-bred young men, with
captions like "Rock 'ard", mugging for the camera
using poses they have presumably learned from Goldie
Lookin' Chain videos.

The chav phenomenon - the mass mockery of a certain
kind of young, Burberry-check wearing, borderline
criminal, proletarian youth - has been with us for
more than three years. Its collision with public
schools, military academies and high-end universities,
however, surely serves to confirm what some people
suspected all along: that the C-word actually denotes
the mind-boggling revival of privileged people
revelling in looking down their noses at the white
working class, that social entity whose mere mention
in certain company can cause either a palpable frisson
of unease or loud ridicule. In last year's Christmas
bestseller, Is It Me or Is Everything Shit?, Steve
Lowe and Alan McArthur crystallised this sea change as
"Nu snobbery": the belief that "the poor are a right
laugh. But there's a downside, too - they sometimes
have bad skin because they don't use the correct sea
salt-based exfoliant scrubs, and they can be violent."
They went on: "It's clearly enormously liberating to
rant on about single mothers and lazy workers like
some gout-ridden Victorian bishop. Let's hope that
soon there are just two words on everyone's lips:
'work' and 'house'."

To illustrate their point, the authors made reference
to an often-quoted passage from the Daily Mail,
bemoaning the kind of women who "pull their shoddily
dyed hair back in that ultra-tight bun known as the
'council house facelift'". In fact, they could have
drawn on any number of examples of Nu Snobbery, going
back to the notion's genesis in the mid-1990s. In
retrospect, the germ of the idea was evident in the
press's gleeful response to Wayne and Waynetta Slob,
the degenerate, perma-smoking welfare claimants who
became a fixture of Harry Enfield's BBC1 show. You
could also detect its beginnings in some of the
supposed social comment associated with Britpop - not
least the snide songs about forlorn proletarian lives
that were briefly the calling card of Blur's Damon
Albarn, who affected a mewling "Essex" accent, but was
in fact raised in one of that county's more upscale
corners. "The strange thing about Damon's songs," said
the critic Jim Shelley, "is that, unlike a writer such
as Morrissey or Ian Dury, he has no sympathy for his
characters ... Albarn's attitude is totally
uncharitable, a kind of snide contempt."

>From there, it was a short hop to the repopularisation
of the kind of archetypes that, in the 80s, were the
preserve of boneheaded Tory MPs - not least that of
the "Pram Face", defined on the website Urban
Dictionary as "a girl who is a little rough round the
edges and wouldn't look at all out of place at 14
years of age pushing a newborn through a council
estate". In turn, the duty to combine haughtiness with
supposed humour duly fell away, and the acceptable
voice of snobbery started to sound uncomfortably
sharp: in Tourism, the much-hyped new novel by Nirpal
Singh Dhaliwal, a rather clumsy attempt to come up
with a voice that might shine light on modern Britain
with the same odorous scorn you find in Michel
Houllebecq presents a principal character nicknamed
Puppy. "I hate poor white people," runs one of his
more unpleasant lines. "No one is more stupid or
useless."

That said, comedy remains Nu Snobbery's most
influential vehicle - and in 2003, its decisive
arrival was proved by the most successful British
comedy programme since The Office. Little Britain
(along with the inexplicably popular comedian Jimmy
Carr - sample joke: "The male gypsy moth can smell the
female gypsy moth up to seven miles away - and that
fact also works if you remove the word 'moth'") was
emblematic of that post-PC nihilism whereby a little
misogyny or homophobia was all part of the fun, but
its fondness for laughing at the people now
fashionably termed "the disadvantaged" was surely its
most insidious aspect. It is hard to cry foul at these
things without sounding hopelessly po-faced, but
still: somewhere in the characterisation of Lou and
Andy, the hapless carer and his wheelchair-using
charge, there surely lurks the whiff not only of
welfare fraud, but the idea that people so obviously
at society's bottom end are so stupid that they
probably deserve their fate.

And what of Vicky Pollard? Her portrayal might shine
light on Matt Lucas's comedic talent, but her
transformation into a signifier for a pretty hideous
archetype - that selfsame Pram Face, supported in her
fecklessness by a generous welfare state - speaks
volumes about the people we now consider to be fair
game. On one Little Britain web forum, cited last year
by the columnist Johann Hari, the link between
prime-time tomfoolery and social attitudes became
crystal clear: "Down here in Bristol," wrote one
subscriber, "we have an area called Southmead, which
is absolutely packed with Vickys wearing fluorescent
tracksuits. I was coming home on the bus today, and as
always, there were millions sat at the back all
holding their babies that they had when they were 12,
and every other word 'Fuck this' and 'Fuck that', and
that's just the babies! They all have council flats
and not a GCSE to their name. Do the Vickys out there
not watch television, because if they do they surely
would have seen Vicky on TV and thought, 'That's me!'
Do they not realise we are taking the piss out of
them?"

