In England’s ‘White’ and Pleasant Land
Mar 5th, 2008 by Donagh
In Monday’s Media supplement in the Guardian there was an article about a new season of documentaries that will soon be aired on the BBC called the “White” season. The suggestion behind it is that ‘white’ working class British people are no longer represented in the media except through a series of negative cliches. They are often tattoo sporting, BNP supporting, butch dog owning, bingo attending scumbags and chavs, so the argument goes.
This imbalance has come about because of the changes that have happened in Britain in the last couple of decades, or as the commissioning editor for the BBC said in a recent self-penned article in the Daily Mail:
“Over the past two decades, Britain has been through a revolution. The extent of the change, in both scale and speed, has probably been unique in the peacetime history of our country. Globalisation, mass immigration and economic upheaval have helped to transform the fabric of our nation. These changes have been the subject of noisy debate within the media, politics and academia, yet it is a curious irony that, in all the heated discussion about the consequences of this revolution, one voice has been largely absent: that of the white working class.”
This opinion has been supported by one of the less-well known but still thoroughly dislikeable muscular liberals Andrew Anthony, writing last Sunday in the Observer:
“In these tolerant days, the one underprivileged group that it’s OK to find intolerable is the white working class. In our multicultural society, they’re the unlucky ones deemed to be without a culture. Last year, for example, the editor of Eastern Eye went on television to condemn Channel 4 for allowing ‘illiterate chavs’ on to Celebrity Big Brother. Eyelids remained unbatted. Trevor Phillips was not called upon to issue a statement. The Sky News presenter to whom this comment was made simply nodded his head in silent agreement.”
So, the good eggs at the BBC believe that the time in now right to redress the balance. However, the one thing that is very striking about this is the use of the word ‘white’. Its curious that the mainstream media should finally decide to look at working class life purely in terms of skin colour.
The question is why this sort of attention and why now?
Watching the BBC trailer, which shows a white bald man sitting against a black background with words from foreign languages being written all over his face, you realize it’s choosing to use notions of working class identity to make a racial comment.
Its not that the British working class has disappeared, or is under represented. Rather its suggesting that there is a culture associated with a specifically white working class people, which is distinctly different to non-white working class culture, and it is this ‘culture’, which thrived before the wave of mass immigration and the effects of the expansion of the EU which brought in immigrants from Eastern Europe, which is under threat.
But this surely is a vile reactionary attitude and there is no adequate argument for why such a culture should be preserved. To my mind it seems to be reaction against a view that the British establishment should be tolerant of all the different cultures that now exist in 21st Century Britain. It is also a reaction against what is perceived to be a political correctness regarding the depiction of Muslims. In criticizing the reliance on stereotypes in one of the dramas in the season, White Girl, Andrew Anthony says:
“Every Muslim in the play, written by Abi Morgan, is polite, considerate and possessed of saintly forbearance. Quick thought experiment: can you imagine the reverse scenario being presented in a TV play? Zen chavs and vicious, uncouth Muslims?”
What Anthony fails to even deal with is the fact that if race should be discussed in terms of the working class and what is represented then it should show how different racial minorities have become integrated within the British working class. To go back to Klein article from the Daily Mail, which class would those Polish construction workers who have been streaming into Britain be considered part of?
DSquared, writing in the comments on Chris Bentham’s Crooked Timber post on the subject makes a series of excellent points:
“Also slightly gets my goat that the only way to be “white working class” is to be poor, have a declining standard of living, work in a sunset industry (preferably in the North of England), etc. Basically manufacturing-fetishism of the 1970s vintage. The kids who pack the trains in to Liverpool Street to work in the back office at Deutsche Bank are white, and they’re working class, but they’re never gonna get their documentary made. I mean, working men’s clubs in Bradford are interesting and worth documenting, but the fact that they are in decline doesn’t actually mean that the white working class is, or that they represent something worth preserving.”
This last point refers to one documentary called “Last Orders” which is about the decline of a Bradford working men’s club, where, commissioning editor Klein argues ‘some […] members feel under siege’.
Which seems to suggest to me that rather than trying to represent the British working class as it is now, they are trying to hark back to a time when such cultural representations were very much to the fore – before mass immigration and all the other forces that supposedly lead to an outmoded notion of British identity becoming embattled. Which is pretty much what the BNP has been saying all these years.
Update:
I’ve only just noticed Flying Rodents classic take on this documentary series:
To recap on the state of the UK for non-Brits, the ranks of Britain’s marginalised and oppressed now includes all minorities, including Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Catholics, Protestants and atheists; homosexuals, heterosexuals and metrosexuals; white working class people, the middle classes and impoverished landed gentry; Northerners, Southerners, islanders, highlanders and lowlanders; Scots, English, Welsh and Irish; Farmers, long-distance hauliers, fishermen, lawyers and entrepreneurs; smokers, dopers, no-hopers and interlopers; immigrants, emigrants and indigents; men, women, children, the young and the elderly.
