Nu-classism
On XL bullies, TikTok discovering Wife Swap, whether shoplifters should be shot at point blank range.
I was determined not to get involved in the XL Bully discourse because it feels tedious and boring and obvious. And also because I have a pug, and people always tell me that is cruel too. Sue me! But, XL Bullies. Yes, big dogs are attacking members of the public. It is bad that this is happening. The videos are really scary. How could you possibly argue with this? It is so obviously bad. Of course it’s bad. Of course something needs to be done.
The problem, though, is that I am too much of a deeply, embarrassingly online person not to fall passively incredibly deep into the rabbit hole of the XL Bully discourse and end up caring about it and getting annoyed about it and not just because I feel bad for the dogs (I do kind of feel bad for the dogs). The more you read about the XL Bully ban and the XL Bully epidemic of violence, the canine reign of terror, particularly on Twitter, the more an undercurrent emerges. I think some people don’t want to get angry — justifiably angry — about rabid animals attacking innocent children on the streets of Birmingham. I think some people seem to want to use the big scary dogs as a way to talk about what they really hate; the people who own them. Or at least, the type of people who might be the sort who would own a dog like that, and then be too bone idle to train it properly.
I think this is why when faced with the absurd, bizarre spectacle of XL Bully “protests” recently, we don’t focus on the absurdity or bizarreness of the idea of protesting on behalf of a dog but instead on the perceived basicness or stupidity of the people protesting. Their signs are grammatically incorrect! They’re misspelled! Their images are just screenshotted Facebook profile pictures! What is the joke here? Who is it aimed at? The undertone to it all is, I really think, that these are irresponsible people who simply aren’t like us. Feral people, feral dogs. The same aberrant people who had feral pitbulls, and before that rottweilers, and before that dobermans.
It’s not that XL bully dog whistles — no pun intended — are a standalone example of the creeping spectre of nu-classism in the UK, it’s just the most recent one, and the one I’ve been thinking about most recently because the whole thing is so odd. Thanks to TikTok a new generation are rediscovering the cesspit of class snobbery that was reality TV in the 2000s. Shows like Wife Swap, Benefits Street, I’m Proud Of My ASBO and Snog Marry Avoid regularly get clipped there and serve as reminders that the butt of the joke was always the poor person with the bad accent who signed on the dole and ate multipacks of crisps for dinner. Even in shows like Supersize vs Superskinny, which also pop up on social media from time to time, and its more brutal cousin, Fat Families, the class implications were always in the background; people ate the wrong food because they were lazy and greedy and too stupid to fuel their own bodies properly. If they were presented as posher, the answers for their poor diet were attributed to other things; health-conscious neuroticism gone wrong, or being a “foodie” rather than lacking in self-control.
There’s a particular micro-trend on TikTok where people mime along to an “iconic” scene from Wife Swap, where mum-of-eight Lizzie Bardsley mocks her fellow contestant (?) Emma, after being chastised for smoking around her children, who have asthma, and not going to work because she was sick. The implication is that Lizzy is stupid and lazy and dishonest, and Emma, who speaks very nicely but is of course being incredibly smug, is correct and moral.
Maybe I’m overly sensitive here. If I am it’s because when these shows were first on air I was uber-conscious of my status as someone who relied on child tax credits and jobseekers allowance and EMA (education maintenance allowance). If you’re not old enough to kind of remember that from the first time round — the nadir of culture that existed between Crimewatch encouraging us to dob in shoplifters on live TV and David Cameron encouraging everyone to hug a hoody — it’s hard to explain how nasty it all felt, and how embarrassing too. Most people who lived around me were on some sort of benefits, whether JSA or SSP or DLA. Did that mean I lived on a Benefits Street? Should we all be paraded in front of the execs at Channel 4 to atone for our crimes against humanity and decorum? You didn’t really want to get into some kind of pre-teen argument with your friend at school over why you got £30 a week in sixth form and they didn’t because if you did you’d get into some pointless argument over why their dad working double shifts as a taxi driver and still not making any money wasn’t really the problem of the benefits system but, as it is today, a problem with wages not rising with inflation and the government not really giving a fuck about that.
