Vernacular social democracy and the politics of Labour

  

Social democracy has put down deep roots in British popular culture; this is why Johnson’s government has instinctively favoured social democratic responses to the Covid-19 crisis. This vernacular social democracy is a potent resource which Labour can use to proclaim its vision of the good society.

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Last year I published a history of post-war England focussed on the key political question of how people have reconciled the competing claims of self and society in their everyday lives.[1] In Me, Me, Me?, I re-analyse personal testimony collected from more than a thousand people in ten different social-science projects conducted between 1947 and 2008. But because this is a book first and foremost about how people made sense of their own lives across six decades of rapid social and cultural change, formal party politics remains largely in the background. Most of the social-scientists involved in these projects may have been intensely political, but their respondents generally were not. Being faithful to their world view meant framing the project through terms more deeply embedded in vernacular usage than the totemic labels of party politics: terms such as family, community, nation, and yes me. But if ‘social democracy’, or even ‘Labour politics’ are not concepts that tend to turn up randomly in popular discourse, there is nonetheless plenty of evidence to support the claim that post-war ‘social democracy’ put down deep roots in British popular culture, and that these traditions remain potent resources for the Left to draw upon, despite the reverses of recent years. In short, social democracy may find itself in crisis, both here and abroad, but it is far from dead.

So what does vernacular social democracy look like in modern Britain? It is often claimed that post-war welfare politics were so deeply entwined with the nationalist myths of the ‘People’s War’ that they broke asunder when obliged to adapt to the transition to a multi-cultural society. As we have seen in recent months, those wartime myths certainly remain potent political forces, but they did not represent the bedrock of popular social democracy in its heyday.  When people talked about entitlement to welfare in the 1950s and 1960s they conjured up folk memories of the hungry thirties more often than they appealed to the blood sacrifices of the two world wars. Crucially, most also worked with a narrowly contractual understanding of welfare which appears to have been based on a deep-rooted internalisation of the logic of Beveridge’s Edwardian National Insurance scheme, reinforced by even older popular distinctions between the ‘hard-working’ and the ‘idle’ poor.

A heated debate about Enoch Powell and immigration recorded between a group of Tyneside shipbuilding workers in 1968 nicely captures this outlook. When one of the blacksmiths claimed to support Powell, a workmate initially appeared to agree before commenting ‘But if they work a year before drawing National Assistance I don’t mind that’.[2] Twenty years earlier, the eminent anthropologist Raymond Firth had found himself being quizzed about welfare rights in his native New Zealand by two brothers from Bermondsey. One declared himself disgusted at the inadequacy of British state pensions, arguing that after a man had ‘worked for his country’ for more than fifty years he deserved to be paid ‘enough to live on decently’ – the government, he argued, ‘ought to see that he gets more’.[3] That is, if a man had worked and paid into the system for fifty years then he deserved to live out his last years secure from the threat of poverty. In addition, there was also a strong sense that the welfare system existed to protect workers from the arbitrary whim of rapacious employers. As one shipbuilding worker put it in 1968: ‘The workman doesn’t run when the gaffer comes now. A man of 50 isn’t scared because the Social Security will look after him’.[4] For sure, all these quotations could be spun to appear consistent with an ethno-nationalist take on welfare politics, but in welfare politics of this vernacular social democracy, anyone who contributed to the system by definition belonged to it. Ethnicity was irrelevant.

But it was not just the idea of collective social insurance that put down deep cultural roots in the post-war era. Crucially, Labour also found imaginative ways to popularise the idea of universal rights tied to citizenship, rather than only to financial contributions. It did this most successfully in the area of health and housing (in education there was less to be done - Labour needed only to broaden and democratise established traditions of universal entitlement). Current party battles over the right to be seen as the true champions of the NHS underscore Labour’s exceptional achievement in the politics of health care, but in other fields the idea of social entitlements linked directly to citizenship has been severely eroded. Housing is now probably the most egregious case of state withdrawal, but it is important to remember that historically it stood on a par with health and education as the vital markers of a civilised, modern state. In Me, Me, Me? we see this mind-set most clearly in the testimonies collected in 1959 from residents of Britain’s first post-war new town: Stevenage.

