How the chav went from jester to bogeyman

The past is another country. Or in the case of 2005, another world entirely. Love Island had just been invented, and was instantly a ratings flop. A man proposed to his girlfriend on an episode of Question Time. Peter Kay had a number one single. Keane won album of the year at the BRITs. Lady Sovereign collaborated with The Ordinary Boys.

Meanwhile, the words of the year legitimised deepening class division in Britain. In 2005, the new entries in Collins English Dictionary included the politically charged ​“ASBO” – anti-social behaviour orders – and the even more politically charged ​“chav”. In 2005, the Collins definition was: ​“a young working class person who dresses in casual sports clothing”. Today, it’s slightly different: ​“a young working-class person whose tastes, although sometimes expensive, are considered vulgar by some”.

The quasi-mythologised figure of the chav dominated the cultural landscape. It was there in Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard and The Catherine Tate Show​’s gobby teenager Lauren with her ​“Am I Bovvered?” catchphrase, in Essex vajazzles and the teenage clique of gum-smacking, rude girls from St Trinian’s. Emboldened by the success of audience participation circus The Jerry Springer Show, Jeremy Kyle launched his particularly British brand of vicious, class-based bear-baiting that would dominate afternoon telly until it was finally cancelled due to guest suicides.

Back then, during the height of New Labour Britain defined by social mobility and aspiration, nobody wanted to be a chav because nobody wanted to be working class at all. Now, over half of British people identify as ​“working class” – with more Reform voters than Labour adopting it. So where did the chav go?

Despite its ubiquity at the time, nobody knows quite where the word ​“chav” came from. Some argue it’s an acronym, standing for ​“Council House And Violent”, or an abbreviated Kent-based insult (“Chatham average”). Others chart its roots back to the Romany word ​“čhavo”, or the Cant (language of Irish and Scottish travellers) ​“chavvy”, which both basically mean child. It emerged on early online forums in 1998, and appeared in its first newspaper article in 2002.

By 2005 it had taken over. Boris Johnson, then writing for The Telegraph, described Britain’s underclass as ​“chavs, losers, burglars and drug addicts”. The rise of the chav was hammered home by now-defunct websites such as Chavscum​.co​.uk and Chavtowns​.co​.uk and plastered on vast swathes of society by the media, who branded anyone working class or in Burberry Nova check ​“chavtastic” or a ​“chavette”.

But 20 years on, there’s been a strange reversal of the chav era. It’s hard to imagine a politician today lampooning the working class for chav-based laughs. Instead we’re in a political landscape where the governing party spend most of their time emphasising their working class roots and banging on about their toolmaker fathers in a desperate attempt to stop losing working class votes to Reform. There’s a caginess around the idea of the working class in today’s political culture that didn’t exist 20 years ago, when they were fair game for gags. In 2025, the working classes are seen as more mysterious, more important, but also something to be wary of.

“Cynically, what happened was the right-wing stopped talking about these people as chavs, and actually tried to present themselves as the champions of the downtrodden against the liberal metropolitan elite”, Owen Jones told Ash Sarkar in 2022, in an interview marking 10 years since his book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. He was describing the way in a particular type of liberal centrist Remainer talked of this ​“racist, bigoted, lumpen working class who basically brought Brexit on the country”, and how right-wing parties were able to fill the void.

The result? “[Chavs] became the basis for very reactionary political projects.”

In the noughties, no sane politician, cultural institution or media pundit wanted to paint themselves as the patron saint of the chavs (although David Cameron did admittedly have that brief era where he wanted to “​“hug a hoodie”.). A gym in London held ​“chav fighting” classes. A British holiday company openly banned ​“chavvy names” from its premises. Profits and attention were gained from making fun of chavs, not embracing them.

The reversal of that landscape took a long time. In 2008, just three years after it appeared in the dictionary, the Fabian Society was urging the BBC to add ​“chav” to its list of offensive terms, calling it ​“sneering and patronising”. The private school kids who threw ​“chav parties” graduated to university, where they began to be reprimanded for them. ASBOs were eventually abolished in 2014, and today the actual word ​“chav” is barely used other than as a slightly wistful reminder of another, perhaps simpler time, when the way the British establishment spoke about the working class was simpler, funnier, easier. But although public chav-bashing for laughs began to dissipate, the stereotyping of the working class didn’t.

Chavs may have stopped being used as a punchline by conservative politicians, but only because politicians across the political spectrum are too afraid of the working classes, too convinced they’re all protesting hanging St George’s flags from lampposts, and too confused about what those people actually do want, to dare joking at their expense. After ignoring them or laughing at them, now, political parties are appealing to working class voters directly, having realised they need them and become suddenly terrified that they’re all out burning asylum hotels (they’re not, incidentally, the best predictor of anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK is actually age, not class).

All of which is to say, the chav stereotype never really went away. It just morphed into something different, something more menacing and less comedic. The white van man and flag shagging gammon have replaced the stereotype of the heavily made-up schoolgirl or the Nova check wearing lad. The sneaking suspicion that every working class person is secretly a racist has replaced the fear that every working class person will become a teen mum. The chav performs a different function in today’s culture – not as a jester but as a bogeyman. Even if the word is deployed nowhere near as regularly in public discourse, the attitudes it embodies remain.

Not exactly progress, then. The chav still exists in its original purpose of flattening the working class to a near-mythical monolith. But today it carries a different guise; is used for a different political end. All cultural stereotypes serve a purpose. We may have got rid of Vicky Pollard, Jeremy Kyle and vajazzles, but the long shadow of the chav remains. And it’s not half as funny as it used to seem.