The decivilizing process and urban working-class youth in Scotland. (2024)

Introduction

ONE EFFECT OF THE HISTORICAL PRECEDENCE OF BRITAIN'S EARLYDEVELOPMENT AS a capitalist state-society is the deep imprint on socialrelations produced by social class distinctions. In this context, anduntil relatively recently, the social category "working class"was often worn with pride as a badge of honor in British society. Itprovided dominated groups with a positive framework for collectiveself-understanding and identity. Material impoverishment was compensatedin part by collective representations of class as an authorized andlegitimated source of social solidarity. Class relations depended on arelatively stable dichotomy between insiders and outsiders. "Folklike us" were frank, honest, and unpretentious, whereas"people like them" were aloof, pompous, and disingenuous. Ifthis image of the British working class too often romanticized,ennobled, and hom*ogenized a more complex and internally divided socialreality, it nonetheless contained a kernel of truth.

Today, however, elementary truths about Britain as a definite kindof class society are routinely traduced and derided. Over the past twodecades, "class" as a structured socioeconomic relationshiphas fallen from public consciousness. It is now an unreliable marker ofparty political alignment. In the 2000s New Labour governments attemptedto expunge class from the lexicon of British politics under the"Respect agenda" (see Millie 2009). The removal of class as apolitical language of social divisions and interests has the effect ofobscuring the social structures that determine the possible positionsindividuals are compelled to occupy in social space. In its place,public discourses of "respect and responsibility" elevatemoral, cultural, and individualistic explanations of social suffering(see Hanco*ck, Mooney, and Neal 2012). Denial of the structuring effectsof class position removes from the socially dominated a crucial sourceof collective claim-making. Instead of focusing on the structuraldisadvantages in the labor market, the blame for material and symbolicdispossession is laid at the door of genetically or morally flawedindividuals, in ways not dissimilar from Victorian images of the"dissolute" and "undeserving" urban poor. And, viceversa, economic success becomes the morally deserved result ofgenetically and culturally successful individuals and their children.

In this sphere, as Norbert Elias (2012) classically demonstrated,feelings of responsibility, obligation, reciprocity, shame, andpropriety are induced as an unintended, spontaneous effect of functionalinterdependencies. Within the centuries-old process of increasedself-restraint, decivilizing "spurts" forcibly reassert formalrelations of superiority and inferiority that had hitherto been inlong-term decline. Elias's focus on the dialectical tension betweencivilizing and decivilizing processes is misleadingly replaced by somewith reified states of being, shifting the focus onto the social andpsychological problems of "incivility" and criminalization (Rodger 2008). Individuals and cultures that are removed from widerinterdependencies--above all, from the labor market and organizationalhierarchies--also escape from external disciplines that demand"civilized" attitudes and conduct. Lacking middle-classaspirations, a supposedly indulgent culture of welfare entitlement andself-interest allows inferior social groups to draw on the public goodone-sidedly without making any productive contribution in return.Elementary codes of conduct, decency, courtesy, and civility are thoughtto have atrophied within the most deprived social groups within theworking class. Unemployed or underemployed welfare recipients thereforeappear to lack the values and behaviors of the wider "civil"society.

UK public policy, at least since the election of New Labour in1997, tried to face this decadent underclass culture by engaging inunsuccessful attempts to forcibly correct and modify the attitudinal andbehavioral deficiencies of dysfunctional individuals and families. Aboveall, New Labour viewed the failure of lower social groups as aconsequence of moral indifference and of a work avoidance ethos (Haylett2001). However, this approach ignored a substantial body of evidencethat points to changing structures of employment as the primarydeterminant of poverty and inequality in Britain. Half of all adultsliving in poverty in the UK are from working households (52 percent),with one or more adults working part-time (16 percent), full-time (22percent), or being self-employed (11 percent) (McKendrick et al. 2011,101). Low pay and structural unemployment and underemployment, notcultural attitudes or uncivil conduct, are the root causes of classdispossession and social suffering.

In this climate, the label "working class" no longerfunctions in Britain as a marker of authenticity, solidity, andrespectability, but rather signifies something base, backward, andshameful: the working class has turned from the mythical "salt ofthe earth" into the reviled "scum of the earth" (Jones2011). Whether in the form of belligerent youth, benefit claimants,council tenants, or public sector trade unions, the working class seemsdistinctly garish, outdated, and ungrateful, a moral rubbish heap setagainst a society newly minted as "middle class" according tothe self-image of the neoliberal imagination. If the working classfigures at all in public discourse, then it is as the marginal identityof the young, white urban poor, subject to populist moral and emotionaldenigration, fear, and contempt. In the past two decades, acute publicconcerns emerged around cultural representations of the marginal figuresof the "Chav" in England and the "Ned" in Scotland.These categories function as folk devils to evoke middle-class feelingsof disgust, fear, embarrassment, and repugnance (Jones 2011; Law 2006a).Middle-class entertainers, politicians, and journalists embracediscourses about "Chavs" and "Neds" in a conspicuousdisplay of the cultural competence and moral standards that are requiredon the other, civilized side of the social ledger.