We see, firstly, that many Stevenage residents latched on to the powerful idea that ‘They’ – those with power and influence in society – were at last taking a keen interest in the well-being of ‘people like us’. A Labour-voting pensioner was struck that both the Queen and the Prime Minister had recently visited the flats near his home to see how the project was progressing, commenting: ‘they’re definitely taking more interest in the working class people’.[5] Besides this internalization of the idea that ordinary people’s lives mattered, it is also striking how easily Stevenage residents appeared to reconcile the idea of collective and individual (or more often family) advancement. In post-war Stevenage the two went hand-in-hand. Grateful to have escaped the chronic overcrowding of Greater London, people saw themselves as on a shared journey of rising living standards and life chances with their fellow new town residents.

This reconciliation of individual aspiration and collective social progress represents vernacular social democracy at its best. It has some parallels with what sociologist Mike Savage has called the ‘rugged individualism’ of industrial workers during the same period.[6] According to Savage, many workers embraced trade union collectivism as the best means of preserving their historic right to a measure of autonomy and independence in the workplace (and also as the best way to improve their family’s living standard).

In this sense, vernacular social democracy in Britain has always been shot through with a powerful streak of popular (small L) liberalism. This tradition has much deeper historical roots which can be traced back to the religious struggles of the seventeenth century and struggles for democracy and reform in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  At its heart this popular liberalism revolves around the defence of individual liberty, family privacy and the importance of personal autonomy. It is, in essence, Savage’s workplace ‘rugged individualism’ worked out across the culture. As Moritz Föllmer has argued, Labour needs to reclaim this strand of demotic individualism for the left if it is reconnect with large swathes of the public. In doing so, it will also be reconnecting with a long history of serious Left engagement with the idea that individuality can only flourish when people are freed from the scourge of poverty and insecurity.[7]

It should also be stressed that the strength of this popular liberal tradition is also Labour’s best hope in combatting the Right’s inevitable efforts to reignite a culture war between the party’s newly-consolidated metropolitan strongholds and its traditional areas of support in the former industrial regions of England, Scotland and Wales. The powerful hold of a quiet, non-assertive liberalism rooted in long-established ideas about ‘fair play’, ‘live and let live’, and the right to privacy and personal autonomy, should embolden Labour’s leaders to believe that the gulf between the new identity politics of the metropolitan cities and the social values of its once loyal supporters is far from unbridgeable. They need to label attempts to sow social division for what they are: cynical Trump-style populist diversions intended to distract voters from the real issues that blight people’s lives wherever they live in Britain.[8]

In addition, Labour also needs to rediscover the emotional dimension at the heart of its historic appeal: its emphasis on self-respect, equality and above all the dignity of labour. That was what the party signalled by calling itself the party of ‘labour’ in the first place. This radical, egalitarian credo put moral flesh on the idea that advancing universal social rights, and ensuring public provision of essential services for all, was about upholding the equal worth and the personal dignity of all citizens. It was, in short, a way of demonstrating that for Labour each individual mattered because all mattered.

          But the party should take succour from the current state of British politics. Firstly, it should note that in Scotland the SNP has demonstrated that a broadly social democratic policy platform can provide the basis for building a robust, cross-class political alliance. For sure, this has been harnessed to a powerful national story about not being like mean-spirited, ‘tory’ England, but in a sense that’s the point: by constructing a strong national narrative the SNP has transformed a political culture which once delivered clear Conservative electoral majorities north of the border into one that appears to be anchored firmly on the (soft) left.

Labour should also take heart from the Conservative Government’s instinctive responses to the current Covid-19 crisis. From the furlough scheme to emergency shelters for rough-sleepers these have represented a sort of kneejerk social democracy precisely because ministers and their advisers were quick to recognise that that was where popular sentiment lay. Ministers acted as they did because, in a crisis, the public, and indeed much of the right-wing media, expected the state to act to protect individual well-being in the name of social justice. Far from being inevitable – many societies have followed different courses - this was the power of vernacular social democracy in action. Labour needs to proclaim these instincts as its own and double down on them when Johnson’s Government seeks to unwind the universalist ethos of its current interventions.

We all know that Labour has a mountain to climb in 2024. Even regaining all of its lost ‘Red Wall’ seats would not give the party a majority, especially since the long overdue redrawing of constituency boundaries is bound to make the challenge even greater. Labour needs to rebuild the sort of broad-based coalition that brought it power in 1945, 1966 and 1997. In this regard, there is much to learn from the strategies pursued by Attlee, Wilson and Blair. Above all, Labour needs to develop a new political narrative that can build on the instincts and values of vernacular social democracy. What the SNP has done for Scotland Labour must do on a pan-British scale. At its core Labour needs a clear story of renewal that is unashamed to use the language of family, place and nation – the bedrocks of identity within popular culture. On these firm foundations it can then construct a powerful vision of the good society – one in which individuals and families flourish precisely because they can rely on a safety net of universal social rights.

