Television

Hideously middle-class

Published 06 March 2008

The BBC's White Season equates working-class culture with racism and the BNP, and exposes unsavoury values at the heart of the corporation

"The white working class in Britain is put under the spotlight this winter on BBC2," says the press release for the BBC's much-trailed White Season. What, all of it, all at once, for the rest of us to look at? One big pale lump, like a ball of lard, with nary an individual face to be seen nor opinion to be heard? Hmm, thought so. "White Season" - even the name makes it sound like a trip to the zoo.

Roly Keating, controller of BBC2, feels so ashamed at having ignored this group, insofar as it requested his attention en masse, that he has commissioned an entire season of programmes about white working-class people that stops just short of saying, "No wonder they all vote BNP."

It includes a film about a declining working men's club in racially divided Bradford; a documentary that asks, nakedly and without shame, "Was Enoch right?"; a drama about a girl living in (again) racially divided Bradford; and a Story ville essay about multiracial Barking, east London, which has a large handful of British National Party councillors.

The clear intention is to distance the BBC from the idea and practice of multiculturalism, and to make itself look as though it is engaging with contemporary issues, while being highly selective about the way it chooses to do so. The innumerable challenges of being working-class in a liberalised economy - never mind the challenges of being working-class full stop - are reduced, in this season, to race and immigration alone, with those (and only those) who are white cast as passive victims of policies they didn't choose.

But here is the news: deindustrialisation, deregulation, poor pay and prospects, low educational standards, bad or insecure housing, pressured living environments and lack of control disproportionately disadvantage working-class people, whether they are white or not. Not that you would know it from watching any of these programmes.

People such as Dave from All White in Barking, who declares he would rather drown himself than be followed from Barking to Canvey Island by "the Africans", haven't been "forgotten" by a changing world: they have deliberately turned their backs on change. Others, like the secretary of the club featured in Henry Singer's film Last Orders, have become overwhelmed by self-pity, which leads them to regard voting for fascists (we are led to believe he has done so, though he does not state this on film) as a noble vote of protest.

The BBC's dedicated website for the season asks, "Is white working-class Britain becoming invisible?" - a suggestion as extraordinary as it is disingenuous. British culture is underpinned by working-class tastes, comforts, vocabulary and prejudices: popular television; football; Greggs the baker; multimillion-selling tabloids; talent contests; sportswear labels; big settees; "real-life" magazines; slimming clubs; package holidays; "us" and "them".

Can it truly be said that any of these common features of working-class life has been affected in any way by non-white immigration or by the mores of a metropolitan liberal elite? No, because it's the other way around. You can find working-class people of all races queuing for steak bakes, buying the Sun for the sport, wearing tracksuits or football tops, and moaning about foreigners and the opposite sex. Most middle-class people wouldn't be seen dead doing the same. The only people who regard such activities as "invisible" are those who spend their lives running a mile from them. For everyone else, they are so normal that they scarcely imagine others might find their lives worthy of a TV series. Working-class lives in Britain are invisible only insofar as they have almost always been invisible to those who comprise the country's power base.

There have been few points in our history at which working people have been regarded as "the backbone of the nation"; their contribution, in the form of blood, sweat, toil and vastly shortened lifespans, to the affluence brought about by the Industrial Revolution was ignored until they were asked to fight in 1914 and were found, in many cases, to be too physically depleted to do so.

Lloyd George offered "homes fit for heroes" after the Great War and built the first huge council estates, thereby cementing class segregation into the landscape. For a brief period during and after the Second World War, the desires and needs of working-class people were taken into account - that is, until they became inconvenient. Voters asked for houses with gardens to be built, but millions got flats nonetheless.

Along similar lines, it has now become commonplace to point out that working-class voters did not "ask" for immigration from the old British empire. Nor did they ask for the empire in the first place, but few marched against it in the same way as dockers, meat porters and factory workers did in support of Enoch Powell following his calculatedly vile "rivers of blood" speech.

Denys Blakeway's film of the same name is trailed as the first serious examination of the speech's content, 40 years after it was made. Blakeway, as writer, producer and director, describes the speech as being one of the most misquoted in history. There is no evidence in his film to suggest that it has ever been misquoted, misunderstood or misrepresented. It is clear that Powell meant every word.

Fragments of footage taken from his address to a group of Conservative businessmen at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham in April 1968 are interspersed with commentary by Roy Hattersley, Baroness Young and the sociologist Stuart Hall, among others, all of whom eloquently undermine Blakeway's take on events. His thesis is that Edward Heath's sacking of Powell from the shadow cabinet, and the subsequent passage of the Race Relations Act, led to the pursuit of multiculturalism as a policy: a disaster, in his eyes.

