A t my primary and secondary
schools in the 1980s and early 90s,
we were all working class. We lived
together on a peripheral estate outside
Birmingham; our parents did routine
jobs or were out of work; and, at 16, we
were pretty much all expected to leave
or go “to the tech” to do childcare or
mechanics. These experiences and
assumptions were not that different
whether we were white, black or brown,
because the fact of being working class
in a working-class area gave us a sense
that our destinies were largely shared.
Twenty-five years
later, my old
schools and area
are characterised as
“white working
class”, even though
around 10% of the
local population come from ethnic
minorities. More recently, politicians on
both sides of the Atlantic have seized on
the demographic of the “white working
class” to explain Britain’s vote for
Brexit and the rise of Trump. But since
when did the “white working class”
become a separate group from the
working class in general? Who decided
that “they” were so different that
they needed their own club, their
own set of dog-whistles and coded
encouragements to victimhood?
On Tuesday, the Runnymede Trust and
the Centre for Labour and Social Studies
thinktanks produced a new essay
collection, Minority Report , seeking to
debunk the power of the term and end
its divisive use. Its editors, Omar Khan
and Faiza Shaheen , comment with
elegant understatement that since the
EU referendum campaign “debates on
race and class have descended from
inadequate to toxic”.
Along with “multiculturalism has
failed”, one of the preoccupations of
politicians and commentators for the
past decade has been trying to define
and meet the needs of “the white
working class” at the same time as
turning working-class people – assumed
to be white, as though being black or
Asian automatically disqualifies you
from membership of a social class – into
unknowable curios.
The contributors to the Runnymede
report express alarm that the
Brexit vote has given legitimacy to
a desire among political leaders on
the right – supported and enabled
by the rightwing press – to divide
shared class interests into competing
racial groups. The problem is that
the term “white working class”
has come to be used across the political
spectrum for differing reasons, but with
similar effects.
Some on the right use “white working
class” to pit people in similar
circumstances against each other. Some
on the left, meanwhile, are suspicious of
what they regard as a malevolent New
Labour project to ignore white working-
class people in favour of those from
ethnic minorities, out of a combination
of guilt, exoticism and an erroneous
belief in the universality of “white
privilege”.
Here, the “white working class”
becomes “the left behind”: those
perceived to be uniformly bewildered
by change, whose sense of loss began in
the era of mass immigration and not
hundreds of years before, in the time of
land enclosures, rapid industrialisation
and continual migration and violence.
Elements of the Conservative party and
Ukip as a whole see vast political gains
to be made from encouraging a sense of
victimhood among people whose
relative economic stability has been
hard-won and, they perceive, short-
lived. Whether or not they are right is
another matter, given the inability of
Ukip’s Paul Nuttall to win the Stoke-on-
Trent Central byelection last month, and
suggests that working-class people are
not as daft as he had hoped.
The term first gained wider currency
around 15 years ago, partly as a result
New Labour’s failure to treat the
narrowing of class divisions as a project
more complex than chucking City
money at former pit villages. In 2004,
the author Michael Collins published
The Likes of Us: A Biography of the
White Working Class, which sought to
paint the south London of his childhood
as an unchanged, socially cohesive
entity for centuries until immigration
and multiculturalism were “imposed”
on its residents from above.
The vogue is to describe
working-class people as 'the left
behind'
A few years later, the BBC chipped in
with its own guilt-ridden intervention,
the White Season, about the white
working class. The term seemed to have
become an insidious shorthand in
media and political discourse for people
the middle-class media landscape could
not get a grip on: people who looked like
them but who seemed to have an
entirely different set of values that had
been ignored and needed exposure.
The current vogue is to describe
working class people as “left behind”,
but all these terms mean similar things:
people who are written about as if they
are curious moon specimens, and are
believed to hold the same views en
masse and thus are not really
responsible for their actions; people
who are nostalgic, backward and need
to get with the programme. This is all
part of the current political story that
says everyone is totally responsible for
their own lives, except when they are
racist – and even then they must have
somehow been “driven to it” by all these
nasty foreigners taking their jobs.
