Oh. (Russ L going to and fro in the Earth)

(I’m told there was a documentary on the telly not too long ago about something very similar to this. I didn’t see it, so if anything you want to say relates to that then you’ll need to explain in full).

There’s a ‘Special Report’ on ‘What Is Britain?’ on The Guardian website at the moment (an aside: Is the The Guardian’s site the first ever occurrence of the internet version of something having better spelling and grammar than its real-life counterpart?), and it includes this article. Inspired by Prince whatsisface having a jolly good guffaw with his Sandhurst chums by dressing up as one of those smelly normal people, it has a look at the nature of the class snobbery around at the moment. Unsurprisingly for a Guardian opinion piece, the whinging tone of the writing gets on my nerves but I do agree with the overall sentiment.

I hate the word ‘chav.’ Obviously there are plenty of little linguistic tropes that you can use to dismiss vast swathes of people without having to trouble yourself with any actual thought, but it really seems to me that this is the most commonly used and widely-accepted at the moment. Call someone ’scum’ for wearing a baseball cap under a hood and no-one will argue.

People who say that sort of thing nearly always respond to the criticism in the same way. They affect the pose that they’re not generalising at all. Phrases like “The only criteria for being a chav is acting like a chav” abound. Claims that it’s purely a behavioral classification and has nothing to do with sociality or appearance will be chucked about with impunity.

I’m yet to see a single person who frequently flings around the word ‘chav’ live up to this idealism.

The media-pushed spread of the rich man’s fear to broader sections of the populace is not a new thing. Take mods, punks, teddy-boys, whatever-have-you: tough youth subcultures have nearly always presented in the media as bunches of ignorant barbarians, and a lot of people have always latched onto it and joined in. Civilisation has yet to collapse as promised. Decades after the fact we can see that these hen-clucking moral panics were nothing more than silliness, but at the time people would have insisted on how genuinely dangerous these young ‘ooligans were in just the same way that people reckon chavs are different to all that have gone before.

I’ll tell a story, if you’ll indulge me. It was a Saturday night in November 2004, and I was on a 126 bus heading home from a gig at the Jug Of Ale. A young-ish lad (wearing a Burberry cap, gloves, all the rest of it) tapped me on the shoulder to ask a favour.

It turns out he’d been around most of the bus, asking people if he could borrow their mobile. It’s not surprising that people were initially wary, but he was bending over backwards to try and allay any possible fears anyone might have had. He was offering to let people hold his bling gold chains for the duration of the call, and even for them to hold the phone against the side of his face while he spoke if they wanted. He wouldn’t have had the opportunity for any funny business. Mysteriously, though, no-one on the entire bus had any credit. Funny that, isn’t it? As he walked away from one pair of girls he overheard them mutter something about “Fucking chavs.”

Nice. Shall I tell you why he needed to make a call so desperately? He’d just got out of prison (apparently he was attacked but ended up getting convicted for defending himself. For the purposes of this it isn’t really important - whatever it was, he’d served his sentence) and was at a bail hostel. He had to be back for a certain time, but hadn’t realised what the traffic was like in town and was now going to be late. If he could manage to ring them, he might be able to sort out some leeway. If he couldn’t, he’d have broken his conditions and was going back inside.

Fate’s cruelty strikes at the worst of times, and I genuinely had no credit. I gave him my phone anyway to try a reversed charge call, but it seems that they didn’t work from mobiles at the time.

This lad had tears in his eyes. I’ve no idea what became of him, but I really, really hope he didn’t end up back inside purely because he was a ‘fucking chav.’

~ Russ L