The document is an opinion piece defending "chavs" against middle-class derision and arguing that distinctions between "good" and "bad" working class people reveal more about the detractors. The author notes that calling people "chavs" says more about the caller, revealing insecurities about sex, money, jobs or education. Overall, the piece criticizes hypocrisy in looking down on working class aspirations to consumer goods and argues that the working class deserves to spend their money as they please after decades of economic hardship.

1. From The Times February 18, 2005, Julie Burchill
Yeah but, no but, why I'm proud to be a chav
Vicky Pollard of Little Britain is a chav, the latest object of middle-
class derision. But the sneering reveals more about the detractors
than the chavs
WHEN I was first asked by Sky One to make a documentary about the chav phenomenon, it’s fair to say that I
had reservations. Even to use the word seemed, to me, something like spitting in the face of 99 per cent of the
people I’ve ever loved — rednecks all, with just a few rogue toffs and bourgie slacker-boys thrown in.
But it wasn’t just a moral objection — vanity played a part too. For I’ve noticed that calling
people “chavs” says far, far more about the caller than it does the called. And, amusingly, it
pinpoints the exact area which the name-caller is most anxious about. Thus individuals who
aren’t getting any good lovin’ will hiss on ceaselessly about how slaggy chavs are; those who
know that secretly their job is one long duck, dive’n’skive (journalists are particularly culpable
here) will bang on about how idle chavs are; and those who stayed in long and expensive
educations yet are earning less before tax per annum than Wayne Rooney spends on valet
parking each year will be rather cross about how much money he pulls in with no help from
anyone but his rather clever feet. In the end, as a loved-up, honestly idle, uneducated, filthy
rich guttersnipe, I just couldn’t resist the call of the old neighbourhood.
I soon learnt that sometimes, hilariously, it is not just individuals who feel chav envy but whole
institutions — the Daily Mail, for instance, whose whole raison d’être would appear to be that
SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE IS HAVING FUN AND IT MUST BE STOPPED NOW! — naturally
fears, loathes and envies chavs with a passion. The Mail gripes about their sex drive, their
money and their laziness (go figure) but is particularly obsessed with what it sees as the sky-
high chav birthrate, mostly to unwed teenage mothers. However, as in so many things, the
Mail seems somewhat confused on this issue, as when it’s not worrying about young working-
class women having too many children, it’s worrying about young middle-class women having
too few. That children are children, and will grow up to be adults who will help to pay for our
pensions regardless of their social origins, seems lost on the ever-anxious Mail — and their
concern with the “correct” social origin of said children would seem to be sailing dangerously
close to their fascist sympathies of the past. Though it’s probably phobia and not fascism that
inspires such censoriousness; be it chav girls getting pregnant or posh girls staying childless,
they are obviously having TOO MUCH FUN doing so.
Whenever I stand up for chavs — on the basis that the white indigenous English working-
class is now the one group you can insult without feeling the breath of the Commission for
Racial Equality on your neck, which makes it pretty damn cowardly apart from being what I
call “social racism” — there will always be some joker who will bend over backwards to
reassure me that not ALL the working class are wasters. No, there are the good proles who
slave away ruining their health for a pittance — and then there are the bad proles; the chavs,
who work no harder than they have to, and like to spend what money they have on nice
things for themselves and their children — in fact, who are human and, to their detractors at
least, unashamed of that. And here’s the rub — and the accompanying hypocrisy, which will
make sense to anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together. The very things that
chavs stand accused of — aspiration, love of material goods, lack of communal values — are
the very things that have not just been fetishised by institutions such as the main political
parties and the Daily Mail for the past 30 years, but forced on the British people as surely as
the Industrial Revolution was. The De-Industrial Revolution deprived the working class of

2. skills, trades and neighbourhood socialism, seen most dramatically in the defeat of the miners
and the closing of the pits. Twenty years on, it’s a bit late for voices of the Establishment to
pine for hand-stitched banners, brass bands and scrubbed doorsteps; that’s all gone.
No, we’ve got to work with what we’ve got now — and sticky-beaked sad sacks trying to
differentiate between good proles and bad are only showing their rank ignorance of recent
history as well as their totally transparent desire to feel superior to people who have been
dealt a pretty poor hand, both educationally and economically speaking, yet still manage to
wring a fair amount of fun from life. Michael Collins, author of The Likes of Us: A Biography of
the White Working Class, recalls how in the 19th century middle-class do-gooders berated
the costermongers for spending “too much” money on nice clothes for their children. Nothing
changes, except that now the clothes come from Von Dutch. The working class still spend
shamelessly — as they rightly should, for which class has worked harder for its money?
Perhaps it is their “betters” who should be more shame-faced in their weird, status-needy
spending, be it on five types of extortionately priced organic lettuce in a poxy salad, a king’s
ransom on a fortnight’s living death in a mausoleum in Tuscany or blowing £200 a throw on
having some vicious bint pelt you with hot stones, as many middle-class, media-mad women
are apt to do.
Whatever, whenever I hear some well-connected, expensively educated nobody
differentiating between the good/bad and the deserving/undeserving working-class, it only
has the effect of making me cleave to the bad, undeserving half, perverse little soul that I am
— please, Lord Snooty, don’t do me no favours! When Dominic Mohan — of The Sun, no
less! — says that I’m defending chavs because I am a chav, I felt a deep glow of pride. My
people! — right, wrong or falling down drunk with vomit down their velour. And at the end of
the day, a people so lacking in hypocrisy — perhaps the most ludicrous, lowest minor vice of
all — and so rich in honesty that anyone even half-alive has to like them. “If we weren’t doing
this, we’d be on the checkout at Tesco,” says the chav princess supreme, Cheryl Tweedy, of
the magnificent Girls Aloud. Somehow, I just can’t imagine Jade Jagger or Nigella Lawson
admitting the same about the benefits of being born with a famous name. Let alone Dannii
Minogue, who recently claimed during a diss-off with Girls Aloud: “At least I’m not a chav!”
She should be so lucky!
Anyway, to paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, “Who is the chav, the chav, or the one who disses
him?” For sure, websites such as chavscum.co.uk demonstrate exactly the mean-
mindedness and talent to abuse that chav-haters accuse chavs of — and the saddos involved
refuse to reveal their faces. Perhaps we are a nation of chavs — and that suits me fine, as
the alternative would be being a nation of pretentious ponces; naming no names, Monsieur et
Madame! Look at our “betters”, if you will; the Queen has a gilded coach — it doesn’t get
more ostentatious. The third in line to the throne has a bottle-blonde girlfriend called “Chelsy”;
the ninth in line has a pierced, even blonder daughter called Zara. Even Burberry, it turns out,
was founded in Basingstoke rather than Belgravia. And its “chief financial officer”, who
recently had the nerve to attempt to distance her overpriced, underselling product from the
replicas still selling like hot cakes by saying “Chavs are yesterday’s news”, is actually called
Stacey. STACEY! No doubt she has sisters called Tracey and Lacey and a brother called
Casey — and what fun we’d all have down the Bowlplex, legless on Bacardi Breezers! Pot,
kettle, bling, anybody?