POLITICIANS are banging on about the white working class again. Hazel Blears - daughter of a maintenance fitter from Salford - at least knows the milieu in the firsthand way Harriet Harman never will.
Even so, she has managed completely to misinterpret the results of a survey that shows many ordinary white working people on council estates express fears about immigration, and feel a sense of unfairness at the way they are treated. Then again, so has almost everybody.
In some quarters, the notes of bien pensant contempt are readily audible. ‘These people’ simply do not understand what integration means, we read in several newspapers.
Further to the left, those that stress the middle class nature of the British National Party after the recent leak of its membership list will be outraged at the very notion that workers can possible be racist.
Still others reject the concept of a white working class, separate from the working class in general and with a distinct identity, often regarded as implicitly reactionary.
But if the general point is well taken, simple observation suggests that outside of a relatively limited number of melting pot areas, an undeniable white working class cultural identity exists in this country.
Political commonsense over the last two decades has insisted that elections are won and lost in a small number of key marginals, and manifestoes have been geared exclusively to swing voter concerns. If there are millions of ordinary people out there who think that New Labour has written them off as mere voting fodder with no viable electoral options, they are not far wrong. That, of course, potentially represents a colossal opening for the far right.
Now, I was born in east London and am the son of a railway worker. Culturally - if hardly socially these days - I remain white working class. First generation middle-class white working class, if you want to put it like that. Top university-educated white working class, even. White working class, despite now knowing which fork to use in an overpriced restaurant. But I will never forget that I didn’t used to be a poncey tosser.
As a result of being brung up proper, I have managed to avoid the all too frequent romanticisation of ’the workers’ to which upper-class lefties are sometimes prone. It has always been the case that many proles are politically rightwing and viscerally racist. I don’t have to go outside some – but only some - of own family to know that.
On the other hand, there is something new in today’s situation, something different about today’s racism, that has made the growth of the BNP possible. It is no longer a racism based a deliberately-inculcated mass ideological basis for imperialism, which I noticed in an uncle sent to Korea in the early 1950s to shoot at gooks, for instance.
This is instead a racism rooted in the collapse of social housing, a racism born of the disappearance of blue collar employment and grassroots trade union organisation, a racism of benefit cuts, a racism centred on the perception that nobody in a position of authority really gives a shit. You might even want to call it a racism of desperation.
But whatever you call it, it is ugly and festering and dangerous, and Labour’s conscious decision to snub the white working class in favour of Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman is no small part of the explanation. In her heart of hearts, I suspect Hazel Blears knows that.
Posted at 13:49, 2 January 2009
Comments (29)
You know which fork to use?!
Please could you do a post on that please, because we middle classes haven't got a clue which is which....
I wonder where this 'white working class' is Dave?
My mates and the people I drink with (not necessarily the same thing) are mostly working class in the usual sense. There are quite a few who have degrees (first generation to have done so) and have fallen into short-term causual work. Otehrs left school at an early age.
Most are probably rather more left-wing than the kind of middle-class tosser who infest parts of Suffolk (whom our far-right PM seems to think are fine enough to spend his Summer holidays next to, Southwold).
But 'white'? I suppose a hefty chunk are of Irish-Scots background (as I am) and another very large group are Afro-Caribbean. A few are real Suffolk bor (and borettes). I recknon around a quarter are not 'white' by the Census definition.
I mean like where do you live.
Dave, here's the thing. People who genuinely belong to a class do not have to talk about their background at every opportunity like you do. Please stop protesting as it does become tedious after a while.
Secondly, this notion of the white working class is, as you seem to say, all about creating a mythical element - the lumpen whites versus the heroic working class.
Actually the working class is white - as are most other people in the UK. Moss Side in Manchester may be multiculti but one district does not a city make.
Speaking from America, my father-in-law is a union truck driver, and about as 'white working class' - and subjectively racist - as they come. Voted for Hillary in the Democratic primary on quite frankly racial grounds, cusses about 'ricans, thinks watermelon and fried chicken jokes are hilarious.
On the other hand, he also runs recruiting drives to sign up blacks and Hispanics for the Teamsters Union. And he can tell you better than anyone I know how the criminal justice system to splits and decimates the working class - especially along racial lines.
