White

I think it’s basically “having a go at the Muslims”, not out of a racist motive for doing so but because it’s a way of continuing a proxy war against their real enemies and “having a go at other people on the left who don’t want to have a go at the Muslims”. I think the idea is a sort of “the worse, the better” Leninism – if they can persuade us that “multiculturalism” means that Enoch Powell has to be regarded as a valid community representative alongside Bernie Grant (who we all of course revere), then maybe we’ll give up and all adopt someone’s warped version of a French-style monoculturalism.

I’d also add that if you actually wanted to make a documentary about white working class culture in the UK since the 1970s, surely your main theme would be how it had been completely cross-pollinated and integrated with black and asian culture in about a million ways. To take white people who don’t want to live near non-white people as representative (or who don’t like Eastern European immigrants) is weird. And of course it’s doubly odd for someone like John Lloyd or Andrew Anthony, who are the first to notice when the BBC mistakenly starts treating extremists and weirdoes as the “authentic” voice of the Muslim community, to not notice that the same shell game is at work.

Also slightly gets my goat that the only way to be “white working class” is to be poor, have a declining standard of living, work in a sunset industry (preferably in the North of England), etc. Basically manufacturing-fetishism of the 1970s vintage. The kids who pack the trains in to Liverpool Street to work in the back office at Deutsche Bank are white, and they’re working class, but they’re never gonna get their documentary made. I mean, working men’s clubs in Bradford are interesting and worth documenting, but the fact that they are in decline doesn’t actually mean that the white working class is, or that they represent something worth preserving.

Many regrets for the shameless plug, but I wrote something pretty similar on my blog:

As someone who enthusiastically welcomes a debate on class, poverty and equality in this country, it’s so deeply dispiriting when the emphasis is placed on the quarrels and street skirmishes between different groups of poor people, rather than one of the many more important areas that affect all of these groups: unemployment, crime, education and the barriers erected by segregated religious schools, drugs, social housing, gang culture and our destructive youth, sexual health, health in general.

Nowadays, there is practically no discussion of some of the issues that had previously been a preserve of the British left (I’ll admit Johann Hari as an admirable exception). You can attribute many reasons to this, but one is certainly this obsession with ‘muscular liberalism’ and bashing those factions of the left they believe to be subservient to far-right Islamism. For all the Galloways and SWPs and their assorted hysterical bretheren may have dismayed & discredited the left, they have, at least, never lost touch with the fact that there are many problems affecting working class communities that need to be addressed. The ‘decents’, it seems, have either forgotten all about this or (in the case of Andrew Anthony) completely misdiagnose the problems.

But the population that used to be the labouring class of manufacturing industry has been passed by, in a multi-generational process of herding their more recalcitrant elements into sink-estates, where much is now made of the ‘culture’ of dependency, gangs, etc that reigns.

This is absolutely not true. The vast majority of that population has moved into other industries, remains in employment and has in general seen an improvement in its standard of living. Poor white English people living in “sink-estates” are really very not typical of the white working class.

By the way, speed-reading alert:

dsquared may feel that such individuals don’t “represent something worth preserving”,

I might or might not feel that, but a look at the sentence I actually wrote reveals that the predicate “does not represent something worth preserving” refers back to the subject “working mens’ clubs in Bradford”. Get this right please.

A lot of valid points are made above, but surely whatever ‘white, working class culture’ turns out to be, it’s a legitimate topic of inquiry? And if white working-class people, whoever they turn out to be, feel embattled, surely examining that fact doesn’t amount to sympathising with them? It’s going to be sociologically important, and politically interesting, even if we think ‘their’ sense of embattled-ness is a product of a distorting media culture, let’s say?

And on the topic of cross-cutting identities, and so on (see 7’s last point, a perfectly valid one), perhaps this is something that we might expect to emerge from these programmes, and maybe usefully so? If the conclusion is that there’s no one white working-class culture, more to the good, right? We haven’t seen the pieces yet, right? (we have seen the newspaper articles Chris B cites, and they may be worrying – I’m talking about the BBC output only!)

The programme and the reactions to it from both ‘muscular liberalis’ and ‘muscular multiculturalists’ is an utterly depressing sign of the times that demostrates how split and clueless the left has become. Regarding the decents, to use discussion of the white working class as a stick to beat Muslims with is truly scrapping the barrel. Rehabilitating Powell is a sick joke. But to advocate state sponsored multiculutralism and then to get into hysterics when the white working class starts seeing itself (or starts being seen by others) as a distinct ethnic group is absurd.

