Chavs - The Demonisation of the Working Class by Owen Jones

I don't always agree with Owen Jones. Whilst we share a broadly similar ideology, I find that sometimes he can fall into the trap that I almost always fell into when doing essays at university.

The trap is that of just arguing your point without listening to counter-arguments and just repeating the things that you find most convincing, regardless of where the whole conversation is going.

I found the book extremely useful as an history of politics from the 80s onwards - something I am not too familiar with and Jones' anger has led him to get a few pieces of information and quotes that he might have not got if he wasn't quite so belligerent, including from senior Tories who have admitted that their party is designed to make the rich richer.

As an accountant, I am definitely not working class but my ancestors were. I found out at my nan's funeral today that her wedding ring was from Woolworths and one of the last things she said to my dad was "your father always said: vote Labour."

I think maybe this is where I get my empathy for their plight and it increases my horror at attacks both through the government and through popular culture. This is set to continue over the course of the next five years as:

- Georgey attempts to find £12 billion of welfare cuts, which are largely going to hit those who are the poorest
- Dave attempts to reduce the power of the trade unions
- Westminster Council attempts to ban feeding the homeless
- the BBC creates a show called the Hardest Grafter which will no doubt  demonise the working class further.

I am worried about the widening gap between rich and poor, especially when we live in one of the world's wealthiest countries. How far can the Conservatives push it before they have another uprising, like the London Riots of 2011 but on a larger scale?

Name change

I have changed the name of my blog. It seemed a little uncouth. Now it is a poor attempt at satire.

Petitions

I have often wondered about the effects of online petitions. Surely me typing my name into a box won't have much effect? Certainly not as much as going and standing outside Downing Street with a placard would, right?

I had a look for successful online petitions. There are a number of sites which will tell you about the victories which have been achieved with online petitions. Change.org gives you their selection of best victories and it does help you to believe that you can make a difference by signing.

However, the sorts of things that seem to be successful are - whilst important - perhaps only small victories in the grand scheme of things. Saving Meriam Yehya Ibrahim from execution and Ghonchech Ghavami are the two big ones they herald. If you get further down the list, you see some about saving a pub or getting an advert removed.

These smaller victories will help to change the culture of society over the long term but the absence of any effect on major government legislation sticks out like a Tory policy which will help those on benefits.

There are a few issues that I have been concerned about since last Friday and I have signed petitions about them (a list is below and I may well grow this as time goes on) but I am under no illusion that the change I am making by doing so is significant. It is better than nothing and as I have vowed to be more engaged, I will sign any petition which sits with my viewpoint.

Despite appearances to the contrary, politicians are human beings, and as such, pressure that we can put on them directly may have an effect. If you want to sign an online petition, it is not too much more effort to contact your MP - either on Twitter or by email - to tell them why you think the issue is important and to let them know directly.

One of the issues with petitions is that they might not always reach their intended recipient (it depends how organised the person arranging the petition is) and that their intended recipient is probably only one of 650 MPs. There is a list here of all MPs on Twitter although I intend to verify this and potentially update it/provide a list of my own at some point.


Petitions I have signed:

Keep the band on Fox Hunting

Don't repeal the Human Right Act

Reform our voting system to include Proportional Representation

Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier and it's relevance today.

I have just finished reading Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. It seemed to raise questions similar to those that I was having on Friday after the results of the 2015 election, despite being written in 1937 – 78 years earlier.

It was not intentional that my reading of this coincided with my disappointment at the election result, it was just one of those happy coincidences you get once in a while. The book had been sitting on my Kindle for a good couple of years before I finally got round to reading it. I really enjoy Orwell’s writing. The fact that he lived amongst the coal miners for the research for this book, and the decision to go assist in the Spanish Civil War (documented in Homage to Catalonia) are two reasons why I find him to be inspiring.

In the second part of Wigan Pier, after having described in the first part, Orwell sets out the premises:

- The appalling conditions of miners are intolerable.
- Socialism can improve these conditions.
- Therefore: we should all be socialists.

As it is clear that the conclusion is not the case (it is in fact a non sequitur), he asks the question: why are we not all socialists?

When reading this, it struck me that there are similarities with the situation we have been in recently. Is it acceptable that (among other problems) almost a million people are using more than a thousand foodbanks? It is acceptable that in the world's 9th richest country 2% of the population cannot afford food and without the food banks would potentially starve to death?

It does seem as if the Conservatives have attempted to demonise those who use foodbanks and it doesn't sit well with me. >On Friday, I was angry as I felt people had voted for a government that had allowed a version of Orwell’s first premise to occur and appeared to have no plan to improve the conditions. In the same way that they shouldn't be demonising the poor and needy, It is important that we do not demonise those who support other political parties (something I know I have also done on occasions, including Friday). Demonisation, mudslinging or any other form of character deformation reduces the force of our own message and arguments because it looks like we have had to resort to underhand tactics as we are not confident enough in our own position. In a democratic process we out to try to understand the reasons why our opponents hold a different position and attempt to persuade them that our position is better through discussion and reasoned arguments.