This essay seeks to overcome the rather static effect ofde-historicized, fixed categories of the British "underclass."In particular, we seek to highlight the specificity of the figure of theChav on the one hand and that of the Ned on the other, which correspondto differences in the sociohistorical development of class disdain inthe distinct nations of Scotland and England, despite the fact that theyboth inhabit the same nation-state, the United Kingdom of Great Britainand Northern Ireland (Law 2006b). Such differences tend to disappearunder the widespread assumption that the Chav phenomenon in Englandautomatically resonates elsewhere in the UK, albeit under differentnames. Differences in the historical development of the urban workingclass in Scotland have produced a casual familiarity with Neds through acolloquial common sense that oscillates between "humor" andmoral outrage. This feeds into a historically distinctive and autonomousScottish media, criminal justice system, and welfare-based institutions.Within this institutional nexus, the sense of national distinctivenessis further accentuated by the devolved state-society. Since 1999 themajor functions of the central UK state, particularly social policy,have been devolved to a semiautonomous Scottish state under politicaldemands for increased self-government, a process that will culminate ina referendum in 2014 for constitutional independence from the UK. Thisfact colors all discourses about the underclass in Scotland.

Civilizing the Underclass in Britain

Previously disconnected folk devils began to coalesce in the 1990swith the emergence of the Chav figure in England as a contemptible underclass caricature--idle, f*ckless, ignorant, slovenly, criminal, andpromiscuously heterosexual (Jones 2011). The Ned figure seemed to referto the same thing in Scotland. Hayward and Yar (2006, 15) situate "Ned" as only one of a range of localized terms, whereas"Chav" has risen to hegemonic status nationally. Chavs/Nedsbecame a journalistic cliche for UK media fears about the wider effectsof the lifestyles of the white urban poor. Terms of class disdain, whatTyler (2008, 24) calls "disgust speech," are routinelymobilized in the public sphere to point the finger at an undeservingstratum of social refuse: "This disgust speech generates a set ofeffects, which adhere to, produce, and embellish the disgusting figureof the chav: chavs are white, live on council (or social housing)estates, eat junk food, steal your phones, wear crap sports wear, drinkcheap cider, they are the absolute dregs of modern civilization; asocial underclass par excellence, chavs are disgusting."

Special malice is reserved for young working-class women, routinelydepicted as loathsome, self-obsessed, superficial, and promiscuouscreatures (Skeggs 2005; Tyler 2008). This discourse of disgust anddisdain reached fever pitch during the media coverage of thedisappearance of Shannon Mathews from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, England,in February 2008, which stood in sharp contrast to the (initially)sympathetic coverage of a missing child, Madeleine McCann, during theprevious year. Whereas the middle-class McCann family elicitedwidespread sympathy from journalists and public figures, theworking-class Mathews family faced public censure, moral indignation,and ridicule (see Mooney and Neal 2009-10). Imagined as representativeof a wider social stratum, an unusual episode involving one troubledfamily became emblematic of what the journalist Carole Malone called"a sub (human) class that now exists in the murkiest, darkestcorners of this country [sic]" (in Jones 2011, 22).

Although the public discourse on Chavs/Neds appears to have emergedrelatively recently, it draws on much older sociolinguistic ideologiesof class and race (Bennett 2012). Elias (2012, 465) identified a muchlonger history of class repulsion, for example, when, in the eighteenthcentury, the nobility was physically repelled by the ascending bourgeoisclass: "Anything that touched their embarrassment-threshold smeltbourgeois, was socially inferior; and inversely: anything bourgeoistouched their embarrassment-threshold. It was the necessity todistinguish themselves from anything bourgeois that sharpened thissensitivity." Clearly, the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, a risingclass encroaching on the highest circles of court society, was anentirely different sociopolitical entity from the contemporary middleclass that looks with contempt at disenfranchised working-class youth.Nonetheless, emotional and moral tensions between class fractions inBritain today must be situated within the long-term sociohistoricaldynamic that Elias (2012, 2008) called "the civilizingprocess"--the long-run but unintended process in the West thatconverted the external constraints of social structure into the internalself-restraints of bodily dispositions.

This process was, and is, simultaneously social, economic,political, geographical, cultural, and psychological. It can be verycrudely sketched as follows: As the division of labor advances, greatersocial interdependencies emerge; upper classes are restrained fromdirect physical violence; violence and taxation become an exclusivefunction of the state; larger geographical areas are pacified, creatingspace for a money economy and an urban bourgeoisie to develop; andself-restraint becomes increasingly automatic as it spreads to widergroups in society. Uninhibited gratification of the senses isincreasingly transformed into a restrained sensibility that demandsemotional control and empathy with sufferers and places definite limitson arbitrary violence. As people are compelled by the central authorityof the state to live in peaceful interdependency with each other, sociallife becomes more predictable and orderly (Elias 2012, vol. 2). Violent,unguarded, or emotional outbursts become signs of weakness to becensured by impersonal powers of calculated reserve. For Elias, apropensity to observe work discipline, even when it can be substitutedwith idle comfort, is a core characteristic that distinguishes theindustrial and commercial bourgeoisie from a decadent court aristocracy.Socially desirable behavior now appears to be produced voluntarily bypersonal initiative and self-control. The very person of the bourgeoisindividual under self-control from the inside out, a hom*o clausus or"closed person," provides an exemplar to the whole society(Elias 1978, 119). Self-restraint appears to individuals as their ownspecial ability rather than as an effect of the impersonal socialinterdependencies of markets, commodities, and functions (Elias 2012,150). Decorous behavior is valorized as the innate and natural abilityof the accomplished, hard-working, well-adjusted middle-class individualwho observes the cultural impulse to conform to socially acceptable,hence reasonable and dignified, norms and values.

