DOUBLE-BARRELLED CONDESCENSION

Tony Parsons cannot stomach

well-to-do liberals who patronise the working class

WHAT HAPPENS when you criticise the British working class?

What happens if you suggest that per- haps they are not all that they once were? That the working class have become cul- turally bankrupt, unthinking philistines, that they are mindless gluttons whose favourite pastime is celebrating their igno- rance — what then? What happens if you suggest that the salt of the earth have become the scum of the earth?

What happens if you criticise the work- ing class is that you get assaulted by the middle class.

I made a film for Channel 4 called The Tattooed Jungle that bemoaned the long spiritual decline of the working class. The Tattooed Jungle suggested that the working class have changed over the last 30 years, and changed for the worse. My thesis was that the working class have gained the booty of the world — cars, VCRs, a satel- lite dish on every roof, the shell suits they all wear — and lost their souls. They are post-literate, I contended — they have been taught to read, but they don't want to. It pained me to suggest these things. These are — or were — my people. I am the son of working-class Londoners, a grammar school boy who grew up in the Cockney diaspora of the home counties. It gave me no pleasure to point out that the working class have degenerated into a tribe of tattooed white trash. But the truth of my argument seemed self-evident. With their pale flesh stained with symbols of love and hate, the dyed blonde hair of the women, the distended beer bellies of the men, the modern working class belch and fart and threaten their way through life. They contribute nothing — they spoil everything.

I suggested all these things in The Tat- tooed Jungle and the cry went up — let's not be beastly to the workers. The middle- class press fell over themselves rushing to the defence of people who own pit bull ter- riers called Tyson. 'One huge shocking gen- eralisation,' gasped the Independent. 'Since Parsons offers no evidence of any real research into his "golden age", his postur- ing seems all the more offensive.'

'A sour tirade,' said the Guardian, which couldn't get The Tattooed Jungle off its mind all week.

It would be wrong to suggest that every- one who objected to The Tattooed Jung' was a middle-class liberal. The opposition, included someone from 'Living Marxism who called Channel 4 to denounce the film as 'a capitalist plot', while in the Sun GarrY Bushell called my theory 'Stalinist'. 'Stone me!' exclaimed Bushell. 'Writer Tony Parsons reckons the working class are all yobs and slobs. Give me down-to-earth people over snobs every time. I count mY blessings that I was born a Londoner — working class, English and free.' Releasing this film taught me that the working class are protected wild life. Just look at them the wrong way and you will find a confederacy of politically correct dunces lined up against you.

There were liberal, lentil-sucking ninnies on magazines like Time Out. Middle-class girls with columns in the Sunday Times. Working class boys made good like Derek Jameson who tearfully confessed his love for the proles in my film, then drove home to Brighton. Television reviewers with double-barrelled names (oh, there's a whole tribe of them). Pop stars who went to minor public schools. And of course Labour Party hacks like Alan Bleasdale, who angrily refused to appear in the film, and Melvyn Bragg, who poured out his prissy bile in the Guardian.

What all these people had in common was their stake in believing that the work- ing class are uniquely virtuous, untainted by avarice, gluttony and spiritual sloth — all those features that are in fact the first thing you notice about them. The social realist playwright, the Pina Colada pinkos, the broadsheet hacks with their boil-in-a- bag liberalism all choose to believe that the faults of the working class are entirely the consequence of being badly treated by 'society'. It is an overwhelmingly patronis- ing view of the working class which con- tends that if you are born on the wrong side of the tracks, you therefore have no control over your destiny. Thirteen years of Tory rule, rising unemployment and recession angst were all trotted out as excuses for the increase in wanton yob- bism.

But there was terrible hardship in the Thirties without the level of casual, some- times murderous violence seen now, or the intellectual indolence, or the cruelty to the very old and very young, or the preening arrogance that can be seen in the working class today.

Much was made of my modest origins. In the Sunday Times, Kate Saunders said I was implying, 'The working class can kiss my arse — I've got the foreman's job at last.' Middle-class condescension again. I don't want the foreman's job, Kate — or even your little column lost in the Sunday Times. Ambitious working-class boys want to own the company.

Again in the Sunday Times, Lesley White suggested that I was somehow doing all this to make a few bob and possi- bly land 'a nice fat book deal. Being a clever boy, he will milk it for all it is worth.'

