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. Briefly that, in the last generation or so, there has been a conscious effort on the part of the ruling class to obliterate class as a political-ideological category, and a basis for political action. And, concurrent with this there has been a rise in more or less explicit forms of class chauvinism, some of it expressed in the obnoxious ideologeme, 'chavs'. Only an era which has revived Victorian attitudes concerning 'respectability' and the 'deserving poor', in which poverty is habitually pathologised and 'wealth creators' extolled, could we have a flesh and blood Etonian of royal pedigree in Number Ten. Over the last dozen or so years, there has been a substantial rise in inegalitarian political attitudes, a drop in support for redistribution and, confluently, a more modest but real drop in the number of people who think of themselves as being 'working class'.

It is axiomatic that public attitudes are complex, with clusters of seemingly contradictory attitudes expressed on the same subject. The most recent social attitudes survey (British Social Attitudes, 27th report) confirms this with its mixed bag of results giving socialists reasons to cheer and mourn. But this is banal, what we would expect. The question is in what overall direction does the balance of these composite attitudes tend; in what direction is the trend over time? The authors of the survey find that on such matters as welfare, poverty and wealth redistribution the public has shifted to the right and ascribe this to New Labour's tenure in office. Most interesting for my purposes, though, are the findings on the 'race to the top'. These findings disclose a set of attitudes which in the relevant ideological struggles would tend to favour the right. They find that most people think of themselves as upwardly mobile, and believe that 'meritocratic' factors such as "hard work" are the most decisive in determining one's success (as compared with 'ascriptive' factors such as class, or race).

When you consider that this is not merely debatable but absurd, that hard work is very far from being a more important factor in success than class background (or race, gender, etc), it becomes apparent just how much ideological ground work has had to be done to construct this 'common sense' worldview, and how much the constituents of this 'common sense' had to compete with and displace every day experience. Of course, there are classically reformist attitudes expressed in there, with majorities feeling that the rich are paid too highly (even if they underestimate just how much the rich are paid). This is why, when an actual tax increase on the rich is proposed and implemented (the 50p rate), it is widely popular. But this is still in a context in which only a minority explicitly support redistributionist policies, and in which the tax was represented not as redistribution but purely as 'fairness' - as in the rich paying a 'fair share' of the burden of the recession. A more serious objection, perhaps, is that the answers to such questions would likely reflect aspiration, or self-justification, rather than literal truth-claims. People say 'hard work' got them where they are, or will get them where they want to be, because it seems to validate their efforts. To say otherwise seems disempowering. They don't literally believe such things. Yet, this is precisely the point. If people find validation in rightist nostrums, then to an extent they have come to inhabit the values of the right. In the same way, there are all sorts of reasons why someone might say "we are too soft on crime", but such utterances necessarily belong to the symbolic territory of reactionary-authoritarianism, and the person reproducing them is treading that territory.

So, what does it mean when majorities inhabit this ideology of 'meritocracy', even with qualms? First of all, we are speaking here of a 'common sense', that is a "mass popular philosophy", consisting largely of ways of seeing that are 'traditional' rather than 'organic': people believe it because it is something that people have believed for some time; because people with authority say it is true; because one's peers have born witness to it; because it makes a certain sense of one's efforts; because in the past such beliefs have served 'people like us' well. Not all of these are bad reasons to believe a thing. Common sense is ideological, and ideologies, as Gramsci said, "'organize' human masses, they form the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.". Common sense has an "imperative character", producing "norms of conduct", and is thus formative of the political situations we struggle in. We operate on common sense, some of whose constituents are progressive - "The personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over" - as part of our efforts to develop a new 'good sense'.