Class and the Chains of Dependency

The lack of cultural and personal discipline that marks out theChav/Ned underclass as a decivilizing threat. Excessive displays ofdegraded consumption by Chav/ Neds offend against the closed restraintof the hom*o clausus. For Hayward and Yar (2006), work-determinedconceptualizations of a demoralized underclass in the 1980s have beentransformed into an ostentatious display of symbolic cultural goods byyoung people, with Chavs as symbols of the wider society of consumers.Chav discourses vilify urban youth for disgraceful forms of consumptionrather than for the worklessness that had typified the ideologicalrepresentation of the underclass in the 1980s: "This discoursewhich pathologizes and marginalizes is fundamentally decoupled from thequestion of economic capital, replacing it instead with a perceived lackof cultural capital" (Hayward and Yar 2006, 14; see alsoHollingworth and Williams 2009).

Clearly this formulation parts company with Bourdieu's (1984)insistence that economic capital and cultural capital are mutuallyconvertible forms of currency. Yet Hayward and Yar (2006, 18) insistthat "if contemporary

fascination with the 'chav' is about anything it is about areconfiguration of the underclass idea through the lens of an unmediated consumer society." However, consumption can never be"unmediated." By placing the accent on poor or tastelessconsumer choices by Chav/Neds, the multiple mediations of production andconsumption (as well as distribution and exchange) are reduced to asingle transparent moment of visibility--clothing, posture and gait,speech, and so on--as outward markers of the decivilized subject.Consumption is always the final and most visible "finishingtouch" of the production of objects as exchangeable commodities.Once the object leaves production and enters society, every relation toit is an external one that depends on a long impersonal chain offunctional interdependencies (Elias 2012, 471-72).

Desirable commodities that appear to the youth as brand markers oflifestyle choices therefore efface their own point of origin and priorstructuring in the realm of production and circulation. Youthsubcultures may come to overidentify with the apparent contingency ofunstable choices in branded products as a compensation for their ownlack of economic value, in what Marx referred to as commodity fetishism.Neds consume commodities that are viewed by the tasteful consumer asvulgar, tainted, and ridiculous. In so doing, the excessivefetishization of the (fake) brand by inferior social groups devalorizesit in practice. In their lack of cultural refinement, Neds are remindersof the insecure, menial toil that "civilized" taste andmanners want to place securely behind the scenes of social life.

Yet underclass figures are also productive for the wider civilizingprocess. They form the point of departure for an entire apparatus ofprofessionals, journalists, politicians, state officials, solicitors,police officers, fashion designers, and so on. As Marx (1861-63, 306)noted, even the criminal can be classed as "productive" forthe civilizing process, which always requires an "uneasy tensionand agility" for its further development: "The criminalproduces an impression, partly moral and partly tragic, as the case maybe, and in this way renders a 'service' by arousing the moraland aesthetic feelings of the public. The criminal breaks the monotonyand everyday security of bourgeois life, giving rise to that uneasytension without which even the spur of competition would getblunted."

Marx's conceptualization is a necessary reminder of thecivilizing counterpoint effect of the most dominated and reviled socialgroups. Increased integration and mutual restraint often depend onprocesses of displacement and exclusion elsewhere, what Elias (2012,422-27) sometimes described as the contradictory tensions of"modern barbarism," a dual process of "diminishingcontrasts, increasing varieties." Contrasts and inequalitiesbetween classes and state-societies are progressively reduced at thesame time as the varieties and nuances of conduct are increased, in a"controlled de-controlling" of emotional life. A constantdialectic of repulsion and assimilation between the classes varies inintensity over time and space, but tends overall to become more even andtemperate.

Dominant groups are not entirely unaffected by the mores andstandards of lower groups. Subordinate groups like "theunderclass," which lack any possibility of upward social mobility,may well exhibit a fatalistic vigor in their conduct and manners. Fromtheir more or less fixed position in social space, dominated groups areencumbered by far fewer anxieties about "correct" bourgeoisstandards of good form, restraint, and taste. Such apparent freedom canexert an attracting as well as a repelling effect on groups morecompletely gripped by the exigencies of functional dependency, invitingthem, for instance, to adopt street fashions, postures, or argot in acontrolled decontrolling of self-restraint.

