Chav != Working Class

Though I realise that to you, from your ivory tower in the heart of Islington, all us smelly proles must look alike.

Personally I see it as a cultural rather than a class concept. There are plenty of members of the working class who are not chavs while there are many members of the middle class who come damn near. Loud, annoying, borish, a tendency to violence instead of reasonable behaviour. These sorts of behaviour deserve to be demonised.

I was thinking about getting this after reading Seymour’s review but you’ve made it sound like yet another “woe is one of the most privileged social groups to have ever existed” treatise.

Can anyone else who’s read it comment?

Shorter Carl Packman: it’s all Maggie’s fault.

And some people still say the Left are out of ideas…

I find it hard to look away from the fascinating phenomenon of chavs being defended by people who are too posh to understand what a chav actually is. Is it really that difficult to grasp? They are the white, criminal underclass, and, by extension, anyone who can be identified culturally with the white, criminal underclass. They are not the working class who, in case you are not aware of this, are not usually criminals and are often not white.

@3

after reading Seymour’s review

Except you haven’t, as Seymour says in his very first line:

I haven’t read Owen Jones’ new book, Chavs, which is garnering rave reviews in the press, but we know the problem that it addresses.

I cannot understand how “chav” and “working class” are being confused. I think the implication that all working class people are “chavs” is offensive and not at all excused by your contention that nobody should be called a chav.

There is a real difference between respectable people, with jobs and morals and a positive contribution to society, and the despicable petty criminals who don’t deserve a penny that they leach off the rest of us. The first group are working class, the second are chavs, and the difference is entirely obvious to everyone. Even people who pretend that they can’t see it (Toynbee!) nevertheless recognise it.

Nobody likes freeloaders, particularly those with a sense of entitlement, and especially those who set out to ruin everything for the rest of us. If you hate tax cheats and corrupt bankers, you have to be consistent and hate the chavs as well.

@5 Criminal underclass now is it? Gone are the days when it was the ‘feckless underclass’ or just ‘underclass’. Now they’re a full on criminal underclass.

@1: The author of this piece lives in Basildon.

“their demonisation of the working class”

As I recall, at the last election, all parties bent over backwards to pander to what has become known as “the white working class”.

Having a laugh at Chavs is different.

I think this argument is based on a premise that does not exist and never has

The notion that snobs identify working class people and chavs as the same thing just does not get off the ground

An earlier comment hit the nail on the head – the chav thing is more about cars with blacked out windows, expensive but tasteless clothes and bling bling than anything else

Being working class I take no offence to anti-chav sentiment as I know exactly the phenomenon they are referring to

http://outspokenrabbit.blogspot.com/

I’ve had the opinion for some time that Liberal Conspiracy (very generally speaking) is ”anti-chav”. Or anti that more lumpen part of the working class.
The kind of people who would rather go to cheer on their favourite boxer at a boxing match than attend a UKuncut protest.
Like the thousands of Ricky Hatton fans who went to his fights in Las Vegas.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ricky+hatton+fans+las+vegas&aq=f

And whose idea of a great night out, is to go to see Liam Gallagher and his latest band at a concert, and drink loads of beer and get a bit rowdy and throw stuff about.

Those people might have jobs, but they’re still riff raff to many liberals I think.

#2 Richard:

as I have tried to point out in the review, chav-hatred is one of the last acceptable forms of predjudice, along with anti-gipsy sentiment, and it is very often framed in class terms, as Owen has identified. What is unique about chav-bashing however is that it is not typical ‘them’ and ‘us’ as I’ve said, it’s a little more complicated than that.

To hate a chav is discrimination of a particularly snobbish kind, and it has come up at the same time as demonisation of the working class has been embedded into today’s political structure – whether or not a key voting target was the White WC (which I don’t believe to be true) – again which Owen described in his book (which by the way I think everyone should read).

