Who's afraid of the working class?

Once, the political elite of Britain was gripped by fear and loathing of workers. Now it just loathes them

Once, the political elite was gripped by fear and loathing of the working classes. Now it just loathes them. In another time, our rulers listened anxiously for the sound of proletarian boots on the march. Now they look down upon the proles as if they were something to be scraped off the bottom of their shoes.

Margaret Hodge, New Labour's employment minister, marks her white working-class constituents in Barking, east London, eight out of 10 for prejudice and stupidity, claiming that is how many of them might vote for the British National Party in the forthcoming local elections. Denis McShane, a Labour MP from Yorkshire, has sought to update the old divide between the respectable and disrespectable poor, asserting that 'the number one issue for my constituents in Rotherham is the loutish, often violent, sometimes feral behaviour of different groups in working-class communities'. Perhaps he should rename it the divide between the Chavs and the Chav-nots.

Much the same message about the ignorant, lumpen lower orders is clear in politics away from the UK. In France, for example, commentators claim that the run-up to next year's presidential election campaign is a contest between Nicolas Sarkozy and the Front National to see which can stoop the lowest to win the supposedly racist votes of the white working class.

In British popular culture, working-class people are now routinely depicted as living low lives in a yob-culture cycle of binge-drinking, obesity, violence, teenage pregnancy and all-round Chavdom. Some are vilified as the undeserving poor living on welfare benefits, others as the undeserving affluent living flash on 'easy money' and credit. It would appear that, when they are not despoiling the environment with their big, loud cars or driving twee little shops out of business with their supermarket addiction, they are embarrassing Britain abroad with their appalling table manners and football songs. It seems a wonder any of these dreadful people have the time to entertain the nation by shouting at one another about their lies and infidelities on those daytime television 'talk' shows.

Expressions of contempt for 'ordinary people' are everywhere, from self-styled "ordinary bloke" Jamie Oliver's criticisms of the eating habits of 'white trash' families, to the latest Lonely Planet travel guide's description of the ordinary English as obese people who drink too much beer and watch too much TV. Wherever do those Islamic fundamentalists who rant on about our debased British culture get their ideas from?

There is of course nothing new about the abuse of the working classes, from the days when they were known as 'the great unwashed' onwards. But there is something different happening today. In the past, the hatred of the sullen masses was motivated by genuine fear, a sense that these people posed a threat to the status quo. First 'the mob' and then, more importantly, the movement of organised labour were feared as a force capable of anything. Every time the proletariat stirred itself, in a strike or popular revolt, it sent shockwaves through the system.

Today, the capitalist order faces no such threat from the working class. The labour movement is an empty shell, traditional working-class communities lie atomised and impotent. The worst that the political class fears is that white working-class votes might cost it a few council seats to the BNP - an embarrassment, but hardly the storming of the Winter Palace. Yet working-class people and lifestyles are subject to vituperative attacks.

One striking expression of how things have changed is that New Labour figures are now in the forefront of sermonising about the politics of working-class behaviour. In the past the Labour Party - while often staffed and run by middle-class professionals - saw it as important to maintain its standing as the political representatives of the labour movement. That New Labour leaders no longer feel any such compunction reflects the disappearance of the working class as a distinctive political force with a voice of its own.

Those in authority may worry about what white people in inner cities will do on polling day, and feel afraid to pass a posse of chavs on the street. But they do not fear the working class as a collective force. That is why they feel free to caricature these people with impunity. Look at those extraordinary pictures of Prince William and his pals from the military academy at Sandhurst, all dressed up as cartoon chavs for a party. Strangely, army officer cadets didn't dress up as striking miners 'for a laugh' in the 1980s (unless perhaps those rumours of infiltration of the coalfields were true).

What drives today's expressions of loathing and contempt is not fear of any threat from the working classes, but anxiety of another variety within the political and cultural elite. It is a self-conscious feeling of insecurity about their own status and sense of purpose in society today. Striking postures against the proles is an exercise in implicit self-flattery. Those looking down are saying that, whatever doubts they might have about their own values and standing, they are better than that. Their aim is to get closer to the moral high ground by standing on those they see as chip-fattened lowlife.

In this sense the new politics of behaviour pioneered by New Labour, with its focus on the apparently uncivilised eating, drinking, smoking and living habits associated with the working class, can be understood as the new form of moral snobbery. The current association of racism with the uncivilised lumpen proletariat is particularly striking in that context. It is worth recalling that, when the politics of race first reared its ugly head in British society, long before mass immigration, it was aimed against the lower orders of white society who were said to be polluting the national and racial stock.

The flipside of this vilification is the attempt by some writers and cultural commentators to patronise the working classes, to put a tick where others put a cross. So they seek to celebrate 'chavness', or to romanticise working-class communities, trying to imbue the banalities of life with deeper meaning. This reminds me of the cult of the 'noble savage' in earlier times. Once a group like the Highland clans had been defeated, they could safely be patronised and celebrated by their 'betters'. Now that the working class has been routed as a political force, it can be patted on the head as a cultural artefact. The effect is to reduce the white working class to another group of victims, one more expression of grievance-fuelled identity politics.

