T he working class has gradually disappeared from social discourse in North America. Referring to the middle class is much more politically acceptable. In Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, Owen Jones shows that the working class must still be at the forefront of social, political, and cultural analysis. Battlestar Galactica 3 Temporada Legendado there. Sims 2 Default Replacement Skins. His analysis of the contemporary working class in the United Kingdom, principally de-industrialized northern England, is a cautionary tale that should make North American policy makers pause and realize that class matters as much as it ever did.

The English middle class has traditionally been associated with professional employment, public schools that are really private schools, and deliberately cultivated patterns of social behaviour. Jones opens his narrative by recounting an incident at a typical middle-class social event: a dinner party. A guest made a joke about the imminent closure of venerable British retailer Woolworths, and speculated about where chavs would be able to shop after the firm had closed.

It is around this term – chavs – that Jones organizes his discussion. It is a derogatory term used by the media, politicians, and average citizens to describe much of what remains of the British working class. Game Maker 8 Sprites. Jones devotes considerable, and justified, attention to the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s when the Conservative Part y governed Britain. [End Page 345] The British left has long argued that the Conservative government, as the political committee of the capitalist class, had a clear plan for shifting wealth away from workers and otherwise promoting moneyed interests at the expense of everyone else in the country.