@10. Daz Pearce: “The notion that snobs identify working class people and chavs as the same thing just does not get off the ground

An earlier comment hit the nail on the head – the chav thing is more about cars with blacked out windows, expensive but tasteless clothes and bling bling than anything else”

Spot on. Chav is about labelling people who have perceived bad taste in fashion and music. The kids that I see driving around in modded cars are just working class kids. Some of them have dirty finger nails because they have an honest manual job — for those car owners, there’ll be a stronger correlation with working in the motor trade than criminality or idleness.

@2. Richard: “Loud, annoying, borish, a tendency to violence instead of reasonable behaviour. These sorts of behaviour deserve to be demonised.”

For many years, we labelled such people as oiks and hooligans. It is possible to be a chav — a person with dodgy fashion sense — but not an oik or hooligan.

[13] “Chav is about labelling people who have perceived bad taste in fashion and music” – like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EkxebsumAw&feature=related

Or more like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTUrc-De2xY&feature=related

Had to “lol” a bit at the confusion of “chav” and “working class”.

@14. the a&e charge nurse: I don’t follow your argument, so my comments should be judged accordingly.

For the first video, I have to acknowledge the production values. It was well made, and I wish there were a few videos of Louis Jordan or Cab Calloway when they invented rap. But chavs are not necessarily gang members.

The second video almost made me recant my anti-monarchism.

“Chav is about labelling people who have perceived bad taste in fashion and music” – like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EkxebsumAw&feature=related

M16–my postcode. Just fills ya with civic pride.

@6

My mistake, I meant Toynbee (the queen of the ‘metropolitan elite’ of course) I got the link from LT, hence the confusion.

The notion that snobs identify working class people and chavs as the same thing just does not get off the ground

Yeah it does, just say ‘metropolitan elite’ and ‘ivory tower’ a few times, bang in a few mentions of Islington and/or Hampstead and before you know it, you’ve got yourself a conspiracy designed by Guardian readers to keep the plebs under foot.

I like
Little miss chav
http://s4.postimage.org/85uxgcro/littlemisschav.jpg

and

Mr chav
http://s4.postimage.org/85zw2e90/Mr_Chav1.jpg

Chavs seem to mean different things to different people but they are still human beings are they not?!

“But chavs are not necessarily gang members.”

The people that video aren’t chavs as I understand the term. But are they “working class”? If so, who is demonising them, and why?

Chavs, or something similar to the term, are a necessary requirement to maintain the illusion of meritocracy in the face of obvious engineered inequality.
“Oh if only those trapped in run-down council estates would just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and aspire to be middle class they wouldn’t be stuck in the poverty that they are. Oh well. It’s their own fault and not society’s.”

[19] “Chavs seem to mean different things to different people” – according to wiki’s identikit chav they are “aggressive teenagers, of working class background, who repeatedly engage in anti-social behaviour such as street drinking, drug abuse and rowdiness, or other forms of juvenile delinquency”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav

As far back as 2005 it was claimed use of the word is a form of “social racism”, and that such “sneering” reveals more about the shortcomings of the “chav-haters” than those of their supposed victims.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article515509.ece

Back then, rather than Mad-chester hoodies, this lottery winner was seen as the embodiment of British chavism
http://www.cuntscorner.com/upload/1242988731.jpg

“newly consumerised working classes”

I have no idea what this is meant to mean, other than that working class people didn’t used to buy stuff, which clearly isn’t the case.

@22. the a&e charge nurse

Yes I know how to use Wiki.
Maybe I should have said, “can mean different things” and it depends on who’s saying it.

For example, I have a picture of Mr Chav on my wall at work that was given to me by one of the lads for a laugh! Let me say, I am none of the things on that wiki list.
How many Chavs do you know go on political sites?
Mind you, because of my London accent (hate the word c*****y, see, can’t even write it) being called a pikey has been known!

