Owen Jones > Quotes

“Demonisation is the ideological backbone of an unequal society.”
― Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

“Being born into a prosperous middle-class family typically endows you with a safety net for life. If you are not naturally very bright, you are still likely to go far and, at the very least, will never experience poverty as an adult. A good education compounded by your parents' 'cultural capital', financial support and networks will always see you through. If you are a bright child born into a working-class family, you do not have any of these things. The odds are that you will not be better off than your parents.”
― Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

“Taken together, New Labour policies have helped to build a series of overlapping chav caricatures: the feckless, the non-aspirational, the scrounger, the dysfunctional and the disorderly. To hear this sort of rhetoric from Labour, rather than the Tories, has confirmed the stereotypes and prejudices many middle-class people have about working-class communities and individuals. But it can be far subtler than outright attacks. Many of New Labour's underlying philosophies were steeped in middle-class triumphalism. They were based on the assumption that the tattered remnants of the working-class were are on the wrong side of history - and must be made to join 'Middle England' like the rest of us.”
― Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

“When Art struggles, it succeeds; when revelling in its own successes, it as singularly fails.”
― Owen Jones

“Pinochet shared one of the main aims of his ideological soulmates in Britain: to erase the working class as a concept. His goal, he declared, was to ‘make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of entrepreneurs’.”
― Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

“Morality is personal. There is no such thing as collective conscience, collective kindness, collective gentleness, collective freedom,’ she planned to argue. ‘To talk of social justice, social responsibility, a new world order, may be easy and make us feel good, but it does not absolve each of us from personal responsibility.’ It was clearly too much for her speechwriters and did not make the final cut. However, they were not able to stop her infamous declaration several years later (in lifestyle magazine Woman’s Own, of all places): ‘There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”
― Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class