There are others, but I’m sticking with only the most persistently victimised. By my estimate, this means that over 99% of the British population are now ignored or actively oppressed by the British state.
It´s very interesting to see the same methodology applied in America, where white working class males are seen as racist, reactionary, hicks. It also plays out here, where the all-too-real racial tensions within traditional working class areas between Irish and immigrants are played out in full in the media, while middle class ladies who hire Chinese cleaners for €1 an hour are entrepreneurs.
The Guardian article argues that British broadcasting is dominated by the middle class who are responsible for either ignoring the working class or depicting them as a ’slut, stupid or a slob - think Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard’.
But it’s those controllers, like the thoroughly middle-class commissioning editor Klein who are perpetuating another stereotype, that of a embattled ‘white’ ethnic group whose culture is under seige from the huddled masses with their foreign ways.
Speaking of Ireland and immigration, there’s this particularly stoopid post on the Foreign Policy blog: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/8249. Yes, in a small way its about Glen Hansard again.
And it is perhaps, a particularly middle-class, media fixated attitude to imagine that a class or a culture might somehow suffer terribly from being misrepresented, or - the horror! - not represented at all….
maybe the white working class are perfectly happy just being white and working class and all the other things people are in real life, and sensibly think that stuff on telly is all made up anyhow.
Couple of other things about this:
Firstly, there has never been a time when British white working class culture was strong and proudly taking its place in the public sphere and whatever else the reactionary rightwing tabloids are claiming. The history of the white working-class has been of a class struggling against a dominant middle-class bourgeoisie, ever since the 1700s. Socialism, unionism, working men’s clubs, whatever - they were defined against the establishment.
Secondly, surely there has never been a time when the majority of white working-classes in England could trace their ancestry back through ten generations of English? The white working-class has absorbed French Protestants and eastern European Jews and Irish Catholics again and again: one of the things I discovered on moving from England to Ireland is that lots of the names and syntax that I associated with the English working-classes are Irish in origin. It’s not that the white working classes are in opposition to mass immigration: it’s always, but always, been formed and re-constituted by immigration. Far, far more so than the middle-classes.
Sorry, addendrum to my last comment - I forgot to add that I was moving deliberately from British to English in the second paragraph, because I’m English and that’s what I know more about. Wasn’t doing the British=English thing, honest!
I think a major problem here is the terminology that’s being thrown around. By working class they seem to mean ‘underclass’, that is the long-time unemployed and unemployable as I once heard it defined; and of course by white they don’t mean Irish or Polish but just English.
New Labour in Britain has for over a decade promoted the notion that there is no working class anymore, just middle class and this ‘underclass’ - by which they mean chavs on the housing estates and other stereotypes mentioned at the top of the post. This image has become so prevalent that there was a somewhat typical reaction against it - I remember seeing a programme on Sky defending chavery as a legitimate expression of working class culture. Now it might well be an aspect of it but it certainly doesn’t represent the entirety of English working class youth. A documentary (or documentary series) on the English working class that breaks these stereotypes could be a positive development, but it would need an honest balance between the lads in the workingman’s club flirting with the BNP and the left-wing working class activists who actually still exist (they’re the real ‘forgotten people’).
But isn’t it funny when class will only be on the agenda when it’s mixed up with race?
Thanks for the great comments.
Sonofstan, it does seem those who work in telly get a little obsessed with representing – after all, they probably had to endure hours of media lectures about it and all their essays had to mention it if there was any chance of getting a high grade.
Mary, that’s what struck me as odd too. The commissioning of these programs seems quite political – and ignores the fact, as you say, that the working class hasn’t even been part of mainstream culture. In the 18th century they were the rabble. The uncouth crowds milling on London’s streets. In the 21st century they’re racist and poor, living in sink estates and grumbling about their Pakistani neighbours.
And very good point about the working class having historically absorbed immigrants from all over Europe and its alright sticking to what you know.
Ciarán, you’re right, it is looking at the ‘English’ in terms of nationalism rather than looking at the working class as a whole including those who are happy to remain Left-wing activists.
It is curious that they should talk about an ‘unrepresented’ group and then, while promoting it only focus on those who adhere to the clichés without looking at the whole picture.
But in Britian, and I think SonofStan mentioned this in one of Conor’s post, there are those who don’t live in sink estates or own butch dogs or sport union jack tattoos on their arm and who still consider themselves working class.
Maybe they grew up in council estates, or their parents did, but they went to university and have professional jobs – they’re often white and working class – but they don’t tell the right story.
Looking back at the Anthony article it seems that he’s happy to perpetuate the same old myths:
This idea about the ‘new middle class’ certainly has legs.
Digging this up to link to an astute post on k-punk
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/