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.

You have nothing to lose but your van

Phraow. Look at him. He's a real man. Not like Ed Miliband.

Well, if nothing else, Britain now has its very own version of Joe the Plumber. Dan the Van, the emblematic man (and, really, notice he's a man - a manly man at that) on the street. He'd be the man on the Clapham omnibus, were it not for the fact that he has a van, and therefore doesn't need to get the bus. But not just any old man, oh no. He's a common-or-garden salt of the earth working class man. And if you diss Dan, and don't you dare diss Dan, you hate the working class. You're a snob. And probably a member of the metropolitan elite. So don't diss Dan, OK?

There is, of course, a metropolitan elite in Britain. It does indeed make up the social base of New Labour, whose rejection of its core electorate partially explains the exit of a minority of that electorate to UKIP.  Emily Thornberry, a decent soft-left sort from a working class background, isn't really part of it. But then car salesman Dan isn't really part of the working class on any reasonable definition either. Core reality isn't important here. This is about narrative.

Richard Seymour here is good on the details of the class issue here; and this blogpost, which I promoted yesterday, is definitely worth a read. I'd just like to make one observation - the reason the forces around the Labour leadership have been so rattled by Vangate is that Thornberry's tweet upsets their preferred class narrative. This issues from the bowels of Blue Labour, and finds expression in the whole One Nation brand. It surfaced around the debate on Scottish independence, is a nationalistic ally orientated, culturally homogenising story about what it is to be working class. It is deeply reactionary in content, and its effect can only be to cede political terrain which UKIP will work more effectively than Labour.

And Ed Miliband's wedded to it. We're screwed.

The working class is better together, the British state isn't

I've already explained why I support a 'yes' vote tomorrow here and here.

A brief post, then, merely to deride the last desperate recourse of the red-tinged wing of Better Together. It is about class unity. Don't divide Britain and Scotland! That will divide the working class. So say the dimmer recesses of ultra-leftism, and, um, Ed Miliband.

The thought that working class solidarity can, and does, cross borders doesn't occur. Nor does the thought that, if solidarity stops at borders then - given global capitalism - we are all well and truly fucked. Already.

Look, however, it the version of 'working class' identity that is being offered by, at least, the Labour leadership. It is a distinctly Blue Labour vision of a class whose solidarity stops at national borders (there, is, for instance, no question of solidarity with undocumented workers). Wrapped in the Union Jack and nostalgic talk of togetherness and community, like some kind of past-it mod revival, the proponents of this view lecture a 'yes' movement that has been marked by left-wing politics and internationalism about the dangers of nationalism from a position of British chauvinism. Their picture of the working class belongs in a living museum. Let's put it out of its misery, and breathe life into the real thing.

First thoughts on the great rush to UKIP

Some years back, one of the fifty seven different varieties of anarchist group that could be found within spitting distance of my then home in Hackney, put out an anti-BNP leaflet, consisting solely of the words "NICK GRIFFIN : POSH TORY TWAT".

There was, I want to claim, a wisdom in that verbal economy. If nothing else, the leaflet's authors recognised that simply running around shrieking "racist" and "fascist" at far-Right politicians is neither effective, nor gets to the heart of the motivations of those who vote for these people. These days, of course, Nick Griffin looks set to be consigned to the electoral equivalent of Hitler's bunker. And yet, the spirit of that anarchist leaflet finds new application. I give you Nigel Farage, former commodity broker, hard-line Thatcherite, and Arthur Daley impersonator:

At the time of writing, UKIP are making gains in Labour's north-of-England heartlands. And it's not just a northern thing. They have won a sufficient number of councillors in Thurrock to shift the council from Labour to No Overall Control. Those who have pointed out that UKIP has a working class electoral base, and those who feared the impact of this for Labour, stand vindicated already.

What to say about this? A few quick things.

UKIP : Racist Eurosceptic Tories

First, Nigel Farage is a racist. UKIP is full of racists. These things are true. Even the Sun thinks they are true. There is no harm whatsoever in saying them. Had Ed Miliband done so, it might have stopped a proportion of people voting UKIP. His equivocation on this basic point is initially puzzling, although not inexplicable (see Lenin here).