Chav is a word to have a bit a laugh with. One of the lads the other day picked his nose and flicked it at one of the others, the other lad said with no hint of humour, “you’re such a chav”, may seem out of context until you read the last line of what I put above!
Or.
One of the lads has a car fit for a chav, it’s a nice car, has flash wheels and a nice tail on it, and the owner doesn’t wear Burberry.

People can make out they’re inflicting some sort of cruel type of “ism” on those they call a chav but those they are talking about are normally big enough to take it and are we BoVeeeereD, let’s put it this way, I don’t see no one up in arms about it.

@me!

“I don’t see no one up in arms about it”

Should make that clear!
Apart from those who think they have someting to gain from it!!

“The assumption is that a ‘chav’ takes from society without actually giving back to it. Karl Marx had a word for this himself: the lumpenproletarian. This class, of whom Marx called ‘social scum’ in the Communist Manifesto, were unproductive and likely to be used as fodder for reactionaries”

In which case no chav is working class, and none of the working class are chavs. The term might be used by some as synonymous with the underclass, but it means something deeper than that.

At heart it’s a cry against the sheer degeneracy of some of the people nowadays; a degeneracy one can’t associate with the working class now and certainly not with the working class of my grandparents’ days, who may have left school at 14 and worked in dead-end jobs, but at least the way they spoke English wasn’t debased, their morals non-existent, their sense of family a joke.

It’s a million miles from just “Mail readers slagging off the entire working class”, but I wouldn’t expect Lib Con contributors to appreciate that. No, correction, I would expect Lib Con contributors to appreciate that, but to pretend they don’t in order to make a sarky point against right-wingers.

“No longer is class prejudice simply fought along the lines of ‘them (the poor) and us (the wealthy)’, but a situation has arisen where their demonisation of the working class has created a ‘them and us’ within those very communities.”

I am working class. So is my family. You see “working class” has a certain connotation. We get up and go to work.
A chav is a person who, for example, gets up on December 27th, robs a man’s garage and then – for the sake of example – puts a 57 year old man in intensive care for having the gall to step outside and call him on it.
Rinse and repeat. Several times. Eventually a piss-weak sentence is handed down by the court. So jump bail and go into hiding.

People like this are second- and third-generation benefit abusers. They scoff at the people who contribute to society. Uneducated, uncultured, antisocial, they are society’s failures (either way you choose to interpret that sentence). It must look so simple from ivory tower Guardianistaland, but down here we know when the piss is being taken out of us.
I would dearly love to see some form of rehabilitation and education and just basic decency imparted to these people; I don’t want to turn my back on people from deeply broken backgrounds. However, I have to survive living here too.

So yeah. I’m working class. I can’t afford a libel lawyer when you accuse me of being a chav.
But I resent living alongside them. And I resent being conflated with them.

Food for thought: Seven in 10 of us are apparently middle class.

Now I put it to the commenters here who quite like to make a dividing line between the working class and the so-called “Criminal underclass”, that if the term Chav isn’t used as a slur for the working class in general, then so many people wouldn’t be so ashamed of admitting to being working class. When they bloody well are.

Could it possibly be that many think the character of Vicky Pollard is an accurate representation of the working classes, regardless of any bollocks you might say about lack of working?
I think it just may well be so.

during the mid 1980s- early 1990s in the secondary school I attended in Chatham, chavs where kids from poor families who weren’t quite as bad as pikeys (people from the isle of sheppy) but still never the less a kid picked out for ridicule. So I think there is some truth that the word can be used to just describe any poor person regardless of weather they are criminal or not, or anti-social or not wear burberry or not.

Should have thought of this before!

Was Ali G a chav?
Was he likable?

Found this from way back.
Bling Lear: Shakespeare meets Ali G in new chavs’ guide to the Bard
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-561781/Bling-Lear-Shakespeare-meets-Ali-G-new-chavs-guide-Bard.html

@8

Those who are habitually criminal are the *criminal* underclass. What do you want to call the criminal?