And you don't get six-figure book deals by writing about men with a spider's web tattooed on their neck. In fact, the very first job I had scheduled after the film appeared — an interview with the pop group The Orb for the Daily Telegraph — was suddenly cancelled by the band on ideological grounds. They didn't much care for my thesis and so refused to talk to me about their new record. Naturally enough, their lead singer went to a public school.

By now, letters of support were starting to rush in. It turned out that I was not alone in detesting the rise of the beer monster and his disgusting family; I was not alone in mourning the loss of working- class decency. But those who look at the world through pink-tinted glasses contin- ued their anathematising. Melvyn Bragg's brand of cocktail-swigging socialism was particularly offended by The Tattooed Jun- gle. 'The best comedy of the week,' said the nasally challenged one in the Guardian, 'a pathetically ironic whinge.' The king of the autocue objected to my suggestion that this country would be a bet- ter place if we deported everyone with a tattoo.

'The only tattooed person I know,' said Bragg, 'is a young, talented, middle-class hackette rapidly climbing the ladder in a very serious broadsheet.' Then what a very sheltered life he must lead. For someone so intimately involved with the aspirations of the workers, Melvyn certainly manages to keep his distance. Perhaps that is how he is able to retain such a touching faith in the class which has consistently left the Labour Party out for history's dustbin men. Lesley White came round to my house to write a cover story for the Style (but no content) 'section of the Sunday Times and was appalled at what she discovered. 'Inside his three-storey house, complete with Philippe Starck furniture, the self" made man is comfortably spitting out venom at the yobs.' What was she expecting? An outside lavatory and coal in the bath tub? Because someone has a working-class accent, these bleeding hearts expect you to be walking a whippet. There is no snob like a concerned liberal. 'Since his film was screened,' wrote White, 'Parsons has been in constant demand to defend his seductive, provoca-

tive and deeply offensive argument that our once-noble proletariat has declined, through sheer bloody-minded indolence, into a tribe of snarling, snotty, slash-happy stereotypes.'

But I certainly never said that The Tat- tooed Jungle was built on 'sheer-bloody- minded indolence.' I believe the working class has declined because they have lost a love of knowledge, because they have no spiritual life, because they think that respect can be imposed rather than earned. They have lost God and the gram- mar schools and gained game shows and the tabloids.

For these remarks I was savaged by a gaggle of television reviewers with double- barrelled names and single-barrelled brains. It must be a job qualification. Sean Day-Lewis (Sunday Telegraph), Nancy Banks-Smith (Guardian) Lucy Hughes- Hallett (Daily Telegraph) and Victor Lewis- Smith (Evening Standard) — all howled With rage to hear their mates, the working class, rubbished.

But a large number of people — those Who don't sit at home in Acacia Avenue reviewing television programmes for a liv- ing — realise that the working class have lost something of real value. The reason the miners have widespread popular sup- port is because they represent traditional working-class aspirations rather than the warped values of The Tattooed Jungle. The miners are perceived as being from the old school — decent, hard-working family men from close-knit communities. If they were British Rail employees who were being tossed on life's scrap-heap, most of the country would be hanging out bunting. After I appeared on ITN news to encounter Derek Jameson spitting, 'What a load of old cobblers!' at me, I returned home to find a 70-year-old man from a local council estate standing outside my home waiting to shake my hand. That's When I knew that the angels were on my side. A lot of people actually loved the film — women of all ages, older working-class People, doctors and teachers, people who hate to see the city streets full of dog excrement and the pubs full of cheap patri- otism, all those people who have their noses rubbed in the brutal mindlessness of The e Tattooed Jungle every day of their lives. And I would rather have those peo- ple on my side than a man of the people like Melvyn Bragg, who has his head in the Clouds and his feet in the Garrick Club.

The distinguishing feature of all the peo- ple. who disliked The Tattooed Jungle is their patronising attitude towards the Working class. Again and again it was sug- gested that I am now in danger of being beaten to a pulp by the righteously angry proletariat. But the decent people in the working class — the kind that read books, bin their rubbish and don't call their chil- dren Darren — all agreed with my com- plaint. And, of course, the indecent would hardly have been watching Channel 4.