As Singer does in Last Orders, Blakeway inserts footage of riots as if giving proof of Powell's prescience. Both are wrong to do so: the primary motivator for all the riots that have taken place on the British mainland since 1981, even those with triggers based on race, as in Oldham in 2001, has been the poverty, frustration and persistent disadvantage that comes with being trapped in an increasingly marginalised working class. (Few recall the many riots on largely white council estates in 1991 and 1992 as readily as those in Brixton and Toxteth.)

Last Orders makes tentative acknowledgement of this fact, showing how working patterns in mill towns such as Bradford went some way towards causing the lives of white and non-white workers to be lived in parallel, rather than together. The racist son of one of the Wibsey club regulars, coiled with spite and resentment, has not "been made" racist by any slow process of estrangement from wider change; it is because his generation of working-class Bradfordians has grown up almost totally segregated by race.

During the long postwar boom, night shifts were filled by immigrant workers because the existing white workers moved to the day shift as soon as pay and circumstances allowed them to do so. Structural unemployment affected workers from the Commonwealth just as it did white British workers, albeit in different sectors of industry. Both parties, whose children now struggle to overcome a sense of uselessness and despair, are regarded as forming an unemployable "underclass". They suffer from the consequences of the free market in the same ways, whether they are white, black or Asian.

The BBC has made a grave error in locating the problems of Britain's poorest and most pressurised people in race rather than class. Yes, there are working-class people who are white. If they believe themselves to be hard done by, then they are, considering their relative health, social status, pay and longevity, generally right to do so. If they believe they are hard done by because of the presence of other working-class people who happen not to be white, or British-born, they are wrong on every count I can think of.

The only fictional film in the season, White Girl, shows a teenage girl (played by a newcomer, Holly Kenny) finding refuge in her next-door neighbours' home after her violent stepfather follows her mother to the new family house in a heavily Asian part of Bradford. Her neighbours are Muslim: she equates the sense of peace and order in their house with the strength of their faith, and starts to pray with them. This story has already been upheld by apologists for white racism as an example of the BBC equating white and poor with "bad" and Muslim with "good". I see the story of a child making choices beyond those prescribed for her.

It is not an especially good film: Anna Maxwell Martin, the actress who plays the girl's frightened and miserable mother, simply cannot make herself believable in the role of a working-class woman. That piece of casting gives away the real problem at the heart of the BBC's season: the institution is not only still "hideously white", but hideously middle-class.

The White Season is on BBC2 from 7 March. More details from: http://www.bbc.co.uk

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18 comments from readers

TheElitesWin
06 March 2008 at 10:29

Well after all, this is what we pay our TV licience for!

blue
06 March 2008 at 11:10

Lynsey Hanley

PlanetStarbucks
06 March 2008 at 11:33

So basically the white working class should be grateful for their lot? Perhaps if publications like the New Statesman and The Guardian hadn't abandoned the white working class to focus solely on multiculturalism then there would be less resentment from this bracket. There is no party for the white working class to turn to apart from the BNP in these times. To see the non-white working class get preferential treatment in the name of multiculturalism is too much for many to take. Yet those of the white middle class whose jobs were never touched by immigration and have never had to live in poverty, let alone in a racially segregated area feel fit to judge the white working class as indolent and unintelligent.

It is no wonder the left is in such a state with articles like these. If you decide that an Asian working class child is going to get more benefits then a white one you will breed animosity. Positive racism is still racism and with no leftist alternative to turn to, with poverty levels rising around you, what would you do? The BNP are abhorrent in their views but I come from an area where people will vote for them because they are the only party who consistently fight against white poverty. The white working class were the first to welcome black soldiers over during the war yet due to poverty a racial divide developed. This is an economic issue pure and simple. Until you wake up from your 80’s liberal dream and realise that the only problem is economics you will continue to write garbage like this.

Pencils
06 March 2008 at 12:07

A good article. But it's hardly news that the BBC has a patronising and hostile attitude to the working-class. The 'white' bit is just politically correct camouflage; the BBC seems to feel obliged to pretend to be a bit 'left' (it makes their propaganda more plausible), so criticism of non-whites, non-protestants, and immigrants is out. This is a problem of the 'left' generally - the quite promising ' Independent Working Class Assiciation' state that the rest of the 'left' consider the BNP to be the natural home of the white working class. Or you could take the view that there is no real left left, just some fake pseudo-left sects and individuals, mostly effectively run by the secret security services, implementing a deliberate strategy of divide-and-rule, by demonising the white protestant (or non-catholic, since most are no longer religious) working class. The white protestant/secular working class IS the working class, effectively, with a dash of colour thrown in here and there. So 'white working class' is just a code for 'working class', and the message is: proles = thick, can't be allowed to have too much of a say in things. This is the traditional message of the BBC.