D2, two points:
Surely the working class that EP Thompson describes has shrunk if not disappeared with the decline of manufacturing, and many of those who could not adapt to Britain’s post industrial economy have fallen into conditions that dave describes? Also: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/lanc01_.html

In addition, when did France become the new bogeyman? What exactly is so awful about the 5th Republic? You might not agree with its integration strategies and it is depressing that the fascists always make a good showing in elections, but it’s hardly Burma.

You haven’t even mentioned the BNP style ad used to promote this series and what that means. Why is the BBC suddenly so concerned about a group of people they’re happy to write off the rest of the years as chavs or horrible examples for middle class asperationalism to overcome?

Surely the working class that EP Thompson describes has shrunk if not disappeared with the decline of manufacturing, and many of those who could not adapt to Britain’s post industrial economy have fallen into conditions that dave describes?

The simple fact of technological progress more or less ensures that “the working class that [anyone from more than thirty years ago] described has shrunk if not disappeared. But “those who could not adapt to Britain’s post industrial economy” describes a pretty small and not very representative fraction of the working class. Things have got better for the working class in the last twenty years, not worse.

Everyone accepts this when we look at “rural communities” – they have a a lot of genuine problems, but it’s pretty generally accepted that their problems aren’t particularly representative of Britain as a whole. It’s the same with that gerrymandered subset of white working class people that Dave and several others on this thread have determined to be the only ones allowed to have a culture. Welsh nationalist politics went through all of this in the 1970s and 80s when it was trying to define what was authentically Welsh, and my god didn’t things get better for them when they gave up on the attempt.

There’s an oddity about the addition of the modifier “white” to “working class”, in the British context. Historically, Britain has been a country where class has trumped ethnicity as the key dimension of social stratification for politics.

What’s the oddity?

Assuming for the moment that class is “the key dimension of social stratification for politics” – surely that does not mean that it’s the only dimension, or that politics is the only important aspect about life? There’s more to life than which political party you vote for.

But there is a problem. The cultural elites have indeed given disproportionate attention to other cultures, and have tended to avoid criticism. In contrast, white working class culture is either neglected or patronised or criticised.

Reading all the commenters above trying to intellectualise the problem away is interesting.

I have a mental picture of you holding your sophisticated noses as you watch the programmes.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by distinct, and what we mean by ‘white, working class culture.’ A charitable reading is that the series might simply be interested to investigate what cultural norms, practices, etc people who happen to be white and working class happen to share – and a conclusion to that could be that they share very little that’s distinct from other cross-cutting groups. That’s certainly the conclusion I’d expect. And it would be interesting in itself, to many people. Given Billy Bragg(he’s involved in the series, right?)’s not-always-very-articulate arguments to the effect that the English are a mongrel nation, that we’re all ‘half-English’ and need to redefine what it means to be English in the twenty-first century, I kind of assumed that hybridity and intersectionality was going to be part of the story being told. But like I said, I haven’t seen the programmes yet.

What kind of problems could “white” working-class people have over and above the problems of working-class people as a whole, by virtue of being “white”, which might make the “white working class” into a meaningful category of people deserving of a pundit’s sympathy?

I can’t actually think of any, beyond fear and hatred of all those brown people flooding the country.

Who said an all-white environment was necessary?

Anyway, my alternative theory is that the whole Decent Left phenomenon is just that those centre-left commentators with an unusually high social authoritarianism index finally got external validation sufficient to get their auth on.

Well why don’t you watch the programme then?
I won’t be able to. But my question was meant to express scepticism in principle about what sort of extra problems (apart from racist paranoia) could exist for “white” working-class people qua “white”.

Perhaps indeed the programme will shockingly uncover a systematic campaign of anti-“white” discrimination around Britain. But I rather doubt it. (Given that, eg, according to the statistics linked by aidan kehoe above, “white” people have the lowest levels of unemployment of any grouping identified by levels of dermal melanin/geographic location of ancestors.)

