Owen Jones: Western Hubris Created Today’s Crisis

- Interview by - John-Baptiste Oduor In 2011, Owen Jones solidified his reputation as one of Britain’s sharpest political commentators when he published Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. In the aftermath of the longest-serving Labour government in history, Jones asked how working-class people came to be vilified not just by elites but by representatives of the parties that supposedly existed to serve their interests.

He followed this book up in 2014 with The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, a study of Britain’s powerful elite. His most recent book, The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost, looks at the dangerous and hysterical politics that emerged after the 1990s, the period that came to be known as “the end of history. ” For Jones, the decline of the West that conservative commentators obsess over is not driven by immigration or the permissive culture of liberalism but by the self-inflicted harms caused by decades of neoliberalism.