Which goes to show the basic Marxian dictum that revolutionary consciousness is the result, not the cause, of class struggle.
You have blocked class struggle - like you do under New Labour = you get a block on revolutionary consciousness.
Excellent post Dave, sadly I'm not sure anyone is really listening: we now have a non parliamntary politics in the U.K which is primarily about identity politics, (but excluding the WWC) and a febrile and often hysterical internationalism with a focus on Middle Eastern politics to the exclusion of other horrors such as the Congo, Darfur, etc.Issues that affect the ordinary man or women in the street have been largely ignored. To me, it beggars belief how the Left and civil society can tolerate our pensioners dying of hypothermia for instance, often ex'service people( from all corners of the world) who gave their youth to defend this country.
Though, new groupings like London Coalition Against Poverty are hopeful signs of change.
btw, on welfare cuts, etc, the DM, Express Sun , are clearly beiing briefed by purnell and his advisors, etc and are at present conducting a 'war of hate' against claimants, etc.
The sad fact is that although immigrants only account for 5% of the population (or something like that), unfortunately, they are often in competiton with the 'indigines' (if I may use that word). We all know that the only answer is a principled socialist fight for more resources, for social housing, for a high standards in schools, for a health service that serves the needs of its population etc, but let's face it, we ain't going to get it. The other day I had the mutinous thought that in a 'globalised' world, socialism becomes nigh impossible. it really would be a case of international revolution and how is tht going to happen when even organising a whelk stall proves so difficult?
"Let's face it, we ain't going to get it." The voice of despair that makes the advance of the far right itself inevitable.
'We all know that the only answer is a principled socialist fight for more resources, for social housing, for a high standards in schools, for a health service that serves the needs of its population etc, but let's face it, we ain't going to get it.'
But these do not seem to be the 'priorities' for what is left of the left, as i said above: its seems to be just about events, admittedly horrendous thousands of miles away of which we can do little about. I have no problem showing genuine solidarity with Palestine and the practical call for Egypt to open its borders is a good thing, but the lack of interest in the injustices here, which are relative but important, is glaring.
Interesting how Hazel Blears has discovered the 'deserving poor'. One asks oneself, why now? And, I believe a commitment to a physical location is important to building socialism or a fairer society. if a substantial number of the population just use a country as a 'staging post', then it becomes very difficult, in fact moving to aprivate insurance-based system for social provision could be arguably fairer.
Can I bring the media into this? For years the gutter press has encouraged us to blame problems like a lack of council housing on immigrants. There's no denying that recent migration from within the EU has lead to increased competition for employment in some sectors - that was, after all, the point: import labour and thus hold down wages. Migrant workers are not our enemy, the capitalist class is our enemy. The capitalist press isn't going to advertise this fact - on the contrary, the media barons are keen on seeing us fight amongst one another. So it's no wonder that there's a lot of misunderstanding about how council housing is allocated, etc.
To look only a little further afield, what about the success of the Socialist Party of the Netherlands?
The SP has for decades been arguing the case that large-scale immigration of migrants from low-wage economies is a capitalist ploy to drive down wages and destroy working class solidarity; this, combined with a commitment to public ownership and redistributive taxation, along with opposition to war, NATO and the EU constitution, has led to a level of popular and electoral support for a genuine left party undreamt of in the UK, apart from briefly in Scotland before Tommygate.
If the left in this country does not make the non-racist, anti-capitalist case against mass immigration, then the BNP is waiting in the wings to exploit the situation.
Any society needs at least a minimum degree of social solidarity to be viable - see Sue and Charlie above - so this issue needs to be addressed, and soon.
So, Auld Leftie, the mass socialist agitation, and later trade union organisation, in that epitome of capitalism and mass immigration, New York City, one hundred years ago was a mirage? It wasn't militant in the Mid West or in Mississippi.
Who do you think had higher levels of union density 50 years ago, the bus conductors in the West country or in London (the latter heavily being recent immigrants)?
It's a complete myth to suggest that large-scale immigration of migrants from low-wage economies can't lead to 'social solidarity'.
My neighbour (Caribbean 1st gen) and another (Lithuanian 1st gen) are the ones that got involved with a local problem, not, as it happened the neighbour who is a 'cockney, lived here for generations, dad was a docker'.
