Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(47)

This is just one borough in one city. But it’s a clear example of how, in Britain, race and class are intertwined. In this case, building housing out of reach for working-class people meant that it was out of reach for black people.

We should be rethinking the image we conjure up when we think of a working-class person. Instead of a white man in a flat cap, it’s a black woman pushing a pram. It’s worth questioning exactly who wins from the suggestion that the only working-class people worth our compassion are white, or that it’s black and ethnic minority people who are hoarding scant resources at the expense of white working-class people who are losing out.

A seemingly innocuous phrase has become naturalised in British politics over the last decade. The phrase ‘white working class’ is supposed to describe a group of disadvantaged and under-represented people in Britain. When she threw her hat in the ring for the 2015 Labour Party leadership contest, Leicester West’s MP Liz Kendall explicitly let it be known that she was interested in supporting white working-class children. Setting out her stall for the leadership bid in a meeting with journalists, she said she wanted Labour to ‘be doing the best for kids, particularly in white, working-class communities’.7 It wasn’t just class discrimination that was holding these kids back, she seemed to suggest. It was their whiteness.

And when the BBC announced plans to increase the representation of people of colour in their ranks in an attempt to tackle the over-representation of whiteness on-and off-screen, Conservative politician Philip Davies took great umbrage with the decision. Mr Davies was so outraged that he opted to take on Tony Hall, the BBC’s Director-General. Confronting Mr Hall in a House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee session, Davies said, ‘If I have a white, working-class constituent who wants that opportunity . . . why should they be deprived because you’ve set these politically correct targets?’8 Again, the implication was that race and class are two separate disadvantages that are in direct competition with each other. The phrase white working class plays into the rhetoric of the far right. Affixing the word ‘white’ to the phrase ‘working class’ suggests that these people face structural disadvantage because they are white, rather than because they are working class. These are newly regurgitated old fears of white victimhood, fears that suggest that the real recipients of racism are white people, and that this reverse racism happens because of the unfair ‘special treatment’ that black people receive. When Philip Davies MP intervened against positive action at the BBC, he seemed to interpret the work as an attack on his white and working-class constituents rather than a challenge to the BBC’s white and middle-class managers and executives.

And so we find ourselves focusing on imaginary reverse racism, rather than legitimate class prejudice. It is extraordinary to see how Nick Griffin’s rhetoric about an embattled white working class has been subsumed into the mainstream less than a decade since his political peak. The class privilege of middle-and upper-class people in Britain is not challenged when we focus on the plight of the white working classes. Instead, it shifts the focus of the problem on to black and brown people. The immigrants. There is a scarcity mentality. ‘There are many people who feel that the pace of change in their communities has been too fast, and that the government has not properly resourced those particular areas to respond to that change,’ said Baroness Sayeeda Warsi in a 2009 episode of BBC Question Time. At the time, she was the Conservatives’ shadow minister for community cohesion and social action. ‘This is not a race debate,’ she continued. ‘This is a debate about resources.’

Although Baroness Warsi somewhat optimistically sought to change the terms of the debate, the resentment has never stopped being targeted at immigrants. This feeling of scarcity has been fuelled by government policy. Policies like right to buy, which gave council-house tenants the option to buy the property they were living in with a big discount in the 1980s, reduced the amount of Britain’s social-housing stock. Even now, councils are struggling to replace property sold. Information tracking sales between 2015 and 2016 showed that for the 12,246 council homes sold to tenants in England under right to buy, just 2,055 replacements began to be built.9 This is a consequence of government direction, not grasping immigrants hoarding housing.

The answer to ending British people living in poverty and precarious housing will not be found in ending immigration. There isn’t any evidence to suggest that if ‘my kind’ all ‘go back to where we came from’ life would get any better or easier for poor white people. The same systems and practices that lead to class hierarchy would still stand.

We must ask why politicians only ever approach class and poverty issues when it is in relation to whiteness. When race isn’t mentioned, working-class people aren’t considered deserving of targeted policies at all. In fact, before all of this white working-class talk, class was a political taboo. When Margaret Thatcher said in 1987 that there was no such thing as society, she solidified a national feeling that it was individual ambition alone that would allow a person to get on in life. Although we as a country are all obsessed with class, we had deluded ourselves for a long time that it didn’t matter at all.

But now, I worry that we’ve too eagerly accepted the far right’s agenda of decent hard-working white British people being besieged by immigrants. A 2014 report from market research company Ipsos MORI found that British people thought the foreign-born population of the country was 31 per cent, as opposed to the actual number of 13 per cent.10 The same report found that the higher your income, the more likely you are to think that immigrants are a drain on public services. Things have switched from berating working-class people for daring to exist, to extending a hand of help to them as long as it’s in opposition to those grasping ethnic minorities. Sticking ‘white’ in front of the phrase working class is used to make assumptions about race, work and poverty that compounds the currency-like power of whiteness.