Articles with the Tag working class

Monkeys at the zoo

Auntie Beeb, Racism
Published on

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.

BBC2’s White season: the trailer

Auntie Beeb, Racism
Published on

Below’s the trailer I described earlier. Now am I right or wrong to see this as something that could’ve ended with the words “I’m Nick Griffin and I approve this message” as new to me blog The Soul of Man under Capitalism puts it.

Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber meanwhile looks at the Decentist response to this series:

Given their leftist background, most “decents” have promoted either a class-based solidarity or an abstract universalism of citizenship in opposition to multiculturalism (which their blogs incessantly attack). But these pieces suggest something new. One possibility is that they are being drawn to the promotion of “my culture too!”, a resentment-driven demand for recognition within a multicultural system; another is that they are pushing the ethnos in the demos. Maybe they haven’t worked it out themselves yet. Either way, it gives me the creeps.

BNP or BBC?

Auntie Beeb, Life under Capitalism, Racism
Published on

Imagine the following trailer: the face of a white, bald man somewhere in his forties is shown in close up while Billy Bragg’s interpretation of Jerusalem plays. A hand moves in view and starts writing on the man’s skin in black paint, in a clearly non-western looking script. A second hand follows and writes in another script. More hands follows, until the man’s whole face is covered in black paint. He then closes his eyes and the text appears below: “is Britain’s white working class becoming invisible?” All hands shown look Black or Asian.

sounds like a BNP ad? You would think so, but if you’ve been watching the BBC this weekend you must’ve seen it come past, as a trailer for their coming season of programmes devoted to “the white working class”. According to the press release the BBC have put out about this, these programmes are meant to examine “why some sections of this community feel increasingly marginalised yoday” and why it is that “some white working class people to say they feel under siege and as if their very sense of self is being brought into question“.

Because until now the working class has largely featured on BBC2 as gormless chavs who need to be taught how to feed their children properly, it’s not hard to feel skeptical about the intentions behind this. The BBC has rarely cared about the working classes, white or otherwise, staunch bastion of middle class priviledge that it is. Why suddenly discover them now and sell this with images and a narrative that play straight into BNP scaremongering? A white man’s face that disappears under a layer of black paint; how obvious can you get?

This season could’ve been worthwhile if the BBC had made it working class season rather than white season because the issues it presents are issues that concern the whole working class, not just the white part of it. Britain in the last thirty years has been forcibly shifted from a manufacturing to a services orientated economy and that’s the reason the “white working class” feels “increasingly marginalised today”, because the jobs their fathers and grandfathers had for life have disappeared. It’s the economy, stupid.

Of course the programmes themselves may very well be much better than the trailer makes them out to be; the BBC has a long tradition of making shit trailers for good shows. These programmes might just examine the economic background to the plight of the English working class, -white, black, Asian and other–. For the moment however whatever the BBC thinks it’s doing, it’s mostly providing ammunition to the BNP and other bigots, as a Google search on “BBC white working class” makes clear. The first hit is to the St*rmfr*nt hate site.

The last word is for Theloonyfromcatford commenting on a similar article in the Guardian lamenting the loss of “white working class identity”:

I’m a white,working class man.

The idea that I’ve become invisible, maligned and need a hug/season of programmes from ex public schoolboys in order to feel better about myself is absurd.

Yes, the man who owns the local shop has brown skin. Yes,my work colleagues include Polish girls and black blokes.

So what?