New Cultural Subspecies in Britain

LONDON, March 7, 2007 — -- America has the beer-swilling, foul-mouthed hillbilly who lives in a trailer park, does crystal meth, and wears a wife beater and overalls. Britain has the "chav." The chav lives in public housing called a "council estate," drives a big-bucks hot rod, wears more gold than Mr. T and is a foot soldier of corporate consumerism.

Dressed uniformly in unimaginative designer-labels, chavs congregate around the halls of consumerism in the United Kingdom -- shopping malls and fast food outlets.

In the 19th century Karl Marx predicted the overthrow of capitalism and dreamed of a classless society, but British society today continues to lambaste lower classes, referring to them as chavs as a way of writing off those at the bottom of the social ladder. The phenomenon was first defined in 2005 in the Oxford English Dictionary as a "young lower-class person typified by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of [real or imitation] designer clothes."

Two London schoolboys, Dilir Habibi and Ali Hussaini, interviewed as they walked near Hammersmith yesterday, described the archetypal chav. He wears, "a Burberry cap, his trousers down to his knees, walks with a bop and wears a fitted cap. He's not very nice, plays loud music on his mobile phone on the back of the bus, thinks he's above everyone and aspires to become a musician."

The Burberry clothing brand quickly became synonymous with the chav subculture, and it ceased production of its branded baseball cap in 2004 in an attempt to distance itself from the stereotype. The company argued that all chavs are associated with counterfeit versions of the clothing.

The Miriam Webster Dictionary describes American "white trash" as "a member of an inferior or underprivileged white social group," which is where white trash differs from the chav. Chavs do not experience any lack of material poverty; in fact, they have more disposable income than most. This new generation of nouveau-riche are the proud owners of a wealth of brand-name clothes and the latest cell phones -- every self-respecting public housing project has an army of satellite dishes. But there is a poverty of attitude towards society and education.