Santa (aka the Mrs, formerly known as the Deluded Lefty) included in my stocking a book called “Chavs” by Owen Jones. The Mrs was not fully aware of quite how loathsome Mr Jones is but surely the fact that at the top of the back cover is a quote from Guardian Harridan Polly Toynbee about how wonderful this book is must have been a giveaway.
Toynbee is, as you know, wrong about everything – the Toynbee Rule.
And so the book is dreadful. Mr Jones seems to think that quoting the opinion of some frightful lefty establishes what that frightful lefty believes as a matter of fact. That is even when it has been shown that the factual evidence shows that the views of the frightful lefty in question are just not borne out by hard reality.
I can understand when the students of the Mrs (studying sociology at a former Poly) cite the author of the Spirit Level to demonstrate the “fact” that inequality of wealth causes unhappiness all round. They are just 19 and are not a self-proclaimed one-person think tank for the Left. But when Owen Jones makes the same sort of claim you wonder what fuckwit offered to publish his book? Surely it would have been cheaper to have bought a few essays from her students off the Mrs and republished them?
Jones purports to show how the Middle Classes demonise all working class folks as chavs. His solutions to this perceived problem are, needless to say, big state and redistributionist. I rather sense that the world have moved on.
Those members of the working class who actually work would rather pay less tax and want to get on in life. The Middle Class does not despise them at all. But do we despise the feckless welfare-addicted portions of society posing as the “oppressed and despised working class?” We sure do. And what’s more the real working class despises them too.
And in the despisers camp we also despise Middle Class lefties like Master Jones who want to punish us for our hard work to reward the feckless and suggest that our reluctance to go along with the plans is driven by class hatred. Especially when their manifesto is such patent, wining teenage, incoherent tosh.