 

Jon Lawrence

University of Exeter

 

NOTES

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[1] Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-war England (Oxford, 2019).

[2] Shipbuilding Workers, Box 1, File 3, ‘Observation notes on blacksmiths,’ p. 23, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick

[3] Firth Papers, 3/1/1 Field Notebook 1, pp. 21-22, London School of Economics Library.

[4] Shipbuilding Workers, Box 1, File 3, p. 63.

[5] Ruskin Papers, Stevenage Survey, RS1/306, ‘Continuation of interview in Stevenage with X,’ pp. 6-7, Bishopsgate Library, London.

[6] Mike Savage, ‘Sociology, class and male manual work cultures,’ in John McIlroy et al. (eds.), British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics: Volume Two: the High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964-79 (1999).

[7] Moritz Föllmer, ‘Why the Labour Party should reclaim individualism’, OpenDemocracy, 17 June 2015 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-labour-party-should-reclaim-individualism/ (last accessed 6 July 2020).

[8] Jon Lawrence, ‘Labour must stop believing myths about ‘left behind’ Britons, The Times, Red Box Comment, 2 March 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-must-stop-believing-myths-about-left-behind-britons-r3tbjl66t (last accessed 6 July 2020).

Why the working class was never ‘white’

This essay – a response to Satnam Virdee’s Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider - was originally published on the much-missed New Left Project website, 26 Dec. 2014.

© Jon Lawrence, University of Exeter

I am currently a little over half way through a two year research project re-analysing the surviving field notes from a dozen or so classic social science projects from the late 1930s to the late 2000s. My purpose is to use these sources to explore the shifting nature of everyday life and culture through people’s own words.  Though I am looking at much more fragmentary and mundane language in essence I am following Raymond Williams in seeking to map shifts in the underlying ‘structures of feeling’ of working men and women across the last eighty years. I am particularly interested in the shifting balance between individualism and community in popular culture. One facet of that story brings me into direct dialogue with Satnam Virdee’s new book Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider because it is in popular conceptualisations of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’ that one is most likely to find evidence of the vernacular racism which runs through Virdee’s book. However, when one looks at the issue ‘from below’ – through the recorded speech of working men and women, rather than through the actions of their supposed representatives, the story looks a little different than in Virdee’s telling.  Three differences of emphasis stand out to me:

1.    Perceptions of ‘belonging’ tended to be very local – suspicion of the ‘outsider’ was certainly intense, but it was not strongly marked by ethnicity or perceived ‘racial’ differences.

2.    At the supposed high-point of the ‘racialization’ of the British working class (in the 1950s and 60s) abstract discussion about nationhood and race, often linked to the end of empire, was heard much more frequently, and with more emotional force, from middle-class rather than working-class respondents.

3.    In the Powellite moment, when ‘race’ and immigration really took off as issues in working-class districts there was already a strong working-class opposition to white racism – in fact there were two: one socialist and internationalist, the other liberal and parochial. Left-wing politicians and self-acting ‘racialised outsiders’ were able to achieve so much so quickly in the 1970s and 1980s because the British working class was never a monolithic bastion of ‘whiteness’.

We need to start by recognising the force of ‘class-as-place,’ as opposed to ‘class-as-politics,’ in British popular culture across the period from the 1880s to the 1950s – the period which historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Ross McKibbin identify as the high point of distinctive and relatively homogeneous class cultures in Britain (Hobsbawm, 1984; McKibbin, 1998). Although class feeling has long been a potent force in Britain, the vernacular sense of class has never been easily mobilised through party politics (Lawrence, 1998, 2011). ‘Class’ in everyday usage was (and is) a cultural resource to make sense of social difference and social injustice in a sharply hierarchical and unequal society. This vernacular sense of ‘class’ was strongly rooted in place, and could be highly conservative and particularist (McKibbin, 1998). Moreover, this vernacular culture of ‘class-as-place’ was predicated on an un-resolvable tension between a sense of solidarity against ‘Them’ ─ the ‘outsiders’ who held sway over your own and your loved ones’ prospects ─ and of differentiation and distinction among ‘Us,’ the residents of any given locality. This can be seen very clearly in classic working-class memoirs such as those by Robert Roberts (1971), Louis Heren (1973) and even Richard Hoggart (1988), who first theorised the ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ distinction (Hoggart, 1957).  Each conveys a strong sense of cohesive and relatively closed ‘urban villages’ that nonetheless were riven by deep internal divisions based on skill, gender, status, religion and, yes, also by ethnicity.

