Britain: The underclass, the upper class and us

We didn’t really notice when our society became warped. We were standing among the crowds. We knew it was changing because everybody had become middle class, like us. Posh people were middle class. Poor people were middle class.

But not quite everybody was. On the edge of the crowd a few had slipped away. Our famous class-structure had mutated.

Cool!

By 1997, the working class struggle was over. Their riots were routed, their jobs had gone, and their time had passed.

So too had John Major’s. Confused conservatism was out. The grey man of politics was replaced by a red man. But this was New Red, not Old Red. Old Red Neil Kinnock went into the Eurocracy. New Red Tony Blair cultivated Cool Britannia, having won the votes of the middle class.

Workers’ unions were out. Tony told us ‘things can only get better’ and his ministers danced to the tune. He was young and he was not too posh. He made Britain cool and filled us with hope for a more dynamic future.

We put Union Jacks on our cushions and on the roofs of our cars. We listened to new music. It was like old music, but cooler. The pop stars went to Whitehall and drank in Downing Street. They sang about champagne supernovas and wonderwalls, country houses and charmless men.

Boom!

Poor people got a minimum wage, so they were happy too. Tony wrote to us in 1999 in the Sunday People: “Why I’ve Declared War On Welfare”. He told us about his “big programme of reform. But you and I know it's necessary.”

We did know. We needed to stop those single mums who have babies at 15 and live off our state. They were out. We needed to stop those asylum seekers living it up on our tax money. They should stay out.

By 2002, Gordon Brown was telling us, “We today in our country have economic stability not boom and bust.” He had allowed the Bank of England to set interest rates. His people told us this was a visionary move, which had set us on the path to permanent prosperity.

It was good to know. The ‘90s had been very expensive. Interest rates had spiralled and people had lost homes and businesses.

But that was history. So banks texted and emailed us, offering to lend. We took their credit cards and bought new things. The experts told us consumer spending was driving the economy, so we drove new cars. We were all consumers now.

Things were so good that people were coming from all around. The plumbers were all Polish! They were cheaper and better than the British ones. There weren’t any British ones anyway.

Toffs!

At the same time, Tony was stopping the toffs from hunting foxes. They needed to find better ways to spend their spare time. Despite a million people marching in defence of country life, Tony moved to ban fox hunting.

The House of Lords struck back. The ones who had inherited their seat voted against Tony’s plans. So he stopped them from being able to vote and moved to get them out altogether.

Being born into the Lords and fox hunting were the preserves of old conservatism, which was out. We were all middle class now.

Chavs!

Even TV was changing. Andy Warhol had said in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. Now was the future. Reality TV was a revolution.

We watched Big Brother. We laughed at the contestants’ stupid behaviour and their ignorant comments. We witnessed people plucked from obscurity and made famous and rich. They lived a charmed life acquired for free.

On her way to winning Big Brother in 2002, Jade Goody declared the other contestants were "trying to use me as an escape goat." We laughed and were entertained. The phrase entered our slang dictionary.

But on her next journey into the Big Brother house Jade Goody was making someone else an ‘escape goat’. We were sickened by her victimisation of a Bollywood star. We felt it was racist. Her ignorance had gone too far.

Not long after the death threats, she got cancer. She then died slowly, while we watched her on TV and read about it in the newspapers and magazines. Perhaps this life of fame and luxury did not come for free.

But it did create a new path to prosperity. And it showed how Britain was a land of opportunity, where people and fortunes could be made overnight. We sneered. Others were inspired.

Another word had entered the slang dictionary of the middle classes: chav. Where had the word come from? Council House And Violent? Who knows? But here was the word for the subculture we loved to hate.

The ‘youth’ with the shaved hair, hood over his head, and pitbull terrier in tow was now a modern cliché.

Hoodies!

That youth worried us. The newspapers told us knife crime was spiralling out of control. We heard gun crime was more common now. We were told of postcode wars, where gangs fought for control of territory in our cities.

Tony’s war in Afghanistan wasn’t going too well either. And that had meant lots more heroin. Drugs supply was rising. We were worried about law and order.

The politicians stumbled across the idea of the ‘hoodie’. He was like the chav and sometimes the same. But he was more threatening.

Now crime had a face. We couldn’t see it, because it was hidden under this angry young man’s hood, but we knew it meant trouble.

One Tory MP and famous battle axe took herself off to learn more, while also making a TV programme called Anne Widdecombe vs The Hoodies. In 2006 she visited the Andover Estate near Kings Cross in London, and sought out what she called ‘the forgotten decents’ left to fend for themselves in a community under mob rule.

The locals said they had been vilified and painted with one brush because of where they lived and who they were. “I’ve tried to wear hoods less and less,” says one boy from the estate in a film made in reply, “because I realise people tend to stereotype a little bit.”

Hugs!

So while the kids tried to alter their wardrobes, the war on hoodies, but not the causes of hoodies, was stepped up. Opposition leader, now prime minister, David Cameron took on the issue in a now famous speech.

Hoodies, he said, could be dealt with using three principles. “Understanding what's gone wrong in order to put things right. Giving priority to the emotional quality of the work we do with young people. And giving real power to the real experts who can make the biggest difference.”

He was derided. The speech was boiled down to the slogan ‘hug-a-hoodie’ by the Labour government. One minister and attack dog called it “vacuous… wash-and-go politics.”

With the derision, the idea that we should "try and understand what's gone wrong in these children's lives” had died.

Asbo!

Instead, the only answer was to stamp out this antisocial behaviour by tackling it head on, we decided.