As I said a moment ago, mind, crying 'racist' isn't enough, and on its own would be counterproductive. Two other things about UKIP:

They are Eurosceptics. Whilst this, seemingly crucial, part of their stall took a back-seat to their desire to protect Britain from a surge of Romanian ne'er-do-wells in the campaign, it wasn't entirely absent. Witness the  flag poster,

Apart from looking like an album cover by a mid-90s Guns 'n Roses clone band, it's a reminder that the politics of Europe do actually feature in European election campaigns. A good number of people are not terribly happy with the EU. This is not universally because they don't like foreigners, or fear their good honest bacon and eggs being displaced by croissants: there's a sense of power being distant from them, of life being increasingly beyond their control. Now, I'd want to say a lot about this being primarily a result of capitalism, rather than the EU. But the latter is a tool of the former, the EU is not beyond criticism, and opposition to the EU is not intrinsically Right-wing. It's about time the Left started talking more about this issue. As your host suggested a while back.

Also, UKIP are Tories. Massive Tories. Nigel Farage is the economic equivalent of Nigel Lawson on crack cocaine. Within UKIP you'll find support for a flat tax, the dismantling of pretty much all employment protection and trade union rights, the privatisation of anything that moves, and opposition to the NHS. They have succeeded in this election in getting significant numbers of people who would never dream of voting for these policies if advocated by the actual Tories to vote for them. This is partly because their electoral opponents didn't tell the truth about UKIP's policies loudly enough; although, let's face it, it would be hard for Ed Miliband to push the 'arrrggg, UKIP support really bad austerity, which is likely to cause unemployment' line too hard given his own support for quite a lot of austerity. It is also partly because UKIP were savvy enough not to talk about their policies so much as about an out-of-touch political elite governing in their own interests rather than those of their voters. About this they were correct, even if they did carelessly fail to mention that Farage himself is part of said elite.

UKIP voters : neither racists nor stupid

So, then, we have established that UKIP are a bunch of arse. What to be said about their voters? This is surely the kind of question on which the liberal internet will have a subtle, nuanced, opinion. What says it?

Well, first of all. UKIP voters are bigoted, nasty, racist, xenophobic, sexist, homophobes. All of them. For instance:

Not only are there lots, and lots, and lots of convinced Nazis sprinkled throughout the towns and villages of Britain. No, for the panicked liberal narrative, the UKIP gains evidence the stupidity of voters. The brainless masses have come home to roost.

The Huffington post can be relied on usually to come out with this sort of thing; and it does not disappoint. And check this out:

#WhyImVotingUKIP I'm incompetent enough to fear that my job actually might be taken by an unqualified Romanian who doesn't speak English
— Veronica (@_BingCherry) May 20, 2014

Yes, that's right. Fear for the security of your job, or being in (what gets termed) unskilled work, makes you an excellent target for comedy. There's a strand of class hatred dressed up as progressive values running through the UKIP jokes. This is the 'chav' narrative rewritten for Guardian readers. It reminds me of nothing more than American liberalism, which sees itself as a bastion of educated civilisation against a redneck terror, and as a consequence plays straight into the hands of a populist Right which accuses it (correctly) of elitist metropolitan disdain for the mass of the population.

Making out that UKIP voters are basically just variants on Homer Simpson saves the bother of actually engaging with their fears and concerns, with the feelings of being ignored and of discontent with the status quo. It also avoids tackling the issue of immigration. Because, yes, no small number of people do see immigration as a threat. They are wrong, but they are not all signed up members of the Master Race. The Left can win arguments about immigration - we can talk about the use of low wages to divide workers on the basis of nationality, and we can talk about alternatives based on internationalism, solidarity, and levelling up. But we can't win arguments in which we don't engage. On immigration we've ended up talking only to those who already agree with us, and that leaves rich pickings for the likes of UKIP.


Disillusion versus smug liberalism

It's an unedifying choice isn't it? But it's one which not a few people felt themselves faced with.

Here be dragons, of course. The Blue Labour wing of the Labour Party - Glasman, Cruddas, and their cronies - will agree with pretty much all of the foregoing analysis. Their solution would, and in the coming weeks will, be the familiar cocktail of Family, Faith, and Tradition. This is a kind of homeopathic remedy for UKIP, a useless, diluted version of the real thing. As an attempt to reassert Labour's identity as a party of the working class  it fails not least because it is premised on ignoring those members of the working class who happen to be, say, women or members of ethnic minorities.

A socialist alternative, based not on getting a bunch of students and caring professionals to stand behind a, "Support Palestine. Defeat the Tories" stall on the High St once a fortnight, but on rootedness and hard work on estates and in workplaces, is really the only way to go. I can't say I'm optimistic, but we need a proper class-based, labour movement. I'll give the last word to Owen Jones,

To paraphrase Brecht, don’t lose confidence in the people and want to elect a new one if Ukip do very well. The political elite is to blame
— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) May 23, 2014