The betrayal of the white working class

A good article by Madelaine Bunting in today's Guardian.  No,  you're not dreaming,  I really did say that!

She reports on a new book by three Labour supporting academics,  explaining why Labour lost the support of the white working class.  The book,  "The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict" is published today.  It is based on interviews carried out with residents of Tower Hamlets over 12-years.  As Madelaine explains:

The nub of the argument put forward by the authors, Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young, is that the well-intentioned policies of a rights-based welfare state in which benefits and housing were awarded on the basis of need, not past contributions, directly contributed to the ratcheting up of racial tension as poor incoming Bangladeshis were given priority for council housing.

That's the first time I have ever heard anyone on the left admit that this happened.  She goes on:

The white working-class extended families were broken up as their offspring were moved to Essex for housing. The ones who suffered most were women, left bereft of their social status as the arbiters of family and neighbourhood life. The latter both fragmented. And the blame is pinned on the welfare state (not helped by the economic decline of the docklands in the 60s and 70s).

The problem, claim the authors, was the betrayal of the working class's vision of the welfare state as a system of mutual insurance - to tide one over a tough patch - and its transformation into a welfare state of entitlement and rights based on need. It had moral force, but to many interviewees it was unfair: anyone can live off the system, they complained.

A sense of loss and betrayal among white working-class East Enders underpins many of the interviews. A heroic second world war history, suffering the Luftwaffe's depredations on the docklands, entitled them and their children to something better. Their world "was snatched from them - by bombs and housing policies, other people's notions of progress and the pressures of consumerism".

To compound the sense of injury, the dogged white racism that provides a convincing rationale to many of what has happened is treated with contempt by the "do-gooders" of the welfare state - the social workers and housing officers. Not for the first time, the professional middle classes find grounds for moral superiority over the working class.

As I have said before,  it is still acceptable in intellectual circles to be to be rude about white working class people and especially to scorn them for their racism. No-one would dare heap the same level of abuse on any other group. Meanwhile,  the working-class has borne the brunt of the problems caused by mass immigration,  for the most part with good grace. 

Unfortunately for the do-gooders, though,  working-class people are not convinced by their 'progressive' ideas.  Here's Madelaine again:

Meanwhile, the bitter pill to swallow for the well-intentioned liberal is that while the welfare state may have saved many from dire deprivation, it has singularly failed to engage the active participation of its clients. Instead of being the engine of social democracy once envisaged, it has proved to be an engine of resentful alienation from the state.

So postwar "progress" may have served the middle classes well, materially and socially - they've still got their social networks, which they use for personal advancement, status and companionship - but it has served the working class much less well. Their brightest offspring are adopted and well rewarded, but the networks and self-respect of the communities from which they come have largely been destroyed.

She could have added that the middle-classes have done quite well out of the welfare state,  as many people secured well-paid employment and good pensions from the new public sector professions.

In short then, the white working class has been shafted by housing policies,  the welfare state and mass immigration.  The cohesion of the old communities has been destroyed and we are left with crime,  welfare dependency and social breakdown.  This book was not written by rabid right-wingers but by people on the left.  One of the authors, Michael Young,  wrote "Family and Kinship in East London" in the 1950s,  again based on interviews with local people.  Back then, he warned against these policies but he was ignored by politicians and academics.  The rest of the story we know only too well.

For an account of the impact that these policies had,  "The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class" by Michael Collins is a good place to start.  He tells the story through the experiences of his own family and on the whole, he draws similar conclusions to Michael Young et al.

"The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict"  is going onto my ever-expanding reading list. If anyone gets round to reading it before I do,  post a review below. 

Update:  Laban Tall and Peter Briffa had a go about this last week.  I was too busy being angry about the Cartoon Wars to notice.

Update 2:  Tim Worstall is having a go too.

Comments

[Dave]

I think you/they are missing an important point.
Yes the white working class has been betrayed, but it isn't only from good intentions gone bad, some of it was absolutely done on purpose.

From laban: "A view of multiculturalism where no single group is perceived as dominant is needed" communities minister David Miliband argued this week.
http://ukcommentators.blogspot.com/2006/02/were-doomed.html

Miliband talks with reference to riots in the 80's, but there always seems to be someone arguing for more immigration using any excuse they can find. However his admission that he 'wants' traditional English culture to be a minority in London seems outrageous to me.

We need to stop pretending the problems we face are some kind of accident resulting from bad policy and start looking at the real causes.

Might I add this break up of traditional communities is still happening, in the countryside because of white-flight we are getting rich people dramatically pushing up the prices so local people have to move away.
Now I support the freemarket (mostly) because I don't think there is any better choice. But I don't think it would be happening to the same extent without the mass-immigration.

[Laban Tall]

Dave's right. Round my way the farmers are getting rid of the native workers at top speed - why have tied cottages (worth £300k to white flighters) when you can replace them with 5 Poles in a portakabin or caravan ?

There's also stuff on Madeleine at Harry's and Clive Davis.

[Dave]

Laban. I'm not sure if you are blaming bad capitalistic farmers for part of the mass-immigration or just saying they have no choice because of the lack of 'relatively' poor people able to live in the countryside who would have traditionally done those jobs? I assume the latter
but these days farmers seem to get a bad rep.