The Underclass and Civic Nationalism

Ned is falsely assumed to denote a "Non-EducatedDelinquent," a pejorative backronym that permits symbolic power todenigrate with impunity under the pseudoscientific veneer of an officialcategory, much like the recent use of NEETs (Not in Employment,Education, or Training) to classify unemployed young people in the UK(Lawson 2011). Despite claims to the contrary, descriptions of the Chavsas a cultural underclass in England cannot be readily translated intoaccounts of the Ned phenomenon in Scotland (Hayward and Yar 2006; Skeggs2005). As we have already insisted, social figurations take shape underdistinctive national forms of state-society development. As Bourdieu andWacquant (2004, 236) argue, "each society, at each moment,elaborates a body of social problems taken to be legitimate, worthy ofbeing debated, of being made public and sometimes officialized and, in asense guaranteed by the state."

A relatively autonomous state-society in Scotland has played astrategic role in defining youth crime in general and Ned culture inparticular as a major social problem in need of tackling. In the case ofNeds, it is not simply bad cultural taste that is of concern to theagencies of the devolved Scottish state. Rather, discourses about Nedsconstruct an image of disruptive and suspicious subjects in oppositionto marketized images of Scotland as a neoliberal state-society engagedsuccessfully in global competitive accumulation. In this context it isfrequently claimed that Scotland is a "civic nation" that haspassed through "a social revolution" unparalleled in Westerndemocracies to become a middle-class "professional society"(see Law and Mooney 2006). In August 2011, when Scottish cities wereuntouched by urban riots while major English cities were set aflame,this image of Scotland as a transformed civic nation led the ScottishFirst Minister to claim that such disorders would not take place inScotland because it is a "different society." (1)

This suggests that distinctive civilizing processes internallypacified urban Scotland in contrast to the socio-spatial tensionspunctuated by collective violence in urban England. Claims aboutcivilizing processes therefore function as markers of nationaldifference, despite deep structural similarities between Scotland andEngland. The Ned figure plays a different cultural role in Scottishsociety than the Chav phenomenon, as a new consumption-based underclass,plays in England. Etymologically, the term can be traced back at leastto the 1950s, though it may have originated in the Edwardian periodaround 1910, or even further back (Coleman 2012, 232). Urban discoursesabout Neds in Scotland are not only of older vintage, but they also takeless virulent forms than those about Chavs in England. (2)

Nonetheless, "Ned" tends to be a derogatory denominator.Young people rarely use the label to refer to themselves and typicallyreserve it for other groups or individuals seen as socially inferior orphysically threatening. One study of the speech practices and socialidentities of urban adolescents in Glasgow found thatself-identification was a highly complex and fraught affair for youngurban working-class Scots. In forming their own self-categorizations,young people routinely negotiate cultural spaces deemed"normal" in contrast to Ned pathologies:

Int: So what are you then, what group would you like to be in?

Youth 1: Normal.

Int: What are normal people like?

Youth 2: Me ... I don't know what group I'm in,'cause my ma'll [mother will] says to me--you're a weehairy [promiscuous female]. I go--no, I'm no. She goes--aye, youare. Then when I talk, my pals go--you pure talk like a wee Ned.

Int: What are you then?

Youth 2: I'm a wee Glasgow person. I wouldnae say I'm aNed 'cause I don't go oot and start fights an' aw that. Iwouldn't say I'm a wee geeky person either. (In Timmins et al.2004)

Working-class people in Scotland have long been exposed to theclass condescension of everyday speech forms, coded as sociallyincompetent "slang" dialects by traditional authority figureseven as other, more formal contrasts between classes decay (Stuart-Smith1999). Moreover, this symbolic ascription of negative attributes to anentire social stratum has led to the recategorization of the Britishworking class as an ethnic group. This conflation of class and racedraws from a deep well of inferiority categorizations. In VictorianBritain, members of the working class were cast as colonized subjectsfaring little better in the hierarchy of "civilized" valuesthan the dominated peoples of the British Empire (Bonnett 1998). In theUK, Chavs have become synonymous with the white working class, while thecategory "working class" is increasingly synonymous with poorwhites (Nayak 2006; Sveinsson 2009). (3) Similarly, Neds are discussedas the white working class in Scotland, the ethnic equivalent to Chavsin England (see Raisborough and Adams 2008). However, such attributionsignore the relative absence of ethnic categorizations for the workingclass in Scotland. Across almost all public discourse in Scotland, civicnationalism eclipses ethnic nationalism, although an unspokenrelationship exists between the two (Kamusella 2012). Here the soleexception appears to be ethnoreligious sectarian divisions betweenProtestants and Catholics at football games. Crowd misconduct atfootball games is to be civilized by the Scottish government through theintroduction in 2012 of new legislation, The Offensive Behavior atFootball and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012, whichredefines as a "sectarian hate crime" any offensive referenceto the religious or political posture of rival fans.

Beyond the arbitrary ethnicization of class in Scotland, theconstruction of a decivilized universe "re-animalizes"degraded people and places by collapsing any distinction between natureand culture. In this way, the most dominated and reviled social groupscan be exiled from the public culture of the civic nation. Class habitus and environmental habitat become almost indistinguishable. For instance,Haylett (2003, 61-63) notes an implicit correlation between councilhousing, "estate culture," and "welfare culture" inEngland. This semantic culture-nature slippage enables"disorderly" and "dysfunctional" aspects of urbanworking-class habitus to be perceptually restructured inquasi-animalistic terms (see also Cook 2006, 43-46). Though not solelyan urban phenomenon in Scotland, Ned culture and behavior are assumed tobe the marginalized practices of disaffected and alienated working-classyouth in "the schemes" of Scotland's large public housingestates (see Johnstone and Mooney 2007; Law, Mooney, and Helms 2010).Public housing has played a major historical role in the fabric of urbanScotland and retains a symbolic significance as a degraded criminogenic environment (Damer 1989).

