The biggest lie told about members of Britain’s middle class — and I speak here with all the dubious authority derived from belonging to that doomed tribe — is that we do not think or talk or agonise about what is now called “the white working class”.
Overlooked? Ignored? Rubbish. The middle classes have both feared the revolutionary potential, envied the apparent lawlessness and yearned for a dusting of the hard-won authenticity of this country’s white working class for almost as long as there has been a printing press.
Lift a rock on any decade in the past two centuries and you’ll find our class anxieties beneath, scuttling madly about. Matthew Arnold wrote fretfully in 1869 of “that vast portion of … the working-class which, raw and half-developed, has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place,” Matthew Arnold wrote fretfully in 1869. Everyone with a pen and a bit of money took a safari among what Arnold dubbed “the populace”. Friedrich Engels slummed it in abysmal Manchester; JB Priestley banged on about Bradford; George Orwell grudgingly ate tripe in Wigan.
The appetite for tripe diminished but the middle classes have continued to raid this peculiar larder of respectful resentment for the lower orders, as Joel Budd points out in his introduction to Underdogs.He begins his tale in the Noughties the white working class were considered the scum of the earth. To Peter Mandelson they were “losers, no hopers, low-life scroungers”.
Audiences laughed when Vicky Pollard swapped her baby for a Westlife CD in Little Britain. They hissed when, in 2007, the working-class reality star Jade Goody was needlessly vulgar about the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother. This triggered an equally needless intervention from Gordon Brown, prime minister at the time: “Shilpa is in Britain representing Bollywood and she should be treated with respect.” Effigies of Goody went up in flames across the subcontinent.
A punchline at home and now a disgrace in India, the white working classes were pitiable, then — their children morbidly obese, their tracksuits hideous. They were ungovernable; they were “chavs”. These chavs were also scary, just as they were in Arnold’s day. The Daily Telegraph winched the venerable commentator Simon Heffer out of bed to chastise the violent lumpenproletariat: “Our underclass has been allowed to get out of control … Drug dealing and theft are the main careers …” Enter, stage right, the unbelievably posh David Cameron, promising to hug a hoodie and redeem “broken Britain”.
Then, like the insane cowboy hat-wearing major in Dr Strangelove who rides a nuclear bomb towards its megaton denouement, Cameron dropped Brexit on Britain. The effect of the blast on society was, in a way, radioactive: class mutated. Morrissey, the Anglo-Irish, slum-born singer who once sang wistfully of Margaret Thatcher’s demise (“When will you die?”), suddenly issued warm ticklish purrs for Nigel Farage.
Down was up, up was down, and the scum of the earth became the salt of the earth. Liberals who decried the use of “chav” began throwing “gammon” around like it was Christmas Day. A new union was formed between rebellious hedge fund managers and jobless Red Wall steelworkers. “The way that Labour treated the white working class was despicable,” a still-extant Heffer said to Iain Dale in 2019.
• Tony Sewell: We are still failing the white working classes
Chavs were actually sensible, rooted “Somewheres”, to borrow the author David Goodhart’s phrase. We returned to a season of promises (from government) and concern (from journalists): the white working class would be petted and placated and levelled up. Zadie Smith, the urbane novelist who is as close to an operational conscience as liberal Britain has, was moved to admit in 2016 that the white working class “really have nothing, not even the perceived moral elevation that comes with acknowledged trauma or recognised victimhood”.
Just as Conservative cabinet ministers were referring to pensioners in Stoke as “our voters”, everything changed again. As Budd, an editor at The Economist, puts it: “In 2024, many places thick with white working-class residents voted for a left-wing political party led by a former lawyer from London.” What if the white working class is not what Jacob Rees-Mogg or Owen Jones think it is?
Budd is more of a caveat-ist than a polemicist — a reporter who travels widely through obscure Welsh towns, Leicester estates and Lincolnshire villages, rather than a commentator issuing pronouncements from his desk. This is a calm, sensitive, soothingly sociological book. His notion of the white working class is fuzzy and porous and a bit weird. They are different in different places, although they are everywhere — “not one of the 7,500 wards in England and Wales contains no members of the group”. The young are different from the old. The women are quite different from the men. If they have problems (and they do), these have little to do with being disrespected by the liberal elite.
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Most of the white working class, he finds as he spends time in council estates, one-pub villages and fenland towns, “do not sit around all day resenting immigrants and metropolitan liberals, and wondering what has become of manufacturing”. Their attitudes towards migration are not easy to caricature, varying by place and age. One older man, John, tells Budd: “There’s two sides now. There’s immigrants and there’s families that were born here.” That sounds quite bleak, but Budd reports a “combination of hostility, reflection and sympathy” in John, who is not straightforwardly racist.
With such complexity evident everywhere, Budd finds that the sharply defined lines around white working-class identity are really more like a hazy chalk circle. They can just be blown away.
Budd does make some distinctions. He identifies three areas where the white working classes live. “Heartlands”: towns and villages where they are heavily concentrated. “Enclaves”: the outskirts of ethnically diverse cities, where white working-class people are “a self-conscious group that feels invaded and put upon”. And “colonies”: areas settled by white working-class people from somewhere else, such as Thetford, a Norfolk village full of transplanted Cockneys that has a “strange throwback culture”.
And he does worry about them. He worries about their exam results: “In England, the proportion of white eighteen-year-olds from state schools who go to university is lower than for every other ethnic group.” He worries about the pressures on single mothers in places like the Tees Valley. (One woman tells him: “You have to work like you don’t have children, and be a parent like you don’t work.”) And he worries that they are literally stuck. In a declining pit town like Edlington in South Yorkshire, Budd finds an area “frozen” by planning regulations into its mid-20th-century shape. And more than other groups, the white working class, many of whom live far away from affluent southeast England, cannot take advantage of economic opportunities. So much for Billy Elliot.
The most significant change in working-class life in the past 50 years is that they are now defined in official surveys and censuses as “white British”. The working classes Arnold and Orwell wrote about were almost exclusively white, of course, just like everyone else. In Britain today, the proportion of residents born outside the country is higher than you’ll find in the US, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. Ethnicity is replacing class as the main political faultline in Britain. Budd is bullish and optimistic about this development: “There will be no return to a more homogeneous society.”
The truly stark finding in this book is that Britain’s white heartlands (economically defunct, educationally struggling) are being ruled by people in super-diverse, economically successful cities. Budd does not foresee further friction down the line but it is a situation pregnant with the politics of demagoguery, violence, envy, subsidy and strife. Those who write about it may end up sounding more like Matthew Arnold than Joel Budd.
Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class by Joel Budd (Picador £20 pp336). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
