... Two souls of the working class On the one hand, there is this melancholic representation of a forgotten, disenfranchised white working class. There were documentaries, articles, tea towel memoirs, focus groups, policy documents. This white working class was never discussed in terms of what made it (part of) a class, but always in terms of its supposed cultural tics. ... On the other hand, there is the vicious, punitive demonisation of a section of the working class whom both the Thatcherites and Third Way politicos referred to as the underclass or, in politically correct New Labour terminology, the socially excluded. Later, the idea was popularised through the meme of chavs. These were people identified by their failure to integrate into societal norms, their dependency culture, their crass consumption patterns, their mobbishness, their unfamiliar speech patterns, and their moral degeneracy. They represented the decay of British values. This was linked to racial anxiety in obvious ways, which became explicit during and after the England riots: the whites have become black. Even todays rioters arent like rioters in the good old days. This discourse began to develop only a few years after Tony Blair had declared the class war over. It very visibly wasnt over. However, this was because the symptoms of class were visible rather than because there was a well-organised labour movement putting class on the agenda. And the symptoms of class life under neoliberalism did not have to be explained in a leftist idiom. Three changes in class life The entrenchment of neoliberalism in everyday life, with the destruction of collective organisation and the removal of social protections and provision, ensured that more and more of ordinary experience was characterised by vicious competition. The more that competition was accepted and valorised, the more hierarchy was worshipped, and those lower down the chain treated simultaneously as potential competitors, losers who should be spat upon, and dangerous elements who needed to be controlled. Thus, the resentments deriving from class injuries could be effectively canalised into competition and aggression toward others of the same class. Also important was the growing stratification of the working class based on working patterns, education and lifestyle. It had never been the case that factory workers made up the majority of the working class. However, their experiences were sufficiently like those of other workers, that they were able to stand in for the class, figuratively. Their degree of organisation commanded respect, as did the cultural salience they had achieved in post-war Britain. There is no such easy metonym for the working class today. It is far easier to speak of the class in terms of cultural cliches: the estuary accent, poor education, social conservatism and traditionalism. Skinheads, white vans, England flags, and sports tops, became synecdoches for class. ... Finally, just as important was the transformation of social democracy and its adaptation to Thatcherism. ... When New Labour took office, it was not sufficient for them to administer neoliberal capitalism and police its breakdowns. They had to discipline their own working class base, and react to breakdowns as challenges to their project of transforming Labour into New Labour. These sporadic strikes, protests, civil disobedience and occasional political defections were manifestations of backward-looking tendencies within the working class which had held back Labours necessary modernisation. This resort to non-market solutions was linked to the cultural pathologies producing social exclusion and trapping people in poverty. ... Racecraft and neoliberal dysfunction Race, as became evident after the northern riots and the Cantle report into them, is a convenient ready-made strategy for policing the dysfunctions arising from neoliberal politics. ... The almost instinctive, learned response of the British media, the government and the Labour leadership both in Westminster and in local councils, was to boil all this down to race riots. ... Such claims only made sense as a malevolent twist a particularly toothless kind of liberal multicultural discourse according to which racism is not about hierarchies and oppression, but rather about different groups needing to tolerate one another, get along, respect one anothers right to narrate, and so on. ... This was when New Labour and its allied intelligentsia adopted in fully the neo-Powellite idiom that was to become its disgrace note on questions of race, nationality and immigration. The war on terror merely accelerated the trend, and ushered in the spectacle of the melancholic white working class, marginalised and forgotten, undermined by a new multicultural underclass filled with feral youths and brooding would-be terrorists. ... The fertile terrain of reaction At the early stages, this class discourse was simply one element in a complex set of racial representations that centred on culture, and particularly on Islam as the folk devil menacing British values. It helped create fertile territory for the far right. The BNP was the first beneficiary, increasing its votes between 2000 and 2009 by over 1000%. Often its successes derived from effectively manipulating the language already popularised by New Labour. ... However, it seems likely that it was the credit crunch and ensuing recession that decisively shifted the focus of racist politics. Islam was replaced by immigration as the most salient enemy. ... This was when the discourse of the white working class began to assume the prominence that it has today. And just as the BNP began to collapse - the new post-crunch climate imposing challenges that the schismatic organisation failed to handle with aplomb - the EDL had arrived with its strategy of street violence. ... And when the EDL fell apart, it was not long before Britain First had half a million likes on Facebook and was doing its bomber jacket and cloth cap routine. Now UKIP is using the BNPs strategy in hollowed out Labour heartlands, talking up racialised local issues. ... ...however organisationally fractious the far right are, however much they are projecting influence insanely above their social weight, they are able to do so because the terrain has been produced over a long period. ... And the left is shattered. So what we get instead of a broad popular mobilisation is a kind of ersatz resistance led by a dissident tributary of the Tories; instead of class struggle, this bitterly melancholic politics of whiteness and class authenticity. ... This is the UKIPisation of English politics. It has been a long time in the making. leninology.co.uk/2014/11/the-ukipisation-of-english-politics-ii.html
Posted on: Sat, 29 Nov 2014 11:44:19 +0000
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