Public housing estates in urban Scotland are constructed asdecivilized locales, populated by animalistic creatures whonaturalistically revel in a well-deserved material and cultural poverty.This trope surfaced with particular venom over the Glasgow Eastby-election in 2008, when populist class hatred among mainlyLondon-based journalists pathologized the area and its people as"Shettleston Men" culturally locked into despondency andself-exclusion (Mooney 2009). Deindustrialized cities like Glasgow andDundee undoubtedly have deep-seated problems. Until recently, Glasgowhad some of the highest levels of people on Incapacity Benefit (IB), aparticular target of anti-working-class diatribes. At its peak, one infive working age adults were claiming incapacity benefits; yet after2003 the number of claimants began falling faster than elsewhere. Amajor academic study shows that this pattern represents a form of"disguised unemployment," not a welfare dependency-despondencysubculture. It reflects the loss of 100,000 manufacturing jobs in thecity between 1971 and 1991, with Glasgow falling precipitously from208th to 10th place in the UK for economic inactivity rates during the1980s. Then in the early 2000s improvements in the local job marketfollowed (Webster et al. 2010).

Whereas Glasgow and the Clydeside conurbation feature mostprominently in the stories and representations of Ned behavior, most ofScotland's main towns and cities are assumed to have a Ned"problem." Towns like Dundee are the object of disparagingremarks on hostile websites that, under the ideological alibi thatit's "just a laugh" (Law 2006a; see also Jones 2011),simultaneously mock poverty and public housing, promiscuous teenagemothers, endemic criminality, dissolute lifestyles, welfare dependency,squalid environment, and the supposedly general lack of cultural tasteamong the poor.

Civilizing through Criminalizing

With the reestablisbment of a Scottish parliament in 1999, therewas, in theory at least, some potential for the already distinctive andseparate Scottish criminal justice system to diverge markedly from thepolicies and practices of criminal justice in England and Wales. Ademocratic concern with welfare and rehabilitation have long beenclaimed to form the distinguishing core of the Scottish criminal justicesystem. As a consequence, communitarian public provision of welfare andmutual support appear as key civic or civilizing values (McAra 1999,2004). First, the 1932 Children and Young Persons (Scotland) Act imposeda statutory duty on the courts to prioritize the welfare of the child.In the late 1960s, the creation of Children's Hearings promotedrehabilitation rather than retribution in order to avoid thecriminalization of children (Croall 2005; Ferguson 2005; McAra 2004,2006). The welfarist philosophy of Kibrandron was the dominant approachto youth justice in Scotland for 30 years until the Children (Scotland)Act of 1995 substituted the protection of the child as offender with theprotection of the public as victim.

A steady shift in Scottish criminal justice toward a more punitivestance, particularly in the field of youth justice, has occurred sincethe early 2000s. This has eroded the promise that devolution wouldstrengthen Scotland's traditional welfare ethos. Indeed, signs of ashift toward a more punitive approach were already evident in 1998, whenyoung people living on public housing estates in the Scottish town ofHamilton were subjected to a six-month curfew. Under this scheme, anyyoung people under the age of 15 found on the streets after 8:00 p.m.and judged by the police to represent a danger to themselves or toothers were escorted home to their parents' care (The Guardian,April 11, 1998).

The construction of "antisocial behavior" (see Krause, inthis volume) as a key criminal justice issue in Scotland closelyparallels the emergence of an ASB problem in England and Wales, fueledby a growing middle-class concern with young repeat offenders. Thisconcern was reflected in the Partnership Agreement between Labour andthe Liberal Democrats in forming the ruling Scottish Executive between2003 and 2007 (Scottish Executive 2003a). In the 2003 Scottish ExecutiveReport, Putting Our Communities First, for instance, the definition ofASB included young people "hanging around" and otherrelatively minor transgressions of common decency such as litter,graffiti, and dog fouling! In the retail- and leisure-led regenerationof Glasgow, a New York--style zero tolerance for begging, prostitution,gangs, alcohol, and general "antisocial" conduct attempted tosweep clean the city center economy of its urban dross (Helms 2008).

The ideology of ASB has the effect of lowering the thresholdbetween everyday life and criminal justice system. A greater range ofbehaviors and lifestyles now fall under the gaze of the state and socialcontrol agencies (Cook 2006, 80). Such a punitive attitude is reflectedin more unforgiving approaches to youth criminal justice. In 2002, anAction Plan to Reduce Youth Crime was published that pinpointed repeatand persistent offenders as a key target. In 2003, pilot fast-trackhearings for youth offenders and a pilot youth court scheme werelaunched at Hamilton and Airdrie Sheriff's Court (with the Ministerfor Justice commenting that "punishment is a key part of the youthjustice process"; see Piacentini and Walters 2006). In 2004, theAnti-Social Behaviour (Scotland) Act included the extension of ASBOs to12- to 16-year-olds, the provision of electronic tagging to under-16s,Community Reparation Orders (for those aged 12 and older), and ParentalOrders. Amidst the political and media rhetoric about "plagues ofgroup disorder" (Margaret Curran, quoted in The Scotsman, June 18,2004), one could be forgiven for thinking that Scotland was gripped by amassive and general upsurge in youth crime. This heightened politics ofyouth criminality coincided with a spike in recorded crime in Scotland,which since that point has been in steady decline, falling to its lowestlevel in 30 years by 2010 (Scottish Government 2011).