Owen Hatherley, author of The Ministry
of Nostalgia , reckons “the idea of the
working class as a ‘forgotten tribe’ is a
way of depoliticising class, and making
class into another interest group. [It’s
treated as] a sort of nationality, based
on accent, culture and a particular set
of views. Among other things this makes
it possible to see self-employed small
businessmen who own houses in the
south-east as working class, when in any
economic definition they’re petit
bourgeois.”
In its 13 years in power, Labour hoped
that, with enough redistribution to
former industrial regions – often by
creating public sector jobs in areas of
low private-sector growth – and by
repeating “we’re all middle class
now” often enough, class would
wither away without the necessity
to confront directly the way that the
disadvantages of being working class
are embedded in the overarching
structure of society.
The National Equality Panel, established
by Harriet Harman a year and a half
before Labour were voted out of
government in 2010, sought to enshrine
legislation to prevent employers from
discriminating against job applicants
and employees on the grounds of social
class, but was one of the first casualties
of the coalition government.
As Labour belatedly turned its attention
to class inequality, the British National
Party began making gains in council
seats in parts of northern England and
on the peripheries of cities such as
Leicester and London. Its leader, Nick
Griffin, became an MEP for the north-
west in 2009, holding on to his seat until
2014. Again, Labour MPs in mostly
northern working-class seats perceived
the BNP’s rise as symptomatic of the
party’s move away from its “northern
heartlands” (another soon-to-be
wellworn cliche) and towards its other
electoral constituencies in more
glamorous places.
Yet, as Gargi Bhattacharyya points out
in one of the Runnymede essays, a fixed
idea of respectable “white working
class” values – socially conservative and
focused on the maintenance of law and
order – was not only handy, but
necessary for Labour ministers such as
David Blunkett and Hazel Blears to
carry out many of their more regressive
domestic policies. Blunkett, in
particular, seemed to take pleasure
in the harshness of his stint as home
secretary, going tough on crime (and
quietly ditching his “tough on the causes
of crime” mantra) as he instigated asbos
and built new prisons.
Labour hoped that repeating
'We're all middle class now'
would make class wither away
With fixed ideas come fixed identities,
whether or not they bear any
resemblance to the messy reality. The
idea that immigration and
multiculturalism has been “imposed” on
an oddly static, inert and, by
assumption, all-white working class
doesn’t bear comparison with the
reality. In areas such as Collins’s south
London, working-class people moved in
and out, and instigated mass migrations
of their own to outer suburbs decades
before widespread immigration from
the Caribbean and south Asia.
My paternal grandfather was born in
Ireland, my maternal grandmother in
the South Wales valleys. Both came to
Birmingham to work in factories; their
children, my parents, are Brummies, as
am I. They were white, and working
class, yet also migrants – and in the case
of my Irish granddad, one who in 1950s
Birmingham didn’t count as “white”
enough to fit in (he ended up returning
to Dublin).
I asked Sathnam Sanghera, whose 2008
book The Boy With the Topknot
brilliantly portrays working-class life in
80s Wolverhampton, how he feels about
the term. “A context which implies
[working-class people] are by definition
white is annoying,” he says. “The
working-class area I grew up in was
white and black and Sikh – almost all
my uncles and aunts were working in
factories. Even now the Sikh community
in Britain is only beginning to be lower
middle class, and they seem to have
backed Brexit, at least in
Wolverhampton. The picture is much
more complex than these easy black and
white terms imply.”
The sociologist Paul Gilroy, whose
influential book There Ain’t No Black
in the Union Jack was published 30
years ago, noted in 2008 that British
arguments about class, race and identity
involved “the obsessive repetition of key
themes – invasion, war, contamination,
loss of identity – and the resulting
mixture suggests that an anxious,
melancholic mood has become part of
the cultural infrastructure of the place”.
The use of the same stock terms point to
the same questions: who belongs in
Britain? Who is allowed to belong, and
why does it change according to who
you ask? Why is the messy reality of
daily experience – people rubbing along,
finding a way to co-exist, and,
mysteriously for the likes of Nigel
Farage, consistently refusing to erupt in
race riots every 10 minutes – overlooked
in favour of the easier story of Us and
Them?