The meritocratic 'common sense' is one which we, of course, have to work on. It contains certain tensions, and the reality will never live up to its ideal. So we may occasionally attack layabout Lords and monarchs, 'funemployed' rich kids, and so on, as such things defy the common sense that one does and should get ahead through 'hard work'. Yet we mainly have to work against it. For to believe that, even if one is not well off, then with sufficient hard work one can be, is to believe something about the market, about the creation of wealth and about the relative abilities of one's fellow human beings. It is to believe that market distribution is broadly reflective of effort, that wealth is mainly accumulated by those who contribute the most (thus chairmen work harder than cleaners), and people are naturally very unequal in their abilities. If you believe the system itself is basically meritocratic, even with some significant problems in need of reform, this introduces a bias in your thinking that may lead you to resent scapegoated minorities such as Muslims, single mothers, the unemployed, immigrants and others who appear (because the popular press says so) to get more help than you do, thus partially explaining your failure to enjoy more success than you have. It would also lead you to think that those who do not work are 'cheating' - if they only worked hard, they could get ahead, but instead they choose to waste idle hours while draining taxpayers' money. The bottom 20% of households with no one in employment, no car, no mortgaged property, no savings, etc., are thus pathologised as 'shameless' (tm) wasters, redeemable if at all through missionary work, or police intervention. This is not say that majorities hold the ideas I have outlined as potential corollaries of the meritocratic credo - but significant minorities appear to, and they do so in spite of their basic absurdity and apparent contradiction with other ideas that the same people say they hold.

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. And it was under New Labour, rather than under Thatcher or Major, that the meritocratic 'common sense' was effectively popularised. It was New Labour that shifted the ideological terrain to the right, arguing for right-wing ideas and communicating them far more effectively to popular audiences than the Tories ever could.

Two members of the Tory right on social policy and the 'underclass':

"The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened ... a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up. They are born to mother who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5. Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment." - Keith Joseph,1974

"We're going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it's jolly expensive. But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that's not very sensible." - Howard Flight, 2010

Following on from a theme in The Meaning of David Cameron on the myth of conservatism as a pragmatic, traditionalist ideology (also see this and this):

"[T]he Conservative Party has held a steady commitment to the principle of ‘inequality’. Often this does not appear like an ideological commitment at all since there has been a varying degree of inequality present in British society – in terms of social stratifi cation and income and wealth distribution – since 1945. Therefore what could be seen as an objective of the Conservative Party has often been interpreted as pragmatism, the maintenance of the status quo or a rebuttal of the Labour Party’s (at times shaky) commitment to greater equality. However ... there has been a principled defence of inequality by the Conservative Party. This has taken various forms, from theological or ‘natural’ arguments for inequality to an argument that individual freedom and social and economic equality are incompatible objectives. Therefore, the Conservative Party has sought at different times and in different ways since 1945 to limit the impact of egalitarian policies or even to reverse them.

"One further point should be made at this point which is that if we see the Conservative Party as having a central commitment to inequality, that Conservative politics is about inequality, then it would be possible to see a greater degree of continuity in Conservative Party politics since 1945 than is often asserted. What would appear to be the very different stances taken by ‘One Nation’ and ‘New Right’ Conservatives towards economic and social policy broadly could in fact be similar in that they both have a commitment to ‘inequality’.

...

"Several Conservative politicians have described the non-ideological nature of their Party’s politics. ... This emphasis on pragmatism has led to a concern with power. This view has been stated by Francis Pym: ‘by combining a strong motive for unity with a fi rm refusal to let ideology threaten it … the Conservative Party has a strong instinct for power’. The most sophisticated statement of this approach has been made by Michael Oakeshott, who characterised Conservative politics as being ‘anti-rationalist’. Rationalism was an ideologically based politics. It was a politics based on an abstract concept such as equality or liberty. Instead, Oakeshott argued that since this approach was not capable of capturing the full complexity of the organic society and could not be understood outside of the tradition in which these ideas were formulated a more desirable approach to politics would be one rooted within a recognisable tradition, which would entail operating within national identities. Such an approach has led to a distinction between ‘ideological’ politics and ‘realist’ politics.

...

"[K]ey figures within the ‘One Nation’ approach to Conservatism were united in their opposition of equality as a political principle. They remained committed to hierarchical social and economic structures and saw ‘equality’ as something to which the Labour Party were committed. Hence, although it may be possible to see a broad-based consensus of policy after 1951, with the Conservatives accepting much of what the previous Labour administration had done, there remained no ideological consensus with the idea of ‘equality’ showing a fundamental dividing line between the two major parties. Hence, while the Labour Party ‘revisionists’ such as Hugh Gaitskell and Tony Crosland were busy arguing that socialism was about equality, several of those seen as being on the ‘left’ of the Conservative Party were rejecting the idea of equality as being fundamentally against the principles of Conservatism. Hence David Clark, a leading member of the post-war Research Department and a key ‘moderniser’ along ‘One Nation’ lines, argued that inequality was natural: ‘inequality of natural ability results in class. Some men will always rise superior to others. In a group of men pursuing common purpose, whether it be a nation or a family, a factory or a farm, there must always be those who exercise authority and those who obey.’ For post-war Conservatives therefore there was to be an acceptance of the state, much enlarged during the Second World War and by the Labour Government of 1945–51, but an explicit rejection of ‘equality’. This can be seen in the stance taken on policy by leading Conservative thinkers, so for example, Hogg made a categorical distinction between poverty and inequality much similar to those associated with the New Right during the 1970s and argued that equality should not be a factor in education reform, where Hogg defended both public schools and grammar schools.

