Chavs and toffs together

We live in thoroughly PC times, when tweeting rotten things about a black footballer can land you in jail and opposing gay marriage can see you branded a bigot. But there are still two groups of people it’s OK to hate: chavs and toffs. The tracksuit-wearing poor and the tweed-covered rich. The blinged-up yoof who haunt urban bus stops and the Burberry-sporting poshos who get blotto in Chelsea. These two sections of society are being buried beneath a mountain of media abuse. Perhaps it’s time for a chav/toff alliance to fight back against the haters?

The respectable and the right-on, who make up the vast bulk of the media and political elite, love nothing more than mocking chavs and toffs. They flit with remarkable ease between slating the lower orders for getting drunk on cheap beer and eating ‘junk food’ and ridiculing the rich for swilling claret and eating foie gras.

Most popular

Ed West

Trump is going to give us a thousand years of woke

TV producers invite us to laugh at the antics of both the vulgar working classes and even more vulgar non-working classes. The soaraway successes in reality TV are The Only Way is Essex and Made in ­Chelsea. In the former, the camera lingers on the fake-tanned faces of Essex girls as they say things like ‘Shuu’up!’ and ‘vajazzle’ (don’t ask), while in the latter we watch super-rich youngsters lazing on yachts saying ‘yah’. To the middle-class, painfully earnest inhabitants of TV-land, both social sets look like alien breeds, who speak in a foreign language and have weird mating rituals.

One week, newspapers regale us with tales about the debauchery of chavs (cue photos of a Newcastle lass with her skirt above her head), and the next they tell us in gory detail about what BoJo and Dave got up to in the drunken cesspit of the Bullingdon Club.