“Compliancy-challenged”?

“Lawfulness different”?

“Suffering from offender spectrum disorder”?

@32 Your posts are doing a wonderful job of proving Mr Jones’ main thrust, and indeed Mr Packman’s analysis, particularly the start of the third paragraph. You see while you yourself may well have taken pains to make a clear mental dividing line between the working class and chavs, using criminality as the basis for this line, plenty of others do not, hell there’s those upthread defining chav counter to your own criminal definition.
A YouGov poll found that the majority of those working in television thought that chav character Vicky Pollard was an accurate representation of the average working class mother. If that’s what those working in tv think, what do you think happens when it comes time to portray a member of the working class on the telly?

Totally agree with Cylux, the class system (imagined or real) in a society which values success, is likely to create a consciousness of aspiring upwards. Thousands of working class people do not identify with the label (yet) labelling others in derogatory terms gives the idea of differentness and even superiority.
It reminds me of the two Ronnies and Stephen Fry’s sketch on class.

The basic dynamic is this: There is a significant minority in this country who are antisocial and unpleasant to live around. Mention this to a left-liberal and they have two responses. The first is to accuse you of Daily Mail-esque hysteria. As in, the reason the elderly are scared to leave their homes after dark is not because it is actually dangerous, but because they have been deceived into thinking it’s dangerous by right-wing rags like the Daily Mail. The second is to accuse you of hating the poor/the working class/etc, which is the strategy of the author of the OP. Of course, Thatcher hated the poor/the working class/etc, and so do you. Therefore, your complaints are part of a long right wing campaign against them.

In other words, there’s nothing wrong, and anyway, even if there is, it’s your fault.

@33

Are you really meaning to suggest that it is snobbery not to identify all working class people as criminals?

@36 Nope

“Nobody likes freeloaders” Except when those freeloaders are glamorously rich, powerful and well connected. All this bile directed at people on benefits in general (tarred as they are by the small percentage of “benefit cheats”) while the casino bankers and financial tax dodgers get barely a mention. The success of this “scapegoat the poor” right wing strategy is one of the most amazing things in post Thatcher political landscape.

@37

Then what the hell are you trying to say? I explained the difference between the working class and the chavs of the criminal underclass and you referred me to a paragraph about the word “chav” being used by “neo-snobs”.

@39 The part you were supposed to take notice of was this bit:

The fact that many working class people would choose not to identify with the term

You didn’t actually explain anything, except how you yourself have personally defined ‘chav’ to mean the ‘criminal underclass’. Elsewhere in this thread we have Charlieman explaining that a chav is “a person with dodgy fashion sense — but not an oik or hooligan.” A significantly different description than criminal underclass you would agree, and there are others along those lines. The fact is that Chav is purposely ill-defined, which is the root of the problem. The only common theme running through everyone’s personal idea of what a chav is, is that it is bad to be one.

So it should come as no surprise that people either decide that they are in fact middle class, not working class – if they regard chav to mean working class, or that Chavs are a separate and easily distinguished class from the working class, and thus when the Mail, Sun and Express talk about chavs, they ain’t talking about them. The point being made is that the term chav allows attacks on the working class – with the blessing and support of the ‘aspirational’ segment of the working class – who have thoroughly convinced themselves that everyone notices the difference between ‘people like us’, and ‘the rest of us’.

@40

But if you are claiming that there is no accepted definition of “Chav” (a bizarre claim as even if there is more than one meaning then it is hard to see how anyone could use a word with no meaning) then this weakens rather than strengthens the argument of the OP which also relies on an understanding of what “Chav” means. You can’t use disagreement over meanings as grounds to reject all definitions except for the one you want to use.