Today's assault on working-class degeneracy only confirms how degenerate the political and cultural elite has become. Far removed from the realities of the life that most people lead, these political leaders cannot even comprehend that there could be good reasons why disaffected working-class voters might be prepared to vote for anybody rather than the established parties. The way that they now condemn the aspiration of millions for a better life as 'crass consumerism' or even 'environmental vandalism' shows that they live on a different planet.

There is no point trying to romanticise a workaday life, or waxing nostalgic about the good old days of class solidarity. But there is a point in taking a stand against the chav-bashers, who forcefully express the mood of misanthropy and miserabilism among the insecure class at the top of society. It appears that the elite can only justify its own position atop the heap today by looking upon others as a pile of crap. That is what I call loathsome.

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NEW ZEALAND: MAORI BELIEFS TRUMP PROPERTY RIGHTS

The whole idea of private property is pretty alien to Maoris. From the names below, the offenders were Maoris or other Polynesians

A police investigation has cleared a Northland police officer of theft after he helped take hundreds of oysters from an oyster farm without permission. Police caught off-duty Kaikohe officer Senior Constable Robert Hippolite and two other men, named as Mark Apiti and Manuel Kahura, with about 600 oysters in a boat near the Waikare Inlet oyster farms last December 29. The farm's owner, Alan Brain, said he had seen the men taking the oysters and rang police, who caught the trio.

However, a police investigation has cleared the men. Theft charges were dropped early this month. Northland police boss Superintendent Viv Rickard said that after a thorough police investigation a legal opinion had been sought. "It was clear from the investigation that the people gathering the shellfish believed they were entitled to gather the oysters. The legal opinion recommended no prosecution take place," Mr Rickard said.

Bay of Islands Senior Sergeant Dan Dickison wrote to Mr Brain saying the main reason a prosecution did not proceed was because the men believed Waikare oyster farmers had given a "general mandate to the community to help themselves to the oysters due to their lack of commercial value caused by sewage contamination".

Mr Brain said he had "never given anyone a right to take oysters at any time". His oysters were still of commercial value because he could transfer them to clean water on a second oyster farm at Kerikeri and on-sell them after two months, according to Northland Health criteria. The Waikare Inlet oyster farms have been closed since 2001 due to contamination by viruses carried in human effluent.

Mr Brain was concerned at health risks to the community with "tens of thousands" of oysters being plundered from the Waikare Inlet farms - and he was concerned at the precedent set by the decision not to prosecute. He was now in a bind if he caught others taking his oysters. "I am now at an absolute loss as to how to protect my property as a law-abiding citizen. I totally rely on the justice system to protect me. It's either that or I protect myself."

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FATHEADED STATISTICS

Recent media coverage of levels of obesity among children in Britain continues to inflate the scale of the phenomenon by using statistical methods that are fundamentally flawed. Over the weekend, the Guardian, for example, claimed on the basis of data from the Health Survey for England (HSfE) that '26.7 per cent of girls and 24.2 per cent of boys [aged 11-15] qualified as obese'. And yes, that is what the short release from the NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre said as well.

The problem is that these figures are based on the now outdated UK National BMI standards for defining obesity in children - cut-off points that have been described by leading experts in the field as 'arbitrary' and 'confusing'.

In a letter to the British Medical Journal back in October 2001, Susan Jebb and Andrew Prentice, both of the MRC Human Nutrition Research Group, said that the choice of cut-off points used to create these figures 'effectively inflates the number of overweight and obese children.. Exaggerating the absolute prevalence of obesity is ultimately unhelpful since it leads to confusing discrepancies in the transition from children to adults.'

This issue was also recognised by the authors of the government's reports on the HSfE some time ago. In the 2003 Summary of Key Findings, they noted that: 'About one in 20 boys (5.5 per cent) and about one in 15 girls (7.2 per cent) aged 2-15 were obese in 2002, according to the international classification.... In comparison with the international classification, obesity estimates derived by the National BMI percentiles classification were much higher (16.0 per cent for boys and 15.9 per cent for girls).'

Simple arithmetic shows that the National BMI standards used in the Health Survey for England reports exaggerate the prevalence of obesity in boys by nearly 200 per cent and in girls by over 100 per cent. Strangely, however, subsequent reports from the HSfE have not even mentioned the definitional problems and have simply quoted statistics based on the old national standards without any qualification. It is not surprising, therefore, that people, including journalists, get confused.

There is no excuse for presenting data in this way when even organisations such as the International Obesity Task Force, who developed the international standards in the first place, are urging everybody to stop doing so.

There is, of course, still evidence of an increasing prevalence of obesity among children whichever set of statistics one uses. But a 'real' shift from 3.9 per cent in 1995 to around 7 per cent in 2004 has very different implications from the reported 11.5 per cent to 18.5 per cent rise. The Guardian's headline 'Child obesity has doubled in a decade' was also particularly misleading and unhelpful in this context, because neither set of figures shows that.

Inflating the figures in this way does not help us to develop sensible strategies for tackling the issues. It allows people to get away with the use of terms such as 'public health time bomb' and gory predictions such as the one from Diabetes UK that 'we will soon be seeing our children growing up losing limbs and going blind'. As Jebb and Prentice concluded:

'Public health policy will best be served by a single definition of overweight and obesity in children and young people, which is consistently applied. We urge health professionals, scientists, and editors to adopt the International Obesity Task Force's proposed reference standard for obesity in children.'

Let us hope that the next reports from the Department of Health take heed of this advice.

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