How far do you think we should go to get the vote that may go to the BNP? They say they will give housing just to whites; should we do that first to stop people voting for them?
Just what is a "non racist case" against "mass immigration". We got here first, or at least our ancestors did but you can't come in (it's not even that we own the place).
And do you really want to live again in 70s Britain? Where shall we eat - the Wimpy Bar (but we’ll have to wipe the encrusted grunge off the tomato sauce bottle) or the cafe (maybe some tripe with bread and marge, and a Wagon Wheel, as a treat). Oh, I forgot, it's 7 o'clock, everything's shut.
That's just one example where mass immigration has made a difference but if it's the variety of your co-workers (if you live in a bigger city); the cultural diversity that has enhanced life in Britain (Morris dancing or Bhangra dancing?) or just our simple ability to organise - my experience as a Unison steward was that union density and tendency towards militancy was noticeably higher amongst non-whites (which wasn't just a reflection of lower job grades) - life, and the possibility of socialist organisation, is a lot higher in places with mass immigration. Red Hereford or Red Hackney first, what do you think?
I wonder what the Socialist Party says to all its potential voters of North African origin in Rotterdam (a large percentage) -whatever the Dutch is for ‘piss off’. Do they take such an attitude to the large number of Belgian Flemish (or British, etc) working in Amsterdam and other places?
There's few who make me inwardly groan as much as Blears; I really need to turn of the TV than listen to her usual ploy of ignoring all questions or interruptions and just doggedly repeating her poison.
But she is astute. She is happy to ride the big lie. Who are the biggest 'benefit farudsters' in Britain? The banks of course, but she knows full well that you can sadly convince someone on minimum wage that their real enemy
is their neighbour, who didn't declare a few hours cleaning whilst signing on, and made a pittance extra, rather than their company directors who make more from her in a day than the claimant receives in a month.
It has to be admitted there's a certain level of stupidity by people in this. The number of people who really think immigrants or 'coloureds' get some sort of priority for housing in the basis of their status or race is not all down to the lies of the Daily Express.
I don't think Labour snubs the 'white' working class in favour of Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman, much as some residents of a council estate in a desolate South Wales valley may think they do. I think Labour snubs 'the' working class; as a trip round a similar estate in Stepney would show. And I think they will continue to do until a force to the Left organises those reliant on both minicabs and Mondeos.
Swallowing racist poison to counter them is no cure. For no borders nor immigration controls.
And do you really want to live again in 70s Britain?...Oh, I forgot, it's 7 o'clock, everything's shut.
So the business innovation of 24x7 shopping against the wishes of shop workers was a good thing Sir Richard? Margaret Thatcher brought choice to Britain in the 1980s? You've now got McDonald's and Starbucks on the high street and not just dreary old Wimpy and for that we should all give thanks to the bold visionaries of unrestricted capitalism? And the transformation of British retail during that decade somehow has an unexplained connection to immigration (well, I suppose those two chains did originate in the good old USA).
Mr Punch tops off his insights with the observation that some working class people are just stupid and hence racist. More or less stupid (and hence racist) proportionately than any other class? Do racist beliefs correlate with class or intelligence? Did they in apartheid South Africa, in the USA among the rich bourgeoisie who enforced Jim Crow or the mandarins of the British Empire or in Israel today?
Unsavoury,
Read more carefully.
I made no claim or inferred that the working class is "proportionately (more racist) than any other class". I wrote that some (class unspecific) people are "stupid".
However I'd also say, on observation it's different. People won't say 'Paki' at a Stoke Newington dinner table but still they will often find a pressing reason to move ('I feel I might develop asthma' is a recent one I heard) to Enfield, or Eastbourne, as Esther approaches eleven. (Although that can also be class prejudice as well).
And if you're a property owner, or otherwise are less reliant on state services, or employed, you're not likely to obsess (as much) about who is on the housing waiting list, getting benefits etc.
And I'd say mass immigration, capitalist boom and more has transformed retail (and leisure). And that's good. Try a night out in Luxembourg to see how it was.
