Danczuk and the 'white working class'

New Left Project are running a series on race and class in Britain. It's deserving of a look. In particular, Jon Lawrence's piece, published today, Why the Working Class was never 'White', is excellent, and speaks to a particularly unhelpful idea that has currency in the labour movement. I quote the final paragraph:

The sooner we recognise that the ‘white working class’ is not a thing, but rather an unhelpful media construction which the left must eschew, the better. Not only does it deflect attention from the virulent racism in other parts of English society, but it reinforces the idea of working-class people as unchanging, anachronistic and ‘left behind’. The ‘racialisation’ of class in Britain has been a consequence of the weakening of ‘class’ as a political idea since the 1970s – it is a new construction, not an historic one, and it is profoundly unhelpful. It makes it all too easy for millions of people hit hardest by neo-liberal economics to be dismissed as somehow reaping what they deserve.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of Simon Danczuk. The voice of Labour's hard right in England, and a serial complainer - sadly against all the evidence - that the leadership don't say very much about immigration, Danczuk is also a self-proclaimed advocate for the working class and/ or 'ordinary people'. He considers himself to be part of the former, 'a working class MP'. It has to be said that, in spite of an impeccably proletarian background, his last job before entering parliament was as director and co-owner of a public affairs consultancy, but working class status is presumably supposed to be something like Catholic baptism, indelible.

The brand of populism Danczuk promotes combines a class rhetoric with a campaigning stance on tabloid-pleasing issues; he has been a prominent voice around the scandal of child sex abuse. A nostalgic, romantic, attachment to the constructed white working class of yesteryear co-exists in Danczuk's mind with an outright rejection of the kind of reformist mitigation of capitalism's worst excesses one might imagine to feature, 'Spirit of '45' style, in the narrative. The Blue Labour constituency, close to the Labour leadership, sell the purer product. For both, however, there is an old working class Labour following, which is understood as both racialised and racist. Until the 'legitimate' concerns of 'ordinary voters' are addressed, Labour will lose out to UKIP or abstention. There's an element of truth in this, as I've said before, but not in the way the purveyors of Hovis kitsch politics suppose.

How did this discourse come into its own? As Lawrence notes, it was the media and academics who constructed the white working class before it was seized on by politicians and entered into the nexus of cultural self-understanding. But an ideology must have some kind of purchase on truth, however perverse and one-sided, to get a grip on the hearts and minds of any significant number of people. Scientology is always likely to remain a niche pursuit. And the truth, of course, is that large numbers of working class people do feel left behind; large numbers of working class people do feel distant from a political elite. In both cases the feeling is entirely veridical: it's just that the 'white working class story' gets things wrong by supposing this estrangement has anything to do with skin colour.

Matters were not helped by the fact that there was a measure of social liberalism in the New Labour years - although not especially around the issue of immigration: increases in immigrant numbers resulted from the global economic and political context rather than the Blair-Brown governments, which were quite happy to leave asylum seekers languishing in detention centres, being a 'soft touch'. To the extent that a certain liberalism - over civil unions, for example - did co-exist, however, with the absence of any serious reformism in the socio-economic sphere, this helped to give rise to the 'Hampstead Heath politics' tale told by Danczuk. The concurrent demonisation of the working class, documented by Owen Jones and others, provided a context where it could be imagined that council estates were full of resentful xenophobes. Chavs were not only idle, they were racist. Think about how the average BNP supporter was imagined in the media - he or she had an Essex accent and probably the odd tatoo. She lived in a council flat, decked out with England flags. Polling data in fact suggests this character was far more likely to live in a relatively affluent suburb.

Danczuk is just taking the whole story full circle. Rather than turn up his nose in disgust at the reactionary proletarian of metropolitan imagining, he has set himself up as their champion. Much the same dynamic was at work around Emily Thornberry's forced resignation. The flag-waving cage fighter at the centre of that particular episode is a living caricature of the working class as projected from Westminster. Until a better class politics becomes articulate, expect to hear more about the white working class.