Thursday 10 May 2018

The Myth of "The White Working Class"

The views habitually attributed to "the white working class" are no more widespread among them, and would be no more acceptable socially, than among those who make that attribution. In other words, not at all. 

The white working class, which was the great majority of the British population at the time, first laughed itself hoarse at Alf Garnett as long ago as 1965. He was a joke even then. That was the whole point of him. In life's more serious moments, the Conservatives unexpectedly won the 1970 General Election after the sacking of Enoch Powell from the Shadow Cabinet. 

The people who said that that sacking would hurt the Conservatives among the white working class, especially after Labour had enacted the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1968, are much the same people who now attribute to that class views that, again, they simply do not hold, at least any more than anyone else does.

Those people were wrong then, and they are wrong now. If anyone doubted that, then the public response to the Windrush scandal has established it beyond doubt.

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