Oh and whilst I'm on the subject, Auld, Could you be from Glasgow (where would the Left have been there without cheap immigrant Labour - the Irish?); a former member of Militant, the AWL, the SWP, the WRP (all of whose most prominent member emigrated to Britain as an adult - hmm, actually, maybe immig...) or enjoy reading my comments or indeed this blog (again, I think, may be written by the scion of immigrants coming for your job). Immigration = good.
...you can sadly convince someone on minimum wage that their real enemy
is their neighbour...It has to be admitted there's a certain level of stupidity by people in this.
Sorry Mr Punch if I got confused by your association of minimum wage earners (working class people I assume) with stupidity in two adjoining sentences.
And if you're a property owner, or otherwise are less reliant on state services, or employed, you're not likely to obsess (as much) about who is on the housing waiting list, getting benefits etc.
These people complain all the time about their taxes going to support work shy scroungers on benefits with 9 kids or asylum seekers. Who do you think buys the Daily Mail/Express demographically speaking?
If you joined the 'white flight' to Enfield, you'd be pretty disappointed. Speaking as a resident of Enfield, Caucasian Brits are pretty thin on the ground here. Some days I go out and I don't hear a word of English spoken on the street or buses. Polish, Czech, Slovakian, Urdu, Syrian Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish etc etc. Something Dave wrote a few weks ago made me realise something about immigration. (I think it was Dave). There is not much evidence that mass immigration drives down wages, but it does however mean that there is more money circulating in society, something that capitalists love. Everyone has to eat food, has to live somewhere, has to spend money on booze etc etc. So, the more people you pack into an area the more money they spend. Not to mention the illegal ecomony, that provides people with money to spend.
By the way, anyone who thinks 24/7 shopping and fastfood restaurants and the ability to buy starfruits in the supermarket is a sign of great social progress is a twat. Back in the 70s we may have only had Ski Yoghurt and proper butchers' shops and proper bakers' shops, but at least we had council housing, nationalised railways and energy companies and a BBC that believed in producing original socially significant drama. And, the newspapers were rather more literate than they are today. Sometimes I think I've lived too long....
@Unsavoury - You think home owners are interested in what happens on council waiting lists? You're wrong.
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So do I, Sue.
You know Dave, you may know which fork to use for which course, but you're working class as long as you depend on a paycheck, as long as you have to sell your labour. It has little to do with cultural background.
Getting into the whole "white working class" fallacy is playing intot he hands of those who would like us all to forget there are a very few people who own much of the country, slightly more people who are highly paid servants of these owners and the rest of us, scrabbling to make a meager living of what's left to us. New Labour needs the BNP.
And, there were proper pubs and they weren't closing at the rate of one a day back in the 70s. You know, Southpawpunch, you saying you thought I'd lived too long has given me the will to live, I feel rejunvenated.
You think home owners are interested in what happens on council waiting lists? You're wrong.
They're interested in why they should have to pay tax to house anyone and the more foreign the person who needs a council house appears (to them) the less reason they see why they should pay for it. It makes sense in this situation for poor whites to play along with the agenda - to present themselves as real Brits who deserve housing versus the foreign lot who don't. The middle class taxpayers and welfare system administrators get to decide the worthiness of the applicants - the power lies with them.
But you've been manning the barricades fighting the man for nigh on 30 year Mr Punch so you know all this, right?
SPP, where did I say I opposed immigration per se? I agree that there have been many positive aspects resulting from the cultural mix which has developed in the UK over many decades now.
However, the reality is that large-scale immigration over a short period inevitably does drive down wages - this is its very purpose, as part of the neocon "globalisation" agenda. This impacts on the existing working population's conditions, whatever their ethnic or cultural origin, no?
You mention the agitation in the USA a century ago, often led and organised by socialist and communist activists who were immigrants themselves - true. But, look at the present-day US, where average wages have been in decline for the last 3-4 decades, at least partly as a result of the large-scale entry of unskilled and low-skilled migrants from Latin America. Their economy necessitates having a large pool of poor people of colour to be their hewers of wood and drawers of water - who will organise them?
As far as the Dutch SP is concerned, it is not, as you appear to suggest, a "whites-only" party but a secular anti-racist party of the left with support from across the whole spectrum of ethnicities in the Netherlands; if anything, the PvdA(Dutch Labour Party) is playing a dangerous game with identity politics, in a short term attempt to win Muslim votes for tactical reasons and no thought given to the potential damage to community relations.