And so when Labour politics sought to construct a political rhetoric which placed ‘the workers’ at the heart of the nation this was driven less by craven nationalism, let alone xenophobia, than by the need to find some synthetic political language capable of transcending local particularism. Labour politicians and trade union leaders had to find some way to overcome the internal divisions which often fractured the sense of ‘class-as-place’ once politics became about more than how to defend the locality from ‘Them’.

Turning to the testimony in the surviving field-notes of social science, one certainly finds plenty of evidence of indigenous hostility towards ‘outsiders’, and some evidence of explicitly racial hostility. But the bold claim that by the 1960s Britain was divided into two separate, antagonistic working classes, one white and one black, is hard to justify when viewed ‘from below’. It is equally difficult to find evidence from these transcripts to sustain the argument that ‘whiteness,’ or notions of racial superiority, were central to working-class culture in post-war Britain. Interestingly, the testimony from Bermondsey in the late 1950s displays the strongest evidence of ethnic antagonism, but this is directed at Irish migrants moving in from north-west London.  Even in the late 1950s there appears to be no recognition of non-white immigration as an issue relevant to local people.

Similarly, the Bethnal Green material from the mid-1950s registers evidence of residual anti-Semitism in this former hot-bed of Oswald Mosley’s BUF, but no evidence of hostility to immigration from South Asia or the Caribbean. This may simply reflect the fact that these were not major areas of first settlement for Commonwealth migrants, but if so that still underscores the limited purchase of racism as an abstract issue about Britishness in such working-class districts. By contrast, one does find significant hostility to immigration as an abstract issue in the testimony gathered from the New Town of Stevenage at exactly the same time. Interestingly, most of this overt racism came from middle-class newcomers to the town for whom it was an abstract political issue about national decline and the loss of empire, not a personal issue rooted in local experience.

This is not to deny the existence of working-class racism, or to suggest that racism is somehow acceptable if rooted in perceived socio-economic grievances, but it is to suggest that the concept of a ‘white working class’ needs problematizing, as does the claim that the British working-class was strongly committed to a post-war vision of ‘White Britain’ analogous to the politics which sustained the idea of a ‘White Australia’ until the 1960s. Yes, old, settled neighbourhoods could be profoundly distrustful of outsiders – all outsiders, including the researchers seeking to study them – but when it came to race they were internally divided. We certainly hear working-class racist voices – often echoing stock racist complaints about over-crowding, welfare dependency or exploitative landlords and small businessmen, but we don’t hear the deep pathological racial fears laid bare in the letters sent to Enoch Powell after his so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 (Whipple, 2009).

But more importantly, we also hear strong anti-racist voices loudly and clearly. At Wallsend on Tyneside, where the researchers were gathering their data just as Powell shot to notoriety, we find workers expressing casual racism, but we also find eloquent expressions of an internationalist, solidaritistic perspective in which, crucially, black and white are seen as sharing the same working-class interests. Racism is denounced as a deliberate capitalist strategy to divide workers against themselves, weakening their ability to challenge those with power over their lives (shipbuilding had long been a very fractious industry and its workers had plenty of experience of the dangers of internal sectarian battles). Even those who endorsed the Powellite line on immigration were usually quick to distance themselves from overt racism (the English racist’s urge to appear liberal is not a new phenomenon). In a discussion among a group of blacksmiths one man declared ‘We ought to keep the blacks out. They’re no worse than me but they ought to stay in their own country.’ One of his workmates claimed to agree but then offered a striking caveat which exposed both the myths about immigration that were fuelling these fears and his own instinctive liberalism: ‘But if they work a year before drawing National Assistance I don’t mind that.’ This, I would suggest, was the other source of opposition to vernacular working-class racism: a widespread popular liberalism which served to contain, and to some extent tame, instinctive prejudices against outsiders – racialized or otherwise. We too often fail to recognise that liberalism was more than a hypocritical veneer across British society – it was a powerful discursive script which helped to delegitimise intolerance and prejudice in the eyes of many working people. As Raph Samuel counselled, the myths we live by have great power over us; academics must study that power as well as expose the myth.