But maybe there is something new. And Hanley herself exemplifies it in this:

"If they believe they are hard done by because of the presence of other working-class people who happen not to be white, or British-born, they are wrong on every count ..."

The problem is the " happen not to be...British born" bit. The working-class, whatever colour or creed, are absolutely correct to be concerned about the power of organised labour being undermined by mass immigration. They would, of course, be wrong to blame the immigrants, rather than the bosses and the corrupt trade union bureaucrats who aid them. But they are still correct to oppose mass immigration.

If there is something new in the current elite approach to the white working class it might be part of a long-term strategy hinted at by the famous quote from Brecht: (loosely) " the people have let the politicians down, it's time to elect another people..." (I think it was more eloquent, but I haven't got the original to hand).

I wonder sometimes if some elite interests envisage a future in which there is a large docile working class which has little memory of any kind of democracy, and feels little affinity with the centuries of struggle that brought us to the ' post-war' consensus'; a Britain and Europe of which US politicians could say to their electorate (if they still bother with that), as they say incorrectly of the Greeks, " these are not any longer the people of the history books, your ancestors - they have been replaced by newcomers"; a people it would be more acceptable to discipline severely, should they prove disobedient.

DCarins
06 March 2008 at 17:01

The terms "working class" and "middle class" are utterly meaningless - if no-one can agree on a definition then it is fruitless, dangerous and divisive to use them at all.

What used to be the "working class" has become the new bourgeoisie, and what used to be the middle class now pretends to be the proletariat. The result is that the people I presume the BBC are talking about are not a class at all, but the residualised poor trapped in a cycle of deprivation; de-skilled, disenfranchised and alienated. That doesn't make a social class.

In order for society to have a reasonable and grown up debate it needs to first agree on what it's talking about - when the definition of the debate's very subject is fluid, how can we expect concrete answers?

writeon
06 March 2008 at 17:10

DCarins,

Perhaps it's not the concrete answers that are the most interesting part of the debate, but rather the conflict about how we decide and define what we're really talking about?

Salvation
06 March 2008 at 17:22

"that he has commissioned an entire season of programmes about white working-class people that stops just short of saying, "No wonder they all vote BNP."

By implication the suggestion is that the BNP is a working class party. Rest assured it is not. Indeed how can it be so when it is often to refered to as 'far right'. The further right you go the less chance you have of being 'working class', i.e socialist, on the left. And as the the great man himself sang, "the one in the rear was a methodist.

Tom Knott
06 March 2008 at 18:37

Anyone with clear memories of the way many films, and for that matter the BBC, especially TV, handled their images of the working class in the 40's and 50's can only say nothing has changed. Contempt, laced with patronising attitudes and condescension has always been the pattern. Those of us who grew up in industrial areas at that time as children of the working class can only wince and shake our heads at the immutable prejudices and sheer nastiness of the London Mediocracy.

BegbiesEvilTwin
06 March 2008 at 23:09

At least Peter Wilby regularly addresses inequality and working class issues in his column but the truth is there's ample room for improvement on such issues within the NS. It's a pity that in the twentieth year of their acquisition of New Society things of a Social Science nature have such a low priority.

Perhaps those selecting the new editor may wish to keep this in mind. The tide may well be turning on these types of issues and it would be a pity if the NS found it out of step with the coming zeitgeist.

antileft
07 March 2008 at 07:22

Oh come on people, the British working classes are the most vulgar, aggressive, alcohol-fueled group anywhere in the world. They just love a good punch up or piss up. Who else do you think makes the streets of britain stink of piss? And who do you think it is breaking bottles and noses in the city centres at night?There's no need to be politically correct here- or indeed proud. Of course, this is a generalisation. Some working classes are very pleasant. But when you compare the working class to the rest of society, it's important to hold your nose.

John Marsh
07 March 2008 at 09:53

Today at Alban Wood Primary School in Garston Watford children are divided up into two groups - black and white. The black ones get additional educational support. It is in a white working class area. So if you're white your children get inferior treatment to black children. Is it surprising that there is anger in the white community when liberals impose such policies. You can check the story in the Watford Observer

cashonly
07 March 2008 at 11:45

The origins of the present tensions lie in the attitude of the textile barons in the 50s and 60s. They knew that the cotton and wool factories were condemned once the market in India was lost. Despite this, they cynically decided to bring in tens of thousands of immigrants to work the night shift in the mills to maximise their profits before the proverbial hit the fan. They assured their own self-destruction by refusing to buy the new Manchester-made textile machines that were selling like hot cakes to othe rparts of the world.

writeon
09 March 2008 at 16:47

One of the interesting results of a recent opinion poll among members of the 'working class' which asked a variety of questions, was the general level of frustration, insecurity and anger expressed.

