I’ve been wanting to read ‘Chavs’ for almost a decade, since it first came out after the election of the Coalition Government. Finally binged it in audiobook form the last few evenings.

The book is very much of its time; listening to it nine years after publication, the world has changed so much. UKIP is a potentially disruptive minor political party barely mentioned at the end of the book; Brexit wasn’t even slightly imagined; Twitter and social media didn’t sway public discourse as much as it does today. Early chapters examine how modern British history, politicians and traditional media paint the working class in an unflattering, demonised light and are gripping.

Unfortunately, my positive feelings to the arguments were short lived. I had a lot of hopes for this book having seen so many friends rate it highly. However, Jones’s arguments on behalf of the working class are limited and don’t stand up to scrutiny. He would not be able to write a book about the working class today without examining the intersection with race; the demonisation of people of colour being a central part of the analysis. It becomes clear as the book continues, that when Jones talks of the working class, he is talking only about the white working class that worked in manufacturing and mines, and lived in the UK for generations. This misses out a significant potion of the working class - immigrants. One chapter glosses over these issues towards the end of the books. It also holds immigrants as an ‘other’ - a group detracting attention from the working class, rather than being a sub-section of them. Once I noticed this positioning, I struggled to engage with the rest of the book.