“What kind of problems could “white” working-class people have over and above the problems of working-class people as a whole, by virtue of being “white””

I guess that is one of the things the programme will be looking at, lthough they don’t actually say (do they?) that their intent is to identify problems. If the problems exist, though, I would guess that they are similar to, but different from, the particular problems faced by black working class people, you know, discriminatory behaviour, denigration in the media, negative sterotypes, that sort of thing. Hard for to say, though.

“Perhaps indeed the programme will shockingly uncover a systematic campaign of anti-”white” discrimination around Britain. But I rather doubt it. ”

I doubt it too, but discrimination needn’t be ‘systmatic’ to be painful to the people suffering from it. I think that most anti-black discrimination that is experienced is equally unsystematic but very often unpleasant for all that. Think of things like negative sterotyping in the media. It is very easy when you don’t belong to a victimised group to insist that these things are trivial, but they often don’t seem trivial to those experiencing them.

Looking at the programmes listed on the BBC website, one obvious gap is anything much looking at contemporary white working-class cultural products. All they have is something on a working men’s club (which judging from the title, Last Orders, is about the decline of that as a cultural centre). Why don’t they have something about white working-class music (or is there no longer any distinctively WWC music?)

I haven’t lived in England for a few years: did I miss the part where “white” suddenly stopped being the default identity, and where people identified as “white” suddenly stopped enjoying all the unexamined structural advantages that had hitherto accrued to them? If so, you’re right: we should indeed carefully and sensitively treat “whites” as a grouping as vulnerable to “negative stereotyping” as any other.

Deutsche Bank don’t, outside exceptional circumstances, recruit non-graduates in the UK.

rilly? Every single secretary in Deutsche Bank has a degree? Every single IT guy? Every single Prime Brokerage Equity Nostro Process Manager? (in case anyone can’t be bothered clicking, that goes to a job ad requiring A-levels). You’ve reached the page of their graduate recruitment site; that’s the tip of the iceberg of the financial services industry.

Also, given London demographics, unless they totally bullshitting about diversity policy and faking the group photos on their web-site, it would be pretty unlikely for anyone working there to find themselves in an all-white environment

Is this another membership criterion for the “white working class”?

My impression is that for most entry-level or menial jobs a British employer would be more likely to hire a South Asian or an Eastern European, as the stereotype is that the ethnic English and Scottish working class are thick lazy drunken louts.

One anecdote, one data point and one question:
1. I once overheard two English builders saying of a Polish coworker, “he’s a good bloke, but we’ve got to teach him not to work so hard.” they were joking, but also serious.

2. among individuals who complete certain types of apprenticeships (apprenticeships of course do not lead to menial jobs, so we’re not talking about exactly same thing), the statistics show that whites are 50% more likely to soon find themselves employed than are nonwhites.

3. at what point will it be acceptable in the UK to stop referring to the white nonworking class as the white working class?

Well if people want to avoid “balkinization” then they should start talking about class and social issues, instead of always group and identity issues. The American Left has ruined chances for progressive change by just that approach, slighting the working class and constantly pushing women, homosexuals, racial minorities, etc.

It seems that people here are just as much into “ethnicities” as their opponents, only they push the racial groups instead of the non-racial ones.

“What kind of problems could “white” working-class people have over and above the problems of working-class people as a whole, by virtue of being “white””

This is not exactly the right question to be asking. It is not problems over and above “working class people” that make this documentary important. Examining the experiences of the white working class is unlikely to shed light on race in the UK, but can perhaps shed light on class. If you examine the discrimination faced by minorities in the working class, it will likely be impossible to distinguish which of their experiences can be attributed to race vs. class. By examining the experiences of the white working class, the documentary could shed light on issues particular to class that cannot be isolated by examining the plight of working class minorities. I am not saying that it will do that, simply that it could. While whites may attribute their problems to people of color in “I’m not racist, but” statements, a critical watcher could discern the ways in which the working class are pitted against each other and the real causes of problems for the working class.

I mean, working men’s clubs in Bradford are interesting and worth documenting, but the fact that they are in decline doesn’t actually mean that the white working class is, or that they represent something worth preserving.

Tsk. The second ‘they’ is ambiguous. But we know what you mean.

I cannot imagine a Guardian journalist dismissing a section of the community as ‘black trash’, simply because they dressed in a certain way, survived on benefits or lived in particular places. This seems to me to be something worth investigating, at least.