In the middle of writing this the Russell Brand story broke and sparked a wave of think pieces about early and mid noughties lad culture, how far we’ve come from condoning that kind of casual misogyny and how we engaged in a kind of collective amnesia that it was okay and funny and banter and how we’ll never allow that to happen again. I find it strange that in a decade or so we’ve come on so far in some aspects but not in others. Casual classism still exists in the UK — in sport, music, the arts, journalism, the education system — in a way that casual sexism doesn’t. You would struggle to find anyone posting clips from Brand’s stand-up routines about blowjobs that make girls’ mascara run (other than to lament how justifiably horrible it is) but the same creators don’t seem to find anything abhorrent or poor taste in posting “chavcore” make-up tutorials or lip syncing along to one of Wife Swap’s most painful moments of classist bear baiting.
I find it really strange and disheartening that this kind of thing still exists, especially in the era of the “eat the rich!” internet and especially coming from a generation that are frequently heralded as our most progressive yet. It’s easier, I think, to tweet platitudes about how Elon Musk would be first against the wall when the revolution comes whilst at the same time ignoring the fact that the wealth gap between us and billionaires is much further than the wealth gap between us and the people being laughed at for buying ugly dogs and shoplifting non-essentials and smoking inside the house. I think this disconnect is probably a specifically British one, because class exists here in a way it doesn’t in America, and sometimes we can fall into the trap of thinking of the internet and the discourse that lives on there as an extension of America (because everyone posts in a kind of American accent).
Last week I read The Angry Island: Hunting the English by AA Gill and in that he puts what I’m saying much more eloquently than I am attempting to here. “Every nation needs a great excuse, and class belonged to the English”, he writes. “If you didn’t get on, if the marriage failed or the kids turned out bad, it could all be put down to class. Yours or someone else’s. It was a wonderful, subtle and direct, ever warm and welcoming excuse for righteous anger. The English could wallow in class.” Class is not just class in England. Whether in 2000 or 2023 it exists as a cultural form, a shorthand for character. But in 2023 it’s a bit more nuanced, or at least a bit more reluctant than it was in the early 00s, where Jeremy Kyle could scream at you for smoking weed at two in the afternoon. It’s a kind of hush-hush wink-wink nu-classism. TikTok creators aren’t going to call you a chav or a pikey to your face (liable to force you to do a front-camera apology) but they might well sing along to “M to the B” in a chav filter and think nothing of it.
Maybe this return to noughties discourse is just cyclical; as with y2k fashion, so to does y2k classism return. You can’t have pedal pushers and chain belts and Uggs without “two child caps” on family tax credits and headlines about “benefits timebombs”. Maybe it’s because en election in the UK is looming. As the old adage goes, nobody ever won an election by being soft on crime. Perhaps that explains why Rishi Sunak has suddenly decided that people on sick pay are able to work, and that fit to work assessments should reflect this post haste! And perhaps explains why nobody has really been bothered about this, at least not compared to big ugly dogs and proposed changes to inheritance tax and VAT at private schools. Still though, it interests and bothers me that being “tough on crime” is only ever viewed, in the UK, through the prism of class. I think the most likely explanation of all is that standards of living in Britain are dropping, a cost of living and housing crisis is growing and whenever times get harder we look for someone to blame (that’s why, by this metric, you keep reading news articles about how shoplifting is the true pandemic). But we don’t blame billionaires because they’re so divorced from our quotidian annoyances and miseries and we don’t even really blame politicians because the last decade or so has taught us to expect so little from them and to somehow still be disappointed.
“Class in England is a cultural form, like farce or limericks”, wrote AA Gill, also in the same book. “Without class stratification the country loses the run of itself. It doesn’t know now to delineate. It starts erroneously attributing class based issues to generational problems, ignoring the fact that, in Britain, one rarely exists without the other.” Without a spectre of a lazy, feckless underclass, I think the UK does lose the run of itself a bit. It needs to laugh at jokes which punch down. It’s easier to get angry at wasted money from benefits-scroungers than billionaires. We should probably ban dangerous dogs because they attack people at random but perhaps not just because they’re owned by people in tracksuits.
This week I read:
This week I wrote:
About the phenomenon of ‘yearnposting’ for i-D. I also have a new short story in The London Magazine’s upcoming October/November issue, which you can pre-order here if you like.
I haven’t had these kind of tiktoks pop up on my FYP (maybe I will now I’ve read this?) but you make such a good point about the seeming blind spot that those usually so socially active have about class! We still have such a long way to go with it dont we?