It is not a question of "swallowing racist poison" as you put it, or attempting to outdo the BNP in xenophobia.
The issue is this. The Labour Party gave up a long time ago on even pretending to represent the working class in this country. Where is there a voice on the left to represent the interests of ordinary working people and listen to the grievances so many of them have? If some of these are expressed in racist terms, then the error of their analysis should be explained to them.
These issues include access to decent affordable social housing, decent jobs and fair wages, quality education, healthcare and childcare and an affordable and viable public transport system. Now, I am as dismayed as anyone by our dirty little wars and am hugely opposed to the waste involved in renewing Trident when the money could be so much better spent; but I despair at times at the obsession of so many on the left with foreign policy to the exclusion of so many other issues which are important to people's daily lives
So, I repeat, it is not racist to question an open borders policy. Why should any socialist buy into a policy of the free movement of labour? It goes hand in glove with the free movement of capital, and for the same reasons. The Dutch SP merely point this out - are they wrong?
'Their economy necessitates having a large pool of poor people of colour to be their hewers of wood and drawers of water - who will organise them?
Yes, and sadly many of them ultimaely end up in Prison/corrective centres as the economy discards and has no further use for them.
'Their economy necessitates having a large pool of poor people of colour to be their hewers of wood and drawers of water - who will organise them?
Yes, and sadly many of them ultimately end up in Prison/corrective centres as the economy discards and has no further use for them.
Thought of a brilliant aphorism this afternoon. 'England, no longer a nation of shopkeepers but now a nation of shoppers.'.
As for New York and the American Labour Movement. Has it escaped anyone's attention that (modern) America was founded on immigration and that most of that immigration took place at the end of the nineteenth century and it was composed of people fleeing poverty and repression in the Old Countries? I know that within my own family there were members who emigrated to America, and rumours abound of one great-uncle who married a Senator's daughter. The immigrants were often from highly politically conscious backgrounds, Italian anarchists, German and French socialists etc etc so it is hardly a shock that they took their ideas with them. My Grandfather ( a German anarchist) was involved in the IWW (the Wobblies), an anarcho-syndalcalist outfit that enjoyed some traction in the States. I've been told, although I don't know if this is true and I haven't been able to confirm it, that one of the Universities in America has a collection of Wobbly literature housed in an archive named after my Grandfather. As for the Mid-West etc, there colonisation was a different story. It was landhunger and the invention of the railroad that was behind that. Trade union militants are not usually keen to become hoe-pushing farmers, it takes a different psychology. Every family being able to settle an acre of land (or however much) tends to mitigate against solidarity. I remember as a teenager reading 'Shane', a novel about the small farmers being threatened by the big cattle ranchers, who wanted to take over their land for grazing for their enourmous herds. Shane was the mysterious gunfighter who rode into town one day and fought the little guys corner for them. Classic American little guy takes on the big guy and wins, but very romantic. I can't remember there being any Native American characters in the book however.
Without the middle class vote, Labour are not even close to being electable.
Blair knew it, Brown knows it and I suspect Blears knows it too - hence her 'soft' language and failure to discuss the real causes of the problems.
On a subject which often generates more heat than light, Dave's post is spot on. It's a pity to see cosseted middle class commentators pontificate on the working class & expect their audience to regard it as the definitive take on the issue, a case in point being Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's blunderbuss of an article in today's Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhai-brown-spare-me-the-tears-over-the-white-working-class-1225824.html ).
On a subject which often generates more heat than light, Dave's post is spot on. It's a pity to see cosseted middle class commentators pontificate on the working class & expect their audience to regard it as the definitive take on the issue, a case in point being Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's blunderbuss of an article in today's Independent
Arf.
They're all like that y'know...but only Alibhai-Brown is too dumb to make a rudimentary effort to hide it.
This is why, if you belong to any putatively socialist organisation, a concerted effort to cleanse it of any members of the middle classes is essential.
Before Christmas, I was reading Mike Marqusee's book about the laboour movement in twenties/thirties/forties New York. It focusses upon his grandfather, E V Moran, who was a well known radical lawyer and broadcaster, but it gives a picture of the rivalries in the New York immigrant communiities, ie the Irish and the Jews.