You say it’s “worth investigating”, but revealed preference suggests that you didn’t take the trouble to find out whether there were any examples of the Guardian referring pejoratively to working class British people as “white trash”. In fact, a quick trawl of the site search facility reveals, basically all of the 100 mentions of the phrase are either:

1) film reviewers’ lazy uses of the term to describe American cultural icons (mainly the late Anna Nicole Smith).

2) opinion columnists saying “apparently it’s acceptable to refer to ‘white trash'” in exactly the way you do.

3) the fact that a character in Coronation Street used the phrase, or Jermaine Jackson did while on Celebrity Big Brother.

4) references to Lynndie England, mainly in the context of Gary Yonge’s article suggesting that she was being made a scapegoat.

It is a view that seems to be, at first sight, supported by some anecdotal evidence such as the willingness of the bourgeois presss to use insulting words like ‘chav’ where they would not use insulting words like ‘paki’.

I was not previously aware that the Sun was part of the bourgeois press.

By examining the experiences of the white working class, the documentary could shed light on issues particular to class that cannot be isolated by examining the plight of working class minorities.

Why is it forced to focus exclusively on one colour/”ethnicity” or another?

I find it more relevant that they are advertising jobs that don’t need a degree.

Only for those with multiple years of very specific experience, which currently can’t easily be acquired as a school leaver.

Of course, DB is currently unusual in that it only does high finance, has no network of regional branches in the UK. On the other hand, that just makes it ahead of the trend:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2007/jan/19/business.accounts

More generally though, is your point that you can’t be working-class and work in the financial services industry?

For non-heritable definitions of class, that’s pretty much true. The lowliest financial service jobs are C1 (Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional), which is traditionally lower middle class.

I don’t think there are many skilled manual workers in the sector, and the unskilled ones like cleaners are almost certainly not employees these days. I’d be surprised if there are many offices where the cleaners and other staff regularly socialise together: it’s a social class boundary, not just an economic one.

The trend to centralisation and automation of many of those jobs is on top of that, tending to replace C1 clerks in Manchester with B graduates in London.

#3, #34, #40 – Since when are (non-jewish) eastern europeans “non-white”?

Larretj @44 has a good point regarding studying the white working class vs the non-white working class to tease out the differences between class and race as influences on people’s conditions, but if Chris is reading the blurbs right, that’s not what this series will be about.

There is something to be said about changes to working class culture which are being driven by changes made by the political class of the country – in this sense, even if immigration were restricted to EU residents, it makes sense to draw a contrast between the “native” and “immigrant”. Cultural changes resulting from mass immigration aren’t always positive – most immigrants from the “third world” have far less egalitarian attitudes towards gender relationships than even the working classes of western countries, and fatalism in the face of government corruption or oppression is not necessarily a positive change in the existing culture.

There’s an oddity about the addition of the modifier “white” to “working class”, in the British context. Historically, Britain has been a country where class has trumped ethnicity as the key dimension of social stratification for politics.

Immediately, “Nestor” from Ulysses popped into my head.

— I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that? No. And do you know why?

— Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.

“Historically,” less than 5% of England defined themselves as non-White. Today, 10% do. I don’t see why it should be considered “odd” that race was never much of a factor back in the old days when almost everyone was the same race!

It isn’t a deliberately constructed barrier. In isn’t a barrier at all as – at least in IT – almost all of these jobs advertised as needing a degree can in fact be got by people without a degree but the skills to do the work. In fact generally in employment if a post mentions a degree at all it is an entry level position – nobody at my Big Bank mentioned a degree (except in the advertisement) and after I was employed there they were surprised but not upset that I don’t have one.

I’m not sure the thousands of people who come our of places like the University of Strathclyde, University of Paisley, or various colleges, and end up working for the vast back offices in glasgow could be classified as “middle class”. Seems to me like a direct continuation of the skilled working classes who built big ships or maintained complex steam engines in days gone by.

The Clyde nowadays echoes to the sound of fingers pitter-pattering on keyboards building and maintaining financial systems rather than heavy machinery, cranes and the like building and maintaining ships, but the employees of the former are largely the offspring of the employees of the latter and their broad function is the same.

I agree with daniel, the BBC is focussing on working men’s clubs with a greyhound fetish and flat caps. That’s a caricature – the working class has changed as much as any other class in Britain and the BBC excludes the bulk of today’s working class in its programme.