The Scottish National Party (SNP)--a minority member of governmentin 2007, subsequently reelected in 2011 with a majority--is generallyconsidered to be less punitive than its Labour and liberal democratcounterparts (see McNeill 2010). At the elections of May 2011, Labourconveyed a much more punitive message than the SNP did. The clearestindications of a softer approach from the SNP is that there has been amarkedly reduced concern with antisocial behavior and less of anemphasis on the behavior and problems of persistent young offenders. TheSNP government's approach in this area, reflected in the key policydocument entitled "Preventing Offending by Young People: AFramework for Action" (Scottish Government 2008), reflects whatMcAra and McVie (2010) have characterized as an "uneasy" mixof welfarist, actuarialist, and retributive influences. The welfaristelements are evident from the outset, the document beginning with alargely positive statement about the contribution of young people toScottish society in general (McNeil 2010, 51). An emphasis onchildren's well-being connects deviant youth to welfareinstitutions such as education and health, keeping them at a distancefrom the criminal justice system and favoring early and intensiveintervention for those classed as "at risk." Although it isimportant to remain cautious about claims concerning the welfarist basisof criminal justice policy in Scotland, especially in relation to youthjustice, the approach of the SNP government marks something of a retreatfrom the steady trend in the early- to mid-2000s toward a convergencewith the much more punitive model of England and Wales (see Croall2012).

Decivilizing Media and Symbolic Power

If Elias examined "manners books" from the Middle Agesonwards to chart the emergence of self-restraint among the upper classesin Europe, today a broad range of mass media perform a similar functionand operate as texts that instruct their audiences in good taste andconduct. Scotland has not only a semi-state apparatus of its own butalso a quasi-autonomous media of long standing (Blain and Hutchison2008). As moral lessons against social impropriety and incompetence,television programs typically invite viewers to adopt an affrontedbourgeois stance of superiority, good taste, and social competence incontrast to the inept displays of social inferiority, culturalignorance, and domestic incompetence of the lower classes (Law andMooney 2011-12).

One of the most popular television programs in Scotland in recentdecades is the comedy series Chewin' the Fat, produced by BBCScotland. This presents a series of sketches and skits featuring twocharacters that are immediately recognizable by Scottish viewers as"the Neds," since they are attired in typical Nedclothing--Burberry-style checked baseball caps and tracksuits("trackies"). Chewing the Fat also features sketches about"Ned TV" and a Glasgow-based "Ned swimming gala" inwhich violence, disorder, and mayhem are presented as the key culturalattributes of Neds (Law 2006a).

Although comedic representations may strike a sympatheticallyparodic torte, more realist depictions can have an insidious ideologicaleffect in reinforcing portrayals of the urban poor as barbarous beasts.This was graphically illustrated by a controversial documentary made inurban Scotland, The Scheme (BBC, 2010-11), which depicted the dailylives of six families from the Onthank and Knockinlaw impoverishedhousing estates in Kilmarnock (Law and Mooney 2011-12). A cast ofcharacters were seen to battle against a series of material, personal,and social disadvantages: drug dependency, petty crime, casual violence,ASBOs, teenage pregnancy and abortion, single parenting, imprisonment,ill health, and bereavement. Although the program was promoted asemblematic of "important social problems," it could lay noclaim to depicting the typical characteristics of even the bottom decile of Scottish society.

Some compared the stigmatization effect that The Scheme had onOnthank with that of a BBC documentary, The Fourth World, about theLilybank scheme in 1970s Glasgow. (4) But the earlier documentary was amore earnest exercise in serious social documentary analysis, centeredaround the participant observation of Kay Carmichael, a social policyacademic and activist. It gave expression to bored teenagers, gangfights, casual violence, glue sniffing, vandalism, fractious neighbors,and tempestuous public exchanges. But where The Fourth World had a senseof political mission and social analysis, however limited, The Schemeflattered a morbid fascination for abject social suffering. Little sensewas provided of the wider forces of neoliberal political economy thatover the past 30 years have restructured the material conditions of lifefor former industrial working-class communities in Kilmarnock andelsewhere across urban Scotland.