@41 Ill defined does not mean it has no accepted definition, it means that it can have many meanings which can vary from person to person, in short the size of the umbrella that the term covers can vary. For you its criminal yobs, for Charlieman it’s poorly dressed people who may also include criminals – ill defined, but you would easily find common ground.
The one definitive meaning that Chav possesses is that to be a Chav is bad, worthy of scorn. It is therefore okay to attack chavs, because they are ‘bad’. Or as Richard Seymour more eloquently puts it:

The ‘Chavs’ phenomenon condenses many of the themes of this savage creed. It charges poor people with getting ideas above their station, with being feckless and irresponsible with money, tasteless, stupid, drunk, thuggish, and barbaric. In the guise of lewd satire, celeb-bashing and tart social commentary, it gives us a hit of class hatred. It references, and caricatures, the outward signs of social problems such as poverty, alcoholism, bad education and so on, but does so in the manner of a taxonomising anthropologist or zoologist, naturalising these very signs as qualities of a particular social sub-species: here a ‘pramface’, there a ‘Croydon facelift’, and mark the Burberry and inauthentic branded wear. The ‘chav’ is a folk devil, the quasi-satirical subject of the last decade’s repeated moral panics about the ‘underclass’: nightmare neighbours, feral youths, ASBO kids, and so on. It is the byproduct of a neoliberalised social democracy which, in its acceptance of ‘free markets’, low taxes, and the language of meritocracy, was unable to directly challenge the growing inequality that, as a consequence of the unimpeded operations of the market, reached new peaks under New Labour.

Perhaps we should try to come up with a coherent definition of Chav. Given that no-one here seems to agree on what exactly it is.

It seems to me that the key reason for the demonisation of ‘chavs’ is their apparent rejection of certain cultural shibboleths which the middle classes hold dear. The importance placed on working hard at school and academic acheivement are key elements of the middle class identity. A chav wouldn’t consider it cool to do well at school, they aspire to being rich, yes, but in the same way that Wayne Rooney is.

It’s this rejection of middle class norms which makes the middle class dislike them.

The same can be seen in the sorts of clothes worn. Most middle class people would not be seen dead in a rayon shell-suit, a middle class person with no money would buy the cheapest jeans and t-shirt that Tesco, Primark or Matalan have to offer, but would still not be seen dead in artificial fibres. Why is this?

Micheal Foucalt’s work on the ‘Other’ is an interesting philosophical analysis which is similar to Richard Seymour’s theory There is a good wiki entry which is really easy to understand.

@42

What you are saying is completely incoherent. You can’t switch from attacking me for daring to suggest the word “chav” has a meaning, and then quote something that assumes it to mean disapproved of “poor people”.

@43

For pity’s sake. Is it really the case that only (and all) middle class people consider it normal to work hard at school?

@45 I have never once claimed that the word Chav had no meaning.

The idea that “chav” isn’t an abusive term for young, working class people is laughable.

The gossip site ‘Popbitch’ did much to popularise the word. Initially they used the word “council” to describe the style of the tyoung working class (and they didn’t mean local authority employees), this evolved into “pikey” and finally “chav” (which is derived from Romany).

‘Popbitch’ also coined the terms “pramface” (the style of a teenage, council estate, single, working class mother) and “Croydon facelift” (from the hairstyle popular with young, working class women of hair pulled back tight into a pony tail).

Camilla Wright, one of the founders of ‘Popbitch’ has a PPE from Oxford, (like so many of our dear leaders now) and has defended the use of the terms.

The argument that “chav” doesn’t mean the young, working class is specious, sophistry.

@45
I wasn’t suggesting that only middle class people work hard at school, but that Chavs don’t. If you work hard at school you are probably not a chav.

@ 40 Cylux

“The point being made is that the term chav allows attacks on the working class – with the blessing and support of the ‘aspirational’ segment of the working class – who have thoroughly convinced themselves that everyone notices the difference between ‘people like us’, and ‘the rest of us’.”

This.

For some reason this article seems to have attracted loads of crap, such as the very first comment, from people who haven’t actually read it.

