Owen Hatherley on what the BBC’s reducing of the experience of the “white working class” to having a bee in one’s bonnet about immigrants means:
This middle-class reductiveness (pioneered in Michael Collins’ sentimentalist The Likes of Us) is something that I find particularly infuriating, as it constantly declares that the white working class that make up most of my family – mostly politically active, with an autodidact or two amongst them, committed to working class solidarity and education – don’t exist, never did exist. Similarly, the history of the East End has to be rewritten in a way that ensures that the Great Dock Strike, Cable Street, decades as one of the few places in Britain where ‘Communist’ wasn’t a pejorative, are all secondary to a Sun reading bestiary. All particularly grotesque in an area that has seen the mass social cleansing that is gentrification expel working class inhabitants, black or white, off to the peripheries.
That is perhaps the core appeal of this whole white season: watching monkeys at the zoo slinging poo, only in this case the monkeys wear flat caps or hoodies and hurl racial abuse. Both the vicarious thrill of being racist by proxie and the moral superiority of knowing that you aren’t like those people, as if the readership of the Daily “welfare cheat bogus asylum seekers bearing aids force drop in house prices” Mail isn’t largely middle class. The racism and bigotry of a large part of the English bourgeoisie projected on the working classes.
The real plight of the working classes and its causes is not investigated. Asians riot and whites vote BNP and that’s just the way it is, and that misjudged racial visionary Enoch Powell saw it would be this way. Ignored remains the virtual destruction of Britain’s industries from 1950 onwards, the hollowing out of the unions, the abandonment of the working class –white or otherwise– by all political parties, the development of a two tier health system, a two tier eductation system, a two tier…
If only the BBC had taken a real look at what has happened to the working classes in the forty years since Powell, instead of falling into the same old easy middle class cliches, instead of looking at monkeys at the zoo.