Besides the broadcast media, the Ned underclass figures regularlyin Scotland's semiautonomous print media, which routinely clothesitself as distinctively Scottish (that is, not English and notspecifically British either) (Law 2001). Compared to the treatment ofChavs in the English press, the use of Neds in the Scottish pressexhibits a distinctive temporal pattern and a more intensive usage.Taking the blunt instrument of a Lexis-Nexis search of selected Scottishnewspapers (5) (not including Scottish editions of large-circulationpapers like The Sun), the term "Neds" was barely mentioned bythe press in the 1990s, except in the humorous columns of Jack Mcleanand Tom Shields in The Herald. Table 1 and Figure 1 show that this datum has increased steadily, especially since 1999--the year of the openingof the Scottish Parliament--and reached a peak of more than one thousandcitations in 2003, when political concerns with Ned behavior were attheir zenith and when an attempt was made in the Scottish Parliament toban the use of the term. This compares with the highpoint of 946mentions of "Chavs" in all UK newspapers in 2005 found byHayward and Yar (2006, 10). Although the overall trend since the early2000s has been downwards, nonetheless post-2003 the number of citationshas consistently been higher than pre-2003. Between 2001 and 2006, thewell-known Scottish tabloid the Daily Record and its sister paper, theSunday Mail, used the term three times more regularly than the"quality" Glasgow papers The Herald and Sunday Herald, that inturn tended to use it twice as much as the Edinburgh-based Scotsman andScotland on Sunday papers. Surprisingly, in 2010-2011 the frequency ofNed citations in The Herald/Sunday Herald appeared to surpass that ofthe Daily Record and Sunday Mail (see Figure 2). These papers caterpredominantly to readers located in west-central Scotland, the regionthat spawned the Ned as a colloquial figure.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Print culture also generated a new genre of Chav-Ned humor. Nedjoke books began to appear, including The Little Book of Neds (2005),Ned Jokes (2007), and Ned Speak (2006), by Lee Bok, who is also creditedwith the equally vitriolic The Little Book of Chavs (2004) and The ChavGuide to Life (2006). The Little Book of Chavs quickly sold out itsfirst print run of 100,000, an indication that these cheaply producedtexts strike a chord about class anxieties and that hate humor can provea profitable enterprise. These books recycle the same hackneyed, hatefuljokes that once passed for publicly acceptable banter directed againstsubordinate groups like ethnic minorities, women, and hom*osexuals(Billig 2001).

Amidst this spate of hate humor books, in 2005 appeared Nedworld,under the pseudonyms Kylie Pilrig and Keanu McGlinchy. From start tofinish, a torrent of stereotyped class hatred is unleashed that would belegally impossible against any other minority group in the UK. The bookpurports to shed humorous insight into "the outrageous lifestyle ofthe ASBO generation"; in fact, its cliched jokes merely repeat thetypical race hate jokes so common in British society in the 1970s. Thisexample is indicative of hundreds of others similar in tone andstructure:

A ned died pure poor and many local shops donated money to the fundfor his funeral out of sympathy. The manager of the jeweller's wasasked to donate a fiver. "Only a fiver?," he asked. "Onlya fiver to bury Brad Pitt Mckenzie? Here's a cheque. Go and buryone hundred of them?" (Pilrig and McGlinchy 2005, 64)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Here the reader is invited to share the genocidal desire of thejoke teller for the physical elimination of Neds in their hundreds. Asone reviewer noted, the book provides

 an index of middle-class fears about the underclass [sic]. It had to be written sooner or later and is, in some perverse way, timely. It flies in the face of politically correct ideas about representing the long-term unemployed, the urban poor, the non-educated and delinquent. (6)

In contrast to the "ultimate race hate word," the n-word,which as Billig (2001, 278) notes, "announces hatred withoutsemantic constraint," "Ned" has become a word that can beinvoked repeatedly since little semantic social constraint orself-restraint is demanded when referring to the most dominated socialgroup of the working class. Ned-type characters of ridicule evenappeared in children's papers like The Beano, a popular comicproduced in Dundee. The cartoon featured a new family, The Neds,comprising Ned, Nedette, and their kids, Asbo and Chavette (December 17,2005, and April 18, 2006; see Raisborough and Adams 2008) and led toprotests in the Scottish Parliament against "classism" and tochallenges from Scotland's Children's Commissioner (SundayTimes, February 5, 2006; The Scotsman, February 6, 2006). Thesecounterprotests against denigration represent yet another indication ofsome of the ambivalences about Neds in Scottish civic and politicalinstitutions, in sharp contrast to the widespread contempt for Chavs soeffortlessly expressed by the English political and media establishment(Jones 2011).

Conclusion

For some sociologists "working class" is primarily acultural or moral category as much as, or more than, a dynamicsocioeconomic relationship (Sayer 2005). In this perspective, class isconsidered relational insofar as it is constructed through theattribution or denial of moral worth by another group with sufficientsocial power to make authoritative value judgments. By contrast, a focuson the tension identified by Elias between civilizing and decivilizingprocesses resituates cultural and material marginality within the curveof development of Scotland as a distinct state-society. From thisperspective, it becomes necessary to distinguish Neds from Chavs asmarginalized devil figures within the distinctive sociopoliticaltrajectories of Scotland and England.

