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| The Laughter Wall, a symbol of community spirit, is demolished in Inchicore Dublin |
Working-class people have been de-humanized by the media, and political elite. Our vocabulary for describing the working class has been changed to 'skanger', 'chav' or 'underclass'. Demonizing working class people has become a culture of attacking and 'blaming the victims' through mainstream media. The press has spread the idea that 'people are poor because they lack moral fibre'. In Britain, Chav-hate is a way of justifying an unequal society and this prejudice against the working class has grown in Ireland also, during the past two decades.
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| The Daily Mail uses the Philpott case in Britain as a pathetic attempt to, once again, smear the working class. According to them, the entirety of people unemployed or working-class in Britain are out to abuse the system in the most horrific of ways, including killing 6 of their own children - if they must. It's ironic that the right-wing press emphasises that we should all act individually as an atomized society, but when something like this happens in a poor area, they use it as an opportunity to tar an entire class with one brush as monstrous welfare-scroungers. |
In the eyes of post-Thatcher Britain, and post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, the working class is often no longer perceived to exist. We are told, that we should aspire to become at least middle-class. We live in what is believed to be a 'meritocracy' of 'social mobility' where people achieve their aspirations through sheer hard work and determination; the mentality goes, if you work hard enough you will surely get anything you desire. Those who don't rise up the social order, surely deserve what they get too, because these people are seen as scroungers, lay-abouts or an untalented, undeserving, underclass. In other words, chavs. In fact, in a recent study in the UK, they even have a new sociological term, the 'precariat' a new social level which British people can 'despise' - an effort to further marginalise the concept and definition of working-class.
'British people can now aspire to and despise four new levels of social classes, according to a new survey conducted by researchers in partnership with public broadcaster the BBC.'
But it is a myth, that those on the top of society got there by absolute hard work, talent and determination, while those on the bottom remain there because of laziness or lack of ambition. The capitalist system is rigged in favour of the privileged. Even if everyone attempted to rise up the social order to become middle-class, it would be impossible; 'who would man the supermarket checkouts, and answer the phones in call centres?'. If the mines are an iconic image of working class Britain during the 20th century, call-centres and supermarkets are the working-class occupations of Ireland during the 21st century. The undoubtedly harsh conditions, of generally meaningful, skilled and proud industrial positions have been replaced by monotonous retail and commercial services positions with less union representation, more mental strain and less job security for working-class people. All of this labour is not in the provision of services benefiting the public at large, but to increase profits for shareholders and owners of those private companies.
There is a motto, 'Rise with your class, not above it'. Nowadays, you might be seen as lazy, unambitious or naive if this was a principle you were to stand by. In fact, class is not something which is generally recognised anymore. It has been Barack Obama's and Tony Blair's ideal to create a middle-class majority in the wake of Thatcherism and Reagan administrations. 'It is our generation's task, then, to reignite the true engine of America's economic growth - a rising, thriving middle class' (Barack Obama, State of the Union speech, 2013). Fianna Fáil and their partners in Government during the 90's fed the illusion among Irish people that 'we are all middle-class now', and we should continue to 'party' away as the boom economy rampaged on. Undoubtedly, more people in Ireland were employed during the boom, but only a privileged few were 'partying'.
During this time, instead of improving the conditions and economic circumstances of the working-class as a whole, a sense of selfish individualism was promoted. The concept of working-class communities, cultures and identity was dismantled, ignored and destroyed - at least the realistic conceptions of them were. (See Up The Republic, 2012)
Ironically, the so-called middle-class which is mis-represented by the media, is in reality an elite class which earns more than 47,000 euro per year. The media grossly mis-conceives what the middle-class actually is. In reality, the median wage is approximately 24,500 euro. That is the true median, and that wage represents a working-class wage. The idea that most of us are middle-class is a fallacy. The definition of working-class is '...that class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live' - by far the greater part of the population of Ireland.
This deliberate mis-representation of the size of the middle-class has an important purpose. It does a lot to inspire people to be ambitious above their conditions. It is useful propaganda for promoting and justifying an unequal free-market system, which claims to promote freedom, but is actually rigged to the advantage of those born into privilege. It inherently oppresses and penalizes those who are less fortunate.
In Britain, there is confusion over which class people feel they belong to. Most British people feel that they belong to the working class - a higher percentage of people than in the 1950's even (See Owen Jones, 2011). But the perception and definition of what people think working-class is varies. The Guardian's Barbara Ellen highlighted this confused thinking recently, when she said of the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg,
'what really made me twitch was when he described himself as a "class mongrel" (working class with media-middle-class bolted-on). In truth, Bragg is no class mongrel – that's just how he's been suckered into feeling'.This statement is absolutely true. Bragg's warped perception of class is as a result of corporate media's propaganda and free-market ideology that anyone can escape the poor conditions of the working-class and become successful, no matter how tall the odds are stacked against you. We can speculate on why Bragg might define himself in this way; Perhaps Bragg promotes his working-class roots because of the rose-tinted sentimental value they hold and because part of the consumer market for his work lies within the working-class, and he brags his middle-class image to get ahead socially.
Much of the demonization of the working class has resulted from Thatcher's defeat over the trade unions in the 1980's and her government's dismantling of traditional industry jobs such as mining. The town's most affected with unemployment and poverty were the very towns which lost their industry jobs without having them replaced by anything better. These towns now display many of the symptoms, such as high crime rates and drug abuse, which impoverished areas tend to have.
Again, these social issues, paradoxically caused by the destruction of working-class industries by Thatcher's government, added fuel to the fire of the media's demonization of poorer areas. When New Labour were finally elected in 1997, the Left was demoralized in Britain. Blair's government had largely bought into Thatcher's declaration that 'There Is No Alternative!'. The collapse of so-called communism in 1989 did not help either. Socialist economic ideals were seen as unfeasible. When Margaret Thatcher was asked what she felt her greatest achievement was, she answered, 'Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds'. During the late nineties, New Labour, in desperation to re-gain power from the Tories, almost completely abandoned the concept of class struggle (See The Blair Years, 2008).
Ireland shares many cultural attributes as the British public do, not least because British media has significant penetration among Irish audiences, and because Britain is Ireland's most significant trading partner. Most people have access to Sky News and British tabloids. Many of the most popular Irish tabloids (including The Sun, The Daily Mail and the Irish Daily Star) are British, with a few relative Irish stories thrown in to the mix so as to appear more appealing to the Irish market. So the negative sense of the working-class has no doubt been influenced by British media in the Republic.
However, the Republic has it's own important reasons to have shunned and dehumanized its working class. The idea of a working class in Ireland, did not fit the narrative of a modern, upwardly mobile Ireland which was being told during the nineties and noughties. Ireland sought to attract foreign corporations who provide employment for a slim percentage of the overall population - an educated middle-class. Such corporations require an educated workforce with soft-skills required for the service based sector. The image of a strong working-class based industry sector is incompatible with that. The story was that these corporations are good for the economy, yet giants like Google, Starbucks and others pay virtually nothing in tax. Those aforementioned corporations actually pay a rate less than 1%.
Discrediting the working class in Ireland, allows working class communities to face significant cuts to services and benefits, and to be taxed to the hilt in order to pay off "more deserving" speculators, banks and 'entrepreneurs' who caused the current recession.
In my next few blogs, I will focus on some examples and case studies of demonization of the working-class by corporate media and the political elite including:
Jade Goody and Big Brother, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the portrayal of the working class as an 'enlightened' bunch post WWII and more recently as scroungers, and how rock and roll has become increasingly middle-class and pretentious...