And to back up what some other people are saying: “chav” is indeed a poorly-defined word, and it’s dangerous to make assumptions about what people mean when they say it. It can mean something definitely negative (“thug” or “freeloader”) or just refer to a type of fashion (“chavtastic”), albeit a much-mocked one. But it does carry strong underclass connotations: you wouldn’t call a violent but well-spoken and well-dressed bloke from Surrey a “chav”.

People who use the word ‘chav’ unreflectively are scum and I look forward to the word ‘chave’ being as socially acceptable as the n-word.

There IS a degree or racism in those who use it, ‘Leftish’ comedians like Marcus Brigstock often resorting to ‘black’ slang when prortraying chavs, innit?

[49] yes, we have been distracted by chav semantics?

In summary the posh hate the poor, while the key significance of the construct (chav) is to enable right wingers to warn middle england what might happen if we deviate from a 1,000 years of tory rule?

Mind you, I think Vimothy [35] is not far off the mark either.

@ 50 Shatterface

“There IS a degree or racism in those who use it, ‘Leftish’ comedians like Marcus Brigstock often resorting to ‘black’ slang when prortraying chavs, innit?”

I think that’s pushing it, unless you can come up with examples of slang that people associate with “chavs” but that in fact are used almost exclusively by black people.

@ 51 a&e

“In summary the posh hate the poor, while the key significance of the construct (chav) is to enable right wingers to warn middle england what might happen if we deviate from a 1,000 years of tory rule?”

That (well, sort of), and to create an “us and them” dicotomy among the less well-off. For example, the government announces big cuts to child benefits that will hurt working families, but the right-wing press presents the issue as being targeted at some “chav” woman who has four kids at age 23 and never worked a day in her life.

But yeah, it’s also to scare middle England. Did you see that advert by the police showing what would happen if you cut police funding? It’s a picture of a load of people in hoodies…

“Mind you, I think Vimothy [35] is not far off the mark either.”

His basic point is fair enough. I’m sure accusations of snobbery are leveled unfairly on all sides of this debate.

@46

I’m becoming convinced you don’t know what you are saying.

If you think my usage of the word “chav” is incorrect can you please explain why it is incorrect? So far your only argument (other than the ad hominems about the motives of anybody who dares acknowledge the existence of the criminal underclass as distinct from the working class) is that other people have used the word in different ways. This might be an argument for saying the word is effectively meaningless but it is not an argument for saying my usage is incorrect and the OP’s is correct.

@48

So what does the middle class have to do with it?

Vladimir: “I cannot understand how “chav” and “working class” are being confused. I think the implication that all working class people are “chavs” is offensive and not at all excused by your contention that nobody should be called a chav.”
You’re right, “chav” as a word refers to a criminal underclass, not the working class. But that isn’t really the point, because it’s obvious that at least a significant minority of richer people use it to describe any town with a below average income, any council estate, and indeed any person they don’t know with a local accent or cheap-looking clothes. So basically, what you might call working class people then.

Yeah, sure it is possible for a self-confessed chav-hater to meet a low income person and decide that this person individually is not a “chav” – but that doesn’t stop them justifying benefit cuts by angrily railing against the spectre of “chavs” as if they represent all benefit recepients, or casually dismissing the entirety of Hull as “chav city”.

So, yes, it does mean “criminal underclass”, but it is still widely used to talk about pretty much anyone on a low income/on benefits (at least until they personally prove otherwise), and even to broad-brush whole areas and cities where such people live. I see that as evidence of pretty serious social divisions, and evidence that quite a few middle class people badly overestimate the size of this criminal underclass…

Cylux in 40: “The point being made is that the term chav allows attacks on the working class – with the blessing and support of the ‘aspirational’ segment of the working class – who have thoroughly convinced themselves that everyone notices the difference between ‘people like us’, and ‘the rest of us’.”

…that puts it much better than I could, and gets into other dimensions of it which make the term so incredibly politically useful to the right.