Ah, yes, expect the focus on people who moved out to three-bedroomed suburban semis (albeit estate semis) in the 1980s, and now see the darkies living in the down-town terraces where they (or their own parents) grew up, and — the nerve — turning disused churches into mosques. Throw in a dash of ‘well, we didn’t keep ourselves separate or talk a funny language’, usually followed by discussions of the Italian ice-cream man and the Catholic club.

I’ll go further than dsquared, because I’m part of that demographic the series appears to be highlighting: It’s a curious mixture of bullshit nostalgia and prolier-than-thou class guilt, and I’d assumed we had enough of that on the BBC with Gene Hunt.

There are aspects of working-class-town culture that are fading away, and industrial towns have a short enough history for people to make a false conflation between ‘keeping our heritage’ and the particular siting of those cultural and structural trappings in the time before non-white immigration. But the continuity between a white immigrant culture and a non-white one is obvious to the people who still live in the terraces, and the accent is equally broad on the second generation.

Plus, with the arrival of Poles and others from the eastern EU, the circle is turning again. My dad, whose casual racism is typical of his peers, speaks highly of the Polish tradesmen he’s worked with, and I don’t quite know what to make of that. Perhaps it’s an intersection of race and class, to the extent that the skilled trades remain very white.

I should add one thing since I insulted “liberal planners.”
As far as democracy is concerned I defend the necessity of indoctrination. Liberals don’t.

Chris,

The power of Google is not something that has escaped my attention this last decade, however, unlike some online commentators, I don’t have any inclination to deliberately overstate my already vast knowledge by pretending I know someone/something I actually don’t. Hovering over your Andrew Anthony link was sufficient to let me know he’s a Guardian columnist, but in the pantheon of decentism he’s hardly the first name to come to mind. My point was that armed only with an entirely objective piece by John Lloyd and something by some bloke called ‘Andrew Anthony’, you were somewhat overstretching with your entirely contrived attack on what and whoever you believe to be “decent” on this 6th day in the month of March, 2008. Like that’s a shock.

I hadn’t realised that “receiving” is a synonym of “anticipating” until now, Brownie. Thanks for broadening my appreciation of English.

Oh, I’m quite certain that any objective reader would quickly come to the conclusion that there’s a great deal more “assumption” than “anticipation” occuring on this thread.

You’ll find his views warmly endorsed multiple times – don’t you guys read one another’s posts?

I’ll take your word. And if I read every post DavidT wrote, my children would wonder who that guy was sitting in corner behind a keyboard.

[aeiou]An interesting end to that linked New Statesman story

the institution is not only still “hideously white”, but hideously middle-class.

Note, the *not only still “hideously white”. It really is strange that an essayist can complain about the rehabilitation of Enoch (as if 7/7 did not prove him right for the 110th time), but can slur white folk that way. It is also strange that somehow BBC could have an entire “Asian Network” (talk about a ‘constructed identity”
, without disturbing the oh so delicate sensibilities of one Chris Bertram. Finally, I’d agree with an earlier commentator that denying white working class culture is in itself an act of agression against the white working class. Surely on my visit to Manze’s Pie and Mash a couple of weeks ago, I saw the beleaguered white working class engaging in a ritual enforcing their own identity. Everyone in the shop, which was doing a brisk trade, was white. Grandmas, rosy cheeked sandy haired lads, clean-scrubbed young mums pushing prams with pink babies. Quite edifying indeed. I hope these people fight back — as Orwell said, the only hope is with the proles.

BTW, to Nick S. Indeed the skilled trades are ‘hiddeously white’ (English, Irish, East European). The Asian adversion to real work (making stuff, building stuff, growing stuff) is commonly known — its one of the reasons they immigrate (I’ve no doubt that could be confirmed by sociological means). As for the ‘Afro-Caribbeans’ , they seem best suited for proping up Ken’s dicatorial city-state, walking around giving parking citations, sitting on their rumps as entrance security for multi-national corporate buildings (in part to guard against their co-ethnics), raising the crime rate, and generally sucking up tax dollars from the English as employees of government ‘race-relations’ quangos . Again, it shouldn’t be hard to adduce the appropriate statistics to confirm these ‘racist’ opinions. Facts are damn hard things.