Tony had been trying, and had introduced Anti-Social Behaviour Orders or ASBOs back in 1999. They would stop kids from spitting, stealing, and shoplifting by telling them they couldn’t do it. If they did, they’d face a tougher punishment.

The idea failed. We thought it was a bit stupid and soft. Then we started reading about farmers getting ASBOs and angry grannies. Then it seemed kids were proud of their ASBOs which made them look tough and cool.

Eventually we gave up, and the children’s secretary Ed Balls said he wanted, "to live in the kind of society that puts ASBOs behind us." It was no good telling these kids what not to do, we thought. They had to be punished for doing it, or stopped in the first place.

We needed more coppers and they needed to be able to do their jobs. Then the experts said policemen were spending a ‘truly staggering’ amount of time doing paperwork, not being bobbies on the beat. So we needed to get the boys in blue back on the streets and away from their desks, like the good old days.

Crash!

Ten years into Tony’s journey, and he’d managed a few more big reforms to help make us all middle class.

We should all be graduates, or at least half of us, he insisted. So Tony made more university places. The universities said they couldn’t afford to pay for the extra students, even though the kids were now paying fees. Tony said the universities were exaggerating.

He said students could borrow money from companies to pay for their tuition, and put the price up. He’d taken it from free to £1,000 to £3,000. It wasn’t great, but it was okay because we could borrow the money from a company for now and pay it back later. We all had good prospects.

Tony also sold all the houses provided by the council to companies, so poor people could rent or buy them. We should all be homeowners, he’d said. And the banks had all said so too. So we borrowed to buy houses.

Then Tony said goodbye and the middle class masses waved him off.

But soon after we heard that a bank called Northern Rock was in trouble. Lots of people tried to get their money out and we had a run on the bank as if we were living in Argentina or somewhere.

Then it all got worse. Lehman Brothers went down. Lloyds TSB was in trouble. Then the government had to take over Bradford and Bingley. RBS and HBOS were next.

Scandal!

Soon we were hearing about plans ‘to pump billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money into the economy.’ Just how many seemed unclear. A lot. Hundreds of billions. And it was our money, and for what? We hadn’t gambled it away. Maybe we had borrowed too much? We didn’t think so.

The answer seemed to lie in the city, where clever men had dreamt up ways to put lipstick on the pig of risky debt and call it safe debt. We realised, they had been paying themselves fortunes, millions of pounds to do so.

The papers began a narrative that’s familiar now, bashing the bankers for their greed. But before we could really take them to task, the Daily Telegraph had turned on the MPs. They had been cooking the books as well, fiddling their expenses and putting mortgages on the tab.

We were angry about it. And then one of them, Anthony Steen, said, “Do you know what it is about? Jealousy. I have got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral.”

• By 2010, the academics had worked out that Britain’s richest 10 per cent of people were more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10 per cent.

• A million young people between 16 and 24 years old are now out of work, one in five of them.

• Last year, the 1,000 richest people in Britain amassed 30 per cent more money than they had a year before. They owned £333.5 billion in total.

Plutocrats, us, scum.

We had created a parallel plutocracy and underclass. At the top of our society a new breed of super-rich were creaming off fortunes. They were making crazy money of the levels we had never dreamed of.

Chief executives were giving themselves huge pay rises far beyond inflation. Bankers were getting bonuses of millions of pounds and then fiddling it into untaxable share and stock options. They were driving around in Aston Martins, wearing Breitling watches and travelling with Louis Vuitton luggage to sail their luxury yachts in the Mediterranean.

And what’s more, they weren’t facing the music for fomenting the financial chaos.

Underneath us all was another class, the hoodies and the chavs, occupying an underworld.

Their antisocial behaviour was unstoppable. We read that they didn’t want to work. They wanted to get famous on reality TV. The girls wanted to have babies young and live off benefits, or marry footballers and live off them.

They were fighting postcode wars and stabbing each other on street corners in dark estates. They were stealing and dealing and fighting.

Like the Americans we are paying for our higher education, aspiring to be super rich, not regulating our businesses or taxing them too much and giving the police the power they needed to stop the criminal elements in our society. Like the Americans we are letting the rich get richer and the poor slip away.

We are fearing a vilified class that isn’t the super-rich and isn’t us. The underclass. The ones left behind, outside of our society.

London’s burning!

So when a new coalition government came in, led by the familiar Eton-Oxford cabal who rubbed shoulders with the plutocracy, they were not popular with the underclass.

And when they told those poor ten or twenty per cent that they had to pay more tax (especially value added tax, which costs them proportionately more than it does the rich) and they must receive less in return, that didn’t please them either.

And why must they pay more and get less? Because the plutocracy borrowed, gambled and lost too much, so much that it threatened our entire economy.

Mary Riddel, in her article “Riots: the underclass lashes out” outlines J K Galbraith’s causes of recession in his book, The Great Crash 1929: “bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance… All those factors are again in play.”

We’ve all roundly condemned these looters for their “mindless violence” and “sheer criminality”. But as Riddel writes, it is not sufficient “to heap contempt on the rioters as if they are a pariah caste.” They already are.

"To behave in this manner young people have to believe they have no stake in the neighbourhood, and consequently no stake in wider society," writes Stafford Scott.

Who represents this class of people in our politics now? The Tories and Labour look after the plutocrats and middle classes. But the poor? Nobody listens to them. Nobody represents them in our parliament. They have no party. They have no voice.

Become middle class, and you have a voice. That is our message.

Penny Red noticed one NBC report, in which a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes…You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you? Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night, a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."