Blears argues that local authorities did improve, but the fundamental distrust that New Labour had towards them meant they did everything possible to bypass them.

Owen Jones: Yeah, we bloody love a bit of want! Margaret Thatcher said in the late 70s, that there’s no such thing as primary poverty in rich countries anymore. You’re left, she said, with the result of individual behaviour and personality defects, people not being able to budget. So rather than poverty and unemployment being seen as social injustice, due to the structure of society (which therefore needed a collective correction), these are individual problems, being encouraged and subsidised by the welfare state. And that’s at the height of mass unemployment. In pursuit of answers, “Chavs” covers a lot of ground. It’s a history of the British class system, a long-form indictment of Margaret Thatcher’s social and economic policies and a rowdy broadside against London’s elite media and political circles. Its combination of wit and outrage, at least in the early chapters, is intoxicating. Not only has he managed to grab the attention of the mainstream press and blogosphere, but he has done it in a broadly supportive way. While Polly Toynbee has given a glowing recommendation of the text, The Independent made it their Book of the Week. But whether his bold conclusions will gain any traction with politicians and policymakers is another matter entirely. Sabbagh, Dan (17 January 2020). "Man found guilty of aggravated assault against Owen Jones". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2 February 2020 . Retrieved 2 February 2020.Above all, unemployment is a class issue. It is a fate you are far more likely to face if you are working class than if you are middle class. In May 2009 — about a year into the recession — the unemployment rate for people in professional occupations was just 1.3 per cent, and was not much higher for managers and senior officials. But for skilled workers, it was 8.1 per cent; for sales and customer service workers, it was 10.5; and for workers in unskilled, ‘elementary’ occupations, it was 13.7 per cent, or over ten times higher than for professionals. Barnes is careful to say that, of course, other factors come into play, not least the rise of rampant consumerism in the 1980s and the greater availability of drugs. But he was in no doubt that people often made the leap from being a bit experimental with drugs to full-blown, problematic drug use, either through despair or as a coping mechanism. New Labour’s approach to crime as a whole was authoritarian, disregarding the main root cause: poverty. Before he became Labour leader, the rising star that was Tony Blair won plaudits by committing to a policy of ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. But, as Blair’s political secretary John McTernan has admitted, New Labour’s strategy ended up as ‘tough on crime, tough on criminals’. Between 1993 and 2010, England and Wales’s prison population nearly doubled, from 44,500 to around 85,000. I agree with the author about Margaret Thatcher and her cruel war on the British poor. But the liberal and left elites now in charge have been even worse in oppressing Britain's indigenous working classes and lumpenproletriat In 2011, Jones published his first book, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, dissecting cultural stereotypes of the British working-class as boorish and anti-social " chavs". The book was selected by critic Dwight Garner of The New York Times as one of his top 10 non-fiction books of 2011, and it was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. [21] [22] [23] [24] [25]

There is an increasingly strong case for compulsory sterilisation of all those who have had a second child—or third, or whatever—while living off state benefits” Take away the heart of a community and it will wilt and begin to die. ‘The community just disintegrated,’ says Mrs Parry. ‘There was just nothing left for nobody. They tried to fetch various works up to the industrial estate, but every one’s just left after two or three years. Loads and loads of men over forty-five never worked again, because they were too old.’ I said before that the Australian word for Chav is Bogan – well, the other word to know is CUB – a Cashed Up Bogan – that is, someone with lots of money, but no taste. This was a major theme of the play. The nice middle class family had come upon financial hard times, but they still had the cultural capital that told them the right wines to drink and the beers they should avoid. But the working class are working as plumbers and so on – and have lots of money, but obviously no taste at all. What a terrible inversion…and how terribly amusing too…The liberal and left elites now use the race card against he white under classes and point out since the latter are supposedly 'racist' and 'bigoted' they must be punished for this and are the unworthy poor as compared to the impoverished people of colour who are deemed worthy of empathy and upliftment. Ash Sarkar: Do you buy into this idea that there is a working class, and then an underclass? Or is that a wholly manufactured distinction?