Episode 9: From Danniella Westbrook to Northern Slums

For today's instalment of the Comrade Contrary files I am going to take a dip into the world of British media. The British working-class is a commonly referred to as ‘Chavs’, characterized by their rowdy, violent behaviour, track-suit, sneakers and Burberry cap, they are the vilified class. 'The stereotype made famous by Vicky Pollard in the BBC comedy series Little Britain', has been the victim of media attacks for many years.  There are many different interpretations of the term, for instance the Oxford University Press, tells me that a 'chav' is, “a young person, often without a high level of education, who follows a particular fashion”. Meanwhile, the brutally forthright Urban Dictionary argues that a 'chav' is simply a person that is, “completely amoral, having never been subjected to right and wrong by their inattentive, uncaring and often absent parents.” This is an excellent example of the attitude that the middle-class media and the current Prime Minister David Cameron.

There are many excellent examples of the British media vilifying the working-class from the case of Shannon Matthews, to the news coverage of many football games, to the riots in the 1980s and the more recent 2011 riots.

The case of Shannon Matthews is one of the easiest places to start. Shannon Matthews was kidnapped on her way home from a swimming class in February of 2008. Shannon was from a working-class family, her mother had 7 children from 5 different fathers and she lived in the working-class suburb of Yorkshire. This much like any other kidnapping of a young girl was devastating and tragic, though not compared to the way it was depicted, or rather not depicted in the media.
9 months earlier on a family holiday in the Portuguese Algrave, Madeline McCann was kidnapped from her bedroom. There were 1,148 stories in the media and a sum of £2.6 Million in reward money from Sir Richard Branson, the Sun and J.K. Rowling. Madeline McCann became a household name, there were websites everywhere, 'help find Madeline'. Comparatively in the same time period that this was going on Shannon Matthews received one third of the media coverage in the same span of time and the reward for her was only £50, 000 almost all donated by the Sun.

The media portrayed the McCanns as a victim, that ‘kind of thing doesn’t usually happen to people like us’, implying the middle-class people. Which was a startlingly different from Matthews, she was demonized because she wasn’t ‘like us’. The media, dominated by the middle-class was only able to empathize with people of the middle-class. Much-like how the media ignored the ‘north’ and its ‘negligent wasteland’ of slums, they ignored Shannon Matthews. This in turn resulted in the people of Britain focusing on Madeline McCann, she was a household name, whereas Matthews was just another ‘Chav’ who was a victim of ‘a chaotic domestic situation, inflicted by parents on their innocent children, long before she vanished’, because Matthews’ family was not the ‘idealized portrait of middle-class family life’ like the McCanns. Matthews’ family conformed to the ‘Chav’ stereotype and hence, she was pushed to the side. I know that this is old news but it is a good example of a re-occurring theme in the British media that needs to be addressed.

The 2011 London Riots were the result a complex web of political, sociological and psychological causal factors, and a response to the growing disconnect between the political and media classes and the broader mass of British Citizens. The shooting of Mark Duggan by Metropolitan Police showed the harassment with which the British Black community has been faced. Yet it’s amazing that the British police manage to shoot so many people when they are an UNARMED force. The politics of classes shows how the social elite oversimplify the issues that the working-class people are faced with due to the growing divide between them and the elite.

The riots started after the police shooting of Mark Duggan, and began as a peaceful protest but soon escalated to an intensity not seen in Britain since the Brixton riots against Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government in 1981.  The Metropolitan police would suggest that Duggan is a ‘gangster and a drug dealer’ characteristic commonly associated with ‘Chavs’, yet the people that lived with him in his community claimed ‘he never troubled nobody’. The treatment of Duggan was based on this falsehood; the people could see this was not appropriate and revolted. Tottenham has historically been a black community that has had issues with the Police and the government’s social policies such as the stop and search laws. The race riots in ’81 highlighted the constant struggle that the Black community faces in being a minority. The Black community does not trust the police because they view them as racists. As activist and local resident Darius Howe argued ‘you have to feel some weight on your neck, you have to feel somebody strangling you, for you to respond violently and that is precisely what happened in the riots here’. Howe believes it is ‘police behaviour towards black people that’s the root cause of the violence. In particular, the hated stop and search laws that many argue are amount to police harassment’. The shooting of Duggan was the trigger for the community to act on being abused by the institutions for so long.

This is just a small taste of what is a huge issue in Britain at the present time. If you want to get a little bit more of an idea I would suggest Owen Jones' book Chavs; The demonization of the working-class, No such thing as society by Andy Smith and the following links:

http://www.culturecompass.co.uk/2009/03/16/chavs-on-tv/
http://spiltinc.co.uk/2012/05/13/is-it-ever-acceptable-to-call-someone-a-chav/
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/owen-jones-why-chavs-were-the-riots-scapegoats-7697824.html