Orwell’s explanations why those in his time weren’t Socialists, as summarised on Wikipedia, are below. I’m not sure that all of them could be relevant today. I’m not sure of the validity of his arguments anyway. It is something I will continue to ponder.

• 1. Class prejudice. This is real and it is visceral. Middle class socialists do themselves no favours by pretending it does not exist and—by glorifying the manual worker—they tend to alienate that large section of the population which is economically working class but culturally middle class. 
• 2. Machine worship. Orwell finds most socialists guilty of this. Orwell himself is suspicious of technological progress for its own sake and thinks it inevitably leads to softness and decadence. He points out that most fictional technically advanced socialist utopias are deadly dull. H. G. Wells in particular is criticised on these grounds. 
• 3. Crankiness. Amongst many other types of people Orwell specifies people who have beards or wear sandals, vegetarians, and nudists as contributing to socialism's negative reputation among many more conventional people. 
• 4. Turgid language. Those who pepper their sentences with “notwithstandings” and “heretofores” and become over excited when discussing dialectical materialism are unlikely to gain much popular support. 
• 5. Failure to concentrate on the basics. Socialism should be about common decency and fair shares for all rather than political orthodoxy or philosophical consistency.

Everything's Political

Before the election started, I was considering doing a blog a week to discuss the issues. I believe that politics is important. I wrote this possibly naïve blog about it quite some time ago. I wrote this possibly naïve blog about the deficit yesterday.

However, I didn’t do this as I thought that other people would be far more educated about it all and able to write more intelligently and persuasively than I could hope to do so. This is partly because when I was at school, there was very little Politics taught. You could do an A-level but you probably wouldn’t opt to do so if you didn’t already have an interest in it, and they didn’t seem to do much to encourage an interest in it prior to that time.

Last night, around 10.01pm, I became quite down. The exit polls revealed to us by David Dimbleby were a shock to most people and a disappointment to me, as I was hoping that Dave and Georgey would be kicked out of power as I am ideologically opposed to almost all of the coalition’s policies.

As it turned out, hoping that something with them had gone wrong proved futile – in fact, they turned out to be even worse than expected (with the exception of Nigel Farridge not winning in South Thanet).

I didn’t stay up the whole night, but I was close to it. As it went on, I was getting more and more down about it all and as it was the middle of the night, everything seemed much worse in the way it does when you start thinking about things in the middle of the night. When I woke after a couple of hours sleep, I was less down about it all (I still believe we’re screwed as the bad men got in, though) and felt more like I should try to participate more in the democracy we are lucky enough to have in this country and try to make myself more educated and also attempt to make a small amount of positive change.

So I made a vow to myself that I would do that, and this blog is the first step. By feeling like I should update it regularly, I will hopefully guilt myself into not slacking off. I am planning to update it quite frequently (I’ve not worked out how frequently yet – it’s only been a few hours) and I’m aware that if I spam my Facebook and Twitter every time I do, it might get annoying. So I will only do so when something that I think is more interesting happens. The rest of the time, you can just check to see if I’ve done anything, or follow my new Twitter account – and give me a virtual kick if it appears like I’m slacking. 

As I mentioned, I don’t know much about politics. Most of what I have learned is either through studying social philosophy at uni – which is what sparked my interested – or through my 17 years as a voter trying to get information on who or what I might be voting on.

I expect this to be a story of my journey and understanding. Both my thoughts as I attempt to learn about the political process and current politics as well as any experiences I may have as I attempt to engage with the political process. I have a bought a book called The Politics Book which I’m working my through in an attempt to understand different theories, the history of politics and to question my beliefs. I may discuss topics that I have been reading.

Part of my vow is that I will get more involved. Even if it is just speaking to my MP or councillors, or whether it is engaging in protests (my former housemate is an activist and if I’m honest, I was always a bit jealous of his enthusiasm, drive and passion), or campaigning for a political party (my only experience here is spending an evening helping leaflet for the Green Party when I was at uni in Canterbury).

If anyone else fancies having a forum to write on, I am open to other contributors as well, or if you want to join me on any part of my journey, you are more than welcome.

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A note on the name of this blog: it’s from this awesome Skunk Anansie song. For those of you who weren’t around in the 90s, they were wicked. Check them out. I wanted to go for the less sweary subtitle of the song, Everything’s Political, but someone has already taken that Blogger name but never used it. I have however taken out the naughty word because a) my mum might read it and b) I can't be arsed to find out Blogger's stance on sweary URLS.