To be frank, I don't think louis actually identifies or has previously identified with what is stereotyped as being "chav". I dont think there is any evidence to support it except for the current talking points. I'd honestly like somebody to point me towards examples of his own behaviour throughout the years that support it.
Your specific points donât make a lot of sense to me. âIdentifiesâ is a verb - every time Louis says âI am a chavâ he is literally identifying as a chav.  Louis has done plenty that is associated with stereotypes of âchavâ (he talks football in a Doncaster accent for a start). But I want to talk about how the term âchavâ works more broadly.
The term 'chavâ did not start as an identity, it started as a slur. Itâs also a pretty recent slur (I apologise if I get any of this wrong. My Owen Jones is packed so I canât look anything up). The term 'chavâ got popularised in the first decade of this century as part of a wave of pathologising working-class people in general and young people in particular. This (like literally everything else) is Thatcherâs fault and also Blairâs and Murdochâs, but I wonât go into that too much. Â Leaving aside the why - the term was part of a wider wave of hating people like Louis at the time that Louis was a teenager.
âChavâ is a slur that is applied to some people within a group in order to police and control the whole group. The term âchavâ is part of a wider system of hatred directed at working-class people and (particularly) people who live in deindustrialised areas like Doncaster. Â The term âchavâ canât be separated out from wider discussions about class and region. Â Which is why I find it kind of incomprehensible that anyone suggests that thereâs no evidence to support that this term is related to Louisâ life sort of incomprehensible, because it ignores so much of what Louis has said.
What happened then, as what happens so often with stigmatising terms - is that people who it was applied to began to use it to refer to themselves in a way that was slightly different from the way people who were using it to perpetuate hatred were using it. Â But thatâs a very shallow history - just as itâs a slur thatâs come to prominence recently - itâs only got a very recent history of being used by people about themselves. Â There arenât some pure actual chavs out there who really are entitled to the identity. Â Thatâs not how this type of slur or reclamation works.Â
I donât think a discussion of identity is really particularly useful to understand slurs and stigmatised terms. Â I think itâs far more useful to think about who has been affected by the hatred the term is perpetuating.
The idea that a boy from Doncaster who doesnât come from a posh family and who turned 18 in 2010 could somehow be outside the discourse of âchavâ is pretty ridiculous to me.Â