"A similar stance towards equality can be seen in the writing of a later prominent Conservative ‘One Nation’ thinker, Ian Gilmour. Gilmour argued that a belief in inequality is a core tenet of Conservatism. He argues that since a basic Conservative belief is freedom and since equality is a threat to freedom then Conservatives must reject equality. Equality is an ideological abstraction and since it lacks precise meaning must be something which is arbitrarily imposed. Although Gilmour sees the elimination of poverty as a Conservative objective, equality is dismissed as something which is the concern of socialists. Gilmour also sees inequality as desirable and natural as an underpinning for the family and for economic activity. There is much in Gilmour’s view of equality that could be found in a traditionalist or New Right approach, although he would be accepting of much greater government involvement in the economy and society. Similarly, contemporary politicians who hold to the ‘One Nation’ position reject the idea of equality. For example, Alistair Burt argues that Conservative politics is concerned with freedom, markets, enterprise and choice, and so even those on the ‘left’ of the Party do not commit themselves to the value of equality.

...

The more populist approach also sees the need to defend economic and social inequalities explicitly. In so doing, the traditionalist approach uses all political arguments available to defend such inequalities. So Powell and the so-called Peterhouse Group associated with Maurice Cowling, John Casey and Edward Norman, drew on the neo-liberal arguments of Friedrich von Hayek in order to defend inequalities. This led to them being described as a ‘Conservative New Right’ since they combined traditionalist approaches with economic liberalism. ... This points to a further element of traditionalist Toryism, which is the ‘anti-rationalist’ nature of politics. Politics based on abstract principles should be rejected in favour of a politics derived from and respectful of political traditions. There were anti-rationalist arguments put forward in favour of English national identity, as seen in the anti-immigration
stances adopted during the 1960s and respect for traditional political institutions as seen in Powell’s rejection of House of Lords reform. For some this marked a major distinction between traditional Toryism and the politics of the New Right, which was seen as being based on abstract (liberal) principles.

"...Inequalities are not just sought by those who would ‘benefit from inequalities of wealth, rank and education but also by enormous numbers who, while not partaking in the benefi ts, recognise that inequalities exist and, in some obscure sense, assume that they ought to’. They assume that they ought to because ‘they are accustomed to inequalities, inequalities are things they associate with a properly functioning society and they do not need an ideological proclamation in order to accept them’. It was this appeal to custom, ‘common sense’ and natural order that should be at the heart of the Conservative appeal in its defence of inequality. Inequality and privilege did not need to be based on abstract principles and could not be refuted by rational politics since they were the natural way of things." (Kevin Hickson, 'Inequality', in Kevin Hickson ed., The Political Thought of the Conservative Party since 1945, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

“The five tenets of injustice are that: elitism is efficient, exclusion is necessary, prejudice is natural, greed is good and despair is inevitable. Because of widespread and growing opposition to the five key unjust beliefs, including the belief that so many should now be ‘losers’, most of those advocating injustice are careful with their words. And those who believe in these tenets are the majority in power across almost all rich countries. Although many of those who are powerful may want to make the conditions of life a little less painful for others, they do not believe that there is a cure for modern social ills, or even that a few inequalities can be much alleviated. Rather, they believe that just a few children are sufficiently able to be fully educated and only a few of those are then able to govern; the rest must be led. They believe that the poor will always be with us no matter how rich we are. They have also come to believe that most others are naturally, perhaps genetically, inferior to them. And many of this small group believe that their friends’ and their own greed is helping the rest of humanity as much as humanity can be helped; they are convinced that to argue against such a counsel of despair is foolhardy. It is their beliefs that uphold injustice.”