Of course, as marginalized underclass figures subject tooverlapping histories of class disgust, Neds and Chavs share a set ofattributed characteristics: tasteless clothing, alcohol and drug abuse,violence, sexual promiscuity, territorial gang membership, and loud,risky, and reckless conduct. As a collectively imagined category, theChav/Ned figure offends against the ideological and psychological weightof a much longer "civilizing process" of class conditioning.Within the process of "diminishing contrasts, increasingvarieties," the ideological spurt of contempt for Neds and Chavselicits emotional repulsion and disgust for lower social groups. As adenigrated social body, the figure of the Chav/Ned reeks of improprietyand, conversely, cultural vulgarity smells of the Chav/Ned.

However, the ascription to Neds and Chavs of shared consumption andbehavioral patterns accepts at face value generic labels of"incivility" that obscure national (and local) differences insocial development. The social, institutional, political, and mediaagitation over Neds in Scotland exhibits distinct national aspects thatneed to be carefully delineated. Rather than hom*ogenizing dominatedsocial groups under the sign of the Chav figure particular to England asa state-society, a focus on the different historical development ofstate-society in Scotland suggests that the Ned represents a moreambiguous underclass figure. It can be called upon to symbolizegood-natured humor or social critique, but it may equally be mobilizedfor moral outrage and criminalization processes. Elias has been invokedby academics to highlight the "criminalization" of welfare asa new phase in the decivilizing process (Rodger 2008). However, thistends to be conceived as a single process operating across the UK, onlyallowing for some policy differences in Scotland. In contrast, we havesought to provide a longer-term perspective that emphasizes the tensionbetween civilizing and decivilizing processes (plural) within the curveof national development in Scotland as a distinct state-society. Herethe nationally autonomous institutions of Scottish state and civilsociety--criminal justice system, policy-making networks, government,and media producers--rely on the antisocial underclass figure of the Nedto formalize the civilizing process and to correct and modify informalurban subcultures developed over a century or more. Civilizing pressuresare not a zero-sum process of repulsion and exclusion, but are marked byambivalences and mediations in the dialectical tensions generated byclass positioning in social space.

With the major welfare functions of the state devolved to Scotlanda dozen years ago, and with the UK state increasingly losing itsterritorial integrity, the Scottish government finds itself torn betweenwelfare nationalism and competitive nationalism (Law and Mooney 2012).Within this contradictory space, civilizing processes are subject to thedynamic tensions produced by the formal, external demands of thecivic-welfare nation and the informal pressures of individuals competingin crisis-prone marketized conditions. Neds appear as a decivilizingunderclass counterpoint to the devolved state-society welfare bargainconceived as a national platform for competitive accumulation. A newphase of public austerity that deepens neoliberal priorities and thereferendum for state independence in 2014 will ensure that problematicand ambivalent representations of the underclass will remain contingenton the development of Scotland as a distinctive state-society.

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NOTES

(1.) Severin Carrell, "England Riots: Alex Salmond Angry as'UK' Headlines Sweep Scotland into Fray," The Guardian,August 10, 2011.

(2.) More sympathetic representations of the urban working class inScotland can be found in films like Peter Mullan's Neds (2011), thefiction of James Kelman and Agnes Owens, the poetry of Tore Leouard,and, in a different register, the fantastical lifeworlds of Irvine Welshstories.

(3.) Stoked by the BBC Television's White season in 2007, muchpublicized liberal angst was displayed about the effects of an abandoned"white" working class that is supposedly unable to adjust tomulticultural Britain and tempted to seek collective refuge indefensive, exclusionary identities of neofascists like the BritishNational Party and the English Defence League (Rhodes 2011) or in the"British jobs for British workers" wave of illegal solidaritystrikes in January 2009.

(4.) Derek Alexander, "Decades before The Scheme Another ScotsCommunity Suffered the TV Treatment," Sunday Mail, June 27, 2010.

(5.) The frequency count provides a rough approximation of thepattern of "Ned" usage in the Scottish press. It includesoccasional uses of the term as an abbreviation for the names Edward andNetherlands.

(6.) Ewan Morrison, "Heard the One about Brad PittMcKenzie," Sunday Herald, Spectrum, November 6, 2005, 32.

Alex Law and Gerry Mooney *

* ALEX LAW is professor of sociology, University of Abertay Dundee.His research interests include sociological theory, class, nation, andstate re-formation, particularly in Scotland and the UK. Currentresearch topics include violence, state-societies, and sport in Europe.His recent books include Key Concepts in Classical Social Theory (Sage,2011), and he is the coauthor of Understanding Social Welfare Movements(Policy Press, 2009). He is currently writing a book on sociologicaltheory and the crisis of neoliberalism. He can be contacted at[emailprotected]. GERRY MOONEY is senior lecturer in social policyand criminology, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, UK,and visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin River Falls, USA.Among other publications, he is coeditor of Social Justice and SocialPolicy in Scotland (Policy Press, 2012) and Criminal Justice in Scotland(Routledge, 2010). He is currently researching different aspects ofsocial welfare and urban policy in Scotland and is also working on therelationship between class and nation in the Scottish context. He can becontacted at [emailprotected].

Table 1. Annual frequency of the term "Neds" in selected Scottishnewspaper titles (1990-2011)Calendar Year Quantity2011 7512010 5202009 3742008 4662007 5262006 2512005 5542004 8202003 1,0122002 4832001 3422000 2371999 2401998 1021997 611996 611995 541994 441993 291992 191991 01990 0