BEFORE last week I'd never heard of Hetty Douglas, though according Dazed & Confused articles, the south London-based artist was a “serious contender in the UK art scene”. Then came the tweet, the one she will probably never live down, which triggered a mass online shaming of a kind we have become familiar with: ill-judged, hard to excuse and appearing to reveal some ugly subconscious truth. Douglas took a photograph of a group of construction workers wearing sweatpants and workboots, and posted it with the comment: “These guys look like they got one GCSE.”

The problem wasn't just the assumptions Douglas seemed to be making about the intelligence of the men who were wearing work clothes. It was also the stupid-shaming, the dismissal of those without qualifications, those deemed less academically smart. Some called Douglas a snob. "You look like a spoiled rich girl gentrifying south London,” ran one, much retweeted, post. Many, on social media, also mocked a photo she had posted of herself holding her Jobcentre work plan, which complained about the lack of water coolers in the building she had gone in to sign on.

What was bubbling up, in the shaming, was a sense of rage, not just at the tweet, but at the idea of rich-girl artist playing about with working-class culture. Of course, no-one knew she was spoiled or rich, though some found clues they thought suggested she might be. What mattered was that this represented something about class in Britain today, the snobberies that were rife, the division and the over-dominance of our culture by middle-class voices. News articles later revealed that Douglas's own father was a builder, and suddenly it seemed she mightn't be much posher than the builders she was insulting.

Douglas published an apology on her blog, explaining how she'd tweeted after becoming frustrated by the banter of some men ahead of her in the McDonald's queue. “Of course,” she wrote, “what I did was wrong, particularly because the guys I captured in the photo weren’t the loud ones. Also they were wearing working clothes – it turned out they were scaffolders – and it looked like I was saying that people who do manual jobs are stupid. That’s not my view and it was me that was stupid for not seeing how it might look.”

But the narrative endured. The schadenfreude had already spread.

That's hardly surprising, because there is a real sense that culture is now dominated by voices that are not just middle-class, like mine, but upper middle-class. The actors that dominate our dramas, from Eddie Redmayne through to Tom Hiddleston, are private school-educated. The same is true in art, and in music, such that cultural commentator Stuart Maconie was driven to write, a couple of years ago, that “popular music has become as essentially bourgeois as the Boden catalogue”.

Maconie observed that before the millennium, it working-class and lower-middle-class faces and voices had been common in British entertainment. “You see ever fewer of those faces now, unless you watch Jeremy Kyle or Benefits Street or Saints And Scroungers where the lower orders are held up for ridicule.”

Plus, there is a still further problem that Hetty Douglas became, perhaps undeservedly, a symbol of: that of wealthy privileged people who take on the style and language of the working-class in order to create their own art, or gain credibility. The journalist Dawn Foster, who herself grew up in poverty, observed in Huck magazine that Douglas's behaviour seemed “symptomatic of a trend in London and beyond: of embracing working-class cultural signifiers while struggling to conceal your visceral hatred of actual working-class people”.

I don't know where Douglas sits on the class ladder. But I suspect that many of those who criticised her, given the demographics that dominate Twitter, were at least as high, if not higher, up the socioeconomic scale than she is.

I also know that one of the problems in our culture is that a section of the population, the liberal middle class, has written off another, the Brexit-voting working class, as ignorant, as the equivalent of looking “like they got one GCSE” – and Douglas's tweet appeared to reflect some of that feeling, whether intentionally or not.

This attitude isn't new. But it seems to have become politically legitimised. Thick-shaming is part of our regular political debate. We don't seek to listen or understand, but to humiliate.

Of course, Douglas too has been humiliated – and I'm not applauding that. None of the outrage over her supposed crime solves the actual problem. It doesn't rid us of a system that makes going to art school seem unaffordable for anyone but the well-heeled, which sees arts funding controlled and dominated by the middle class, and which requires the backing of family wealth in order to be able to do the unpaid work required to get a foothold in the arts.

All it does is give us a scapegoat. And that's not much help. For we live in a world of ever proliferating scapegoats.

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