56 & 57,

You appear to think that words can be attacked for expressing ideas, and that ideas can be attacked for being “dangerous” rather than wrong.

Should we cease to acknowledge the existence of the criminal underclass in order to avoid the danger that somebody might apply the concept to the entire working class? Avoiding the word “chav” on these grounds seems to me to be the political equivalent of putting one’s fingers in one’s ears and going “na-na-na-I-can’t-hear-you” until the problem goes away.

@56 Jungle
Just two points of contention:

You’re right, “chav” as a word refers to a criminal underclass, not the working class.

1: Is it really a wholly criminal underclass, or just an underclass? I.e. is every ‘chav’ or member of the ‘underclass’ really a criminal? This should give you a sense of the success of the demonization at work here.
2: As I’ve been trying to argue in this thread, no, “chav” does not refer to an underclass, but it can refer to an underclass, in much the same way that the American English version of “turtle” can refer to a tortoise, but it would be quite incorrect to say that the American English version of “turtle” refers specifically to a tortoise.

Cylux @40:

You didn’t actually explain anything, except how you yourself have personally defined ‘chav’ to mean the ‘criminal underclass’. Elsewhere in this thread we have Charlieman explaining that a chav is “a person with dodgy fashion sense — but not an oik or hooligan.” A significantly different description than criminal underclass you would agree, and there are others along those lines. The fact is that Chav is purposely ill-defined, which is the root of the problem. The only common theme running through everyone’s personal idea of what a chav is, is that it is bad to be one.

The unclarity over what a chav actually is has been around since the word first crossed my radar. I initially assumed it meant what a Glaswegian means by ‘ned’, or an Elthamian means by ‘kev’; more-or-less the teenaged version of what the 80s meant by ‘medallion man’. Touchy, drunk and with poor taste, covered in flash and bling, and lacking any apparent source for the wealth ostentatiously displayed. Inclined to hit people is a kind of unstated corollary.

I was then (being about 2004) assured by the BBC that to be a chav involved being part of a subculture which wore fake Burberry tracksuits and took Katie Price and Jade Goody as role models for modern femininity. This was temporarily quite accurate, I have to admit. It certainly covers the ‘bad taste’ bit.

Since then, I have been assured with equal seriousness, by a 34-year-old self-employed businessman who self-defined as a chav, that ‘chav’ is a contraction of ‘chava’, a slang word meaning ‘mate’ or ‘bruv’, and that ‘true chavs’ are proud of their working-class heritage. So we can scratch the idea that the one consistent aspect of ‘chav’ is that everyone thinks it’s a bad thing to be one.

Afaict the parallels with Marx’s lumpenproletariat arise partly because it happens to have been people described as chavs who invented happy-slapping and partly because of the ‘no visible reason for having that much cash’ clause. That is also, presumably, where the assumption of general criminality (as opposed to specific violent tendencies) is drawn from.

Basically, it’s another playground insult. Humanity will never get through creating those.

The argument here, where it approaches utility at all, is not about the word chav, it’s about how the media-political construct of ‘chav’ is used and abused by people who want Britons divided and scared. It’s about the way both Labour and the Tories (and to some extent the Liberals, though typically less so) use the nebulous concept of ‘the chav’ for their own ends.

Chav is not synonymous with working class and I get sick of people saying that it is!
I am working class, as are my parents and their parents and so on.. none of us work in “professional” trades but we are not chavs nor are most working class folk (who also despise chavs) .
A lot of chav kids come from middle class backgrounds with relatively well off parents who own their own home and have high levels of education. I live in such an area (though we rent).. Its about attitude and style of dress.
The word doesnt even have much of a meaning anymore because to one person its your burberry clad stereotype but another its hoodies and somebody else will say its sportswear. The one unifying thing is they are seen as the undesirable work-shy lot who breed like rabbits and drain national resources… calling them working class is a bit of a laugh since a lot of them have never had a job!