If "we" are doing exactly that, it might be an idea to
remind ourselves of the social backgrounds of the
people who invented the joke. Lucas was educated at
the Haberdashers' Aske's School in Elstree, which
charges parents around £10,000 a year; David Walliams
went to Reigate Grammar, which rates itself as "one of
the top independent co-educational day schools in the
country".

Naturally enough, the New Snobbery is not restricted
to the more frivolous end of our pop culture. In the
eyes of an increasing number of people, those who
define our politics - led, of course, by two more
public schoolboys - have pulled off a remarkable
trick: scything the working class out of mainstream
politics, and using them as an embodiment of all the
fear and failure that our politicians claim to hold at
bay. To back up the stereotypes, they need look no
further than the nearest TV: as the dissident Labour
MP and former Blair adviser Jon Cruddas put it in a
recent issue of the centre-left journal Renewal, "in
popular culture, the working class is everywhere,
albeit successively demonised in comedy or in debate
around fear, crime and antisocial behaviour - seen
through caricature while patronised by reality TV.
Arguably, the cumulative effect of this is that the
working class itself has been dehumanised - now to be
feared and simultaneously served up as entertainment."
Stranger still, despite five decades of the supposed
decline of deference, the rise of David Cameron
suggests that simple poshness might still be a very
potent political asset.

A 20-minute chat with Cruddas - who finds Little
Britain "wretched" - proves to be very enlightening
indeed. As he sees it, the three main parties now
build their tactics around the "very precise
calibration" of crucial voters who live in a mythical
middle England, and thereby leave the kind of people
who live in his Dagenham constituency out of their
calculations.

Worse still, when things get sticky, they reach for
the ghoulish stereotypes that spread fear through
Daily Mail-land: benefit scroungers, feral youths,
problem families. Throw in Cameron and Blair's
celebration of "meritocracy" and both parties' pursuit
of a social mobility that the economy stubbornly
refuses to deliver, and you end up with two very
important questions. If, as Alan Milburn put it just
before the last election, it's one of the government's
main objectives to "give more people the opportunity
to join the middle class", doesn't that imply a very
negative judgment on those they might leave behind?
And if no leading politician wants to depart, just
occasionally, from the dreamy rhetoric of aspiration
and opportunity, might that not leave a gap for some
very unpleasant people indeed?

Cruddas's stomping ground, he explains with no little
urgency, is currently the focus for an ongoing battle
with the BNP. As he fleshes out his fears about May's
local elections, I'm rather reminded of a passage from
Michael Collins' memoir-cum-biography of the white
working class, The Likes of Us, published in 2004. In
his account, the early New Labour period saw the final
confirmation that as far as what used to be called the
proletariat was concerned, "middle-class progressives
who had traditionally come out fighting these
underdogs' corner, or reporting their condition as
missionaries or journalists, were keen to silence
them, or bury them without an obituary. They loved
Gucci; loathed the Euro. More important, to their
pall-bearers in the press, they were racist,
xenophobic, thick, illiterate, parochial. All they
represent and hold dear was reportedly redundant in
modern, multicultural Britain. It was dead."

The strange thing is, society is perhaps not quite in
the same shape as most of the political elite - or for
that matter, the siren voices who would have you
believe that "everyone's middle class nowadays" -
suggest. As Cruddas points out, people in manual
occupations still account for a relatively stable 10.5
million of the population. Throw in clerical and
secretarial work, and what he calls the "traditional
labour force" stands at around 15 million, and
represents nearly two in three jobs; small wonder that
according to a Mori survey published four years ago,
two-thirds of Britons said they were "working class
and proud of it".

There is, of course, a conversation to be had about
whether an increasingly diverse Britain has made the
old notion of working-class identity redundant, but
the numbers still point up an absurd aspect of the new
snobbery. If, as evidenced by politicians, comedians
and our future king, mocking and demonising supposed
white trash is our new national pastime, we're
victimising an awful lot of people.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,,1751272,00.html



		
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