This is understandable as the working class has bee shafted over the last quarter of a century by successive governments. I think one can argue that it's them who have paid the price for the Thatcher party more than pershaps any other group in society. Mass unemployment, de-skilling, cultural genocide, underachievement in education...

One of the things that struck me was how contemptcious they were of the current political system and how they felt they had vitually no representation in Parliament. No one spoke up for or defended their interests. On this point they are absolutely correct. Parliament doesn't represent 'working class' people at all. Parliament has become the preserve of the middle class and the elite. Three parties who are almost indistinguishable from one another, a 'democracy' in name only, a one party state with three factions jockying for power. Three facitions involved in a tacky and incestuous, dirty dance with each other.

It's only the gross unfairness and fundamentally undemocratic nature of the British electoral system that stops a 'radical' party of the Left or Right gaining access to Westminster based on disgruntled 'working class' support, as they have gained access in many European countries. Under a fair and democratic electoral system, based on proportional representation, the BNP would have seats in parliament as would a handful of ultra-Leftists and probably the Greens as well.

Considering how unfair and undemocratic the bizarre electoral system used in Britain is, the recent criticisms of the undemocratic nature of the recent Russian elections are grotesque.

cg151
14 March 2008 at 22:49

I am white middle class. I am a classical musician trained in the 'western classical music tradition' though my prefence is for music which, though still by western composers such as Messaien and Maxwell davies, has routes, or at least influences, from non western musical cultures. for the record, i also had a great time studiying african drumming and balinese gamelanm, whilst also being born in Salford Manchester. I now live in London on the Old Kent Road . The other night I was embarrased to have a knock on the door because my music (Harrison Birtwistle, extereme modernist composer, probably the first to admit his working class lancastrian routes) was playing too loudly, but it was interested so could my neighbours perhaps borrow the cd at some point? of course. in return they lent me some particularly fantastic Mr Sruff.

I was left smiling, if bemused. Though i'd like to think that my non-classical music includes pretty much every genre from leonard cohen to miles davis, captain beefheart to marvin gaye. all of it awesome.

On the flip side (though i know my neighbours well enough to remove blame) my weekly organic vegetable box was nicked from my doorstep. damn whoever it was.

my point? I'm no longer sure. i was grew up in a working class family in a working class own. have lived in 'poverty' and 'done good' as it were. people who want to better themselves can do and shouldn't be ashamed about doing so. i don't believe i'm racist (who does?) but i equally can't stand the Sun reading, football hooligan, or whoever ran off with my veg box. white or black on either side - i don't care. let's all just grow up a bit.

self righteous? too right

treborc
16 March 2008 at 14:10

I'm working class and proud of it, I enjoy talking to other working class people be they black white Green or pink be they gay or not gay, they they disabled or non disabled because they are like me trying to live on a pittance in new Labour greedy world of global economics.

antileft
17 March 2008 at 07:50

"Considering how unfair and undemocratic the bizarre electoral system used in Britain is, the recent criticisms of the undemocratic nature of the recent Russian elections are grotesque."

Oh come on now! That's too far- at least in Britain the press and business arent blatantly on Brown's side all of the time. If anything theyre more pro-tory. Take a look at the press coverage in russia- it's pretty obscene. To try and say that British criticising russia is "grotesque" is just a bit silly.

"they are like me trying to live on a pittance in new Labour greedy world of global economics."

You know, under new labour, our GPD per head has gone up faster than in any other rich country. If you cant get a bit of that low-lying fruit for yourself, maybe it'd be a good idea to start spending time with more sophisticated people? You might learn something.

knave
27 March 2008 at 10:08

So a man who admires Thatcher and Powell is allowed to make a pro Powell documentry on the BBC. Good that is the beebs remit. Yes it was unbalanced and yes it warms the cockles and adds grise to the mill of the Observer circle school of journos (Yes you Cohen and Anthony) in their battle against the nasty black people.

The whole series missed the point. and was an opportunity missed.

Yes there is racial angle to the white working class but that isn't the whole story. what about discuusing the effect of globalisation, decline of unions and the apprentice schemes, the change from well paid manufacturing jobs to low paid service jobs and cahnging working pastimes to middle class pastimes such as football.

It mainly showed the working classes as one dmensional characters. Just victims.

treborc
01 May 2008 at 09:45

Its the working class not the white working class, most hard working low paid working class are coloured Asian and whites, for god sake the BBC up to it's old trouble making again. all disabled people are frauds look we found three.

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