Popular culture was not monolithically racist, let alone white supremacist, in the 1960s. On the contrary it was riven by intense arguments over the meaning of immigration.  The scenes played out on the sofa between East End docker Alf Garnett and his Left-wing son-in-law in the controversial sit com Till Death us DoPart (1965-75), were taking place daily in workplaces across Britain in the late sixties and early seventies.  It was not working people who racialised the idea of the English ‘working class,’ but academics and journalists (e.g Michael Collins's 2004 book The Likes of Us or the BBC's 'White Series', 2008); the sooner we recognise that the ‘white working class’ is not a thing, but rather an unhelpful media construction which the Left must eschew, the better. Not only does it deflect attention away from the virulent racism in other parts of English society, but it reinforces the idea of working-class people as unchanging, anachronistic and ‘left behind’. The ‘racialisation’ of class in Britain, has been a consequence of the weakening of ‘class’ as a political idea since the 1970s – it is a new construction, not an historic one, and it is profoundly unhelpful. It makes it all too easy for millions of people hit hardest by neo-liberal economics to be dismissed as somehow reaping what they deserve.

References:

BBC (2008) ‘White’ series on BBC2

Collins, M. (2004), The Likes of Us: A biography of the White Working Class (Granta)

Heren, L. (1973), Growing Up Poor in London (Hamish Hamilton)

Hobsbawm, E. (1984) ‘The formation of British working-class culture’ pp. 185-9 in his Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Hoggart, R. (1957), The Uses of Literacy (Chatto & Windus)

Hoggart, R. (1988), A Local Habitation: Life and Times, 1918-1940 (Chatto & Windus)

Lawrence, J. (1998), Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics, 1867-1914 (CUP)

Lawrence, J. (2009), Electing Our Masters: the Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (OUP)

Lawrence, J. (2011), ‘Labour and the politics of class, 1900-1940’ in D. Feldman and J. Lawrence (eds), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (CUP)

McKibbin, R. (1998), Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (OUP)

Roberts, R. (1971), The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of this Century (MUP)

Whipple, A. (2009), ‘Revisiting the “Rivers of Blood” Controversy: Letters to Enoch Powell,’ Journal of British Studies, 48: 717-35.

What lessons can history offer the incoming Boris?

Following his decisive leadership victory - can history predict Boris Johnson’s likely prospects? What can we learn from the fate of those previous premiers chosen by their party rather than the people?

The simple (but rather boring) answer is no – politics is too inherently unpredictable, especially in the turbulent seas of Brexit Britain.  However, history can offer a few pointers to the future. Indeed, examining the fate of past Prime Ministers, who have shared Johnson’s experience of entering Number Ten without first winning an electoral mandate in the country, reveals some interesting patterns.

Since Britain became a de facto democracy, just over a century ago in 1918, as many as eleven Prime Ministers have trodden the same path. Interestingly, the first three chose to seek their own electoral mandate within six months of coming into office (Bonar Law in 1922, and Baldwin twice, in 1923 and 1935). In April 1955 it took Anthony Eden less than a fortnight. The first Premier to break the mould was Neville Chamberlain in 1937, probably not a happy precedent given his ignominious fall, without ever calling a General Election, in the dark days of 1940 (the wartime electoral truce meant his successor, Sir Winston Churchill, had no choice in the matter, but then he was backed by all parties).

It was Harold Macmillan who decisively broke the pattern of speedily seeking a democratic mandate when, in January 1957, he succeeded the ailing Anthony Eden in the aftermath of the ‘Suez Crisis’. With the polls looking bad, and the economy apparently faltering, Macmillan chose to bide his time. Crucially, when he finally held an election, in October 1959, he was returned with a landslide majority of 100 with 49.4 per cent of the poll. Macmillan’s triumph emboldened future incoming Premiers to play the long game, making full use of the levers of state power to engineer the most opportune time to hold a confirmatory poll.

Since Macmillan in 1959 no unelected Premier has ever enjoyed the same extraordinary success. Indeed, apart from John Major in 1992, none has managed to secure a Parliamentary majority by choosing to see out their predecessor’s Parliamentary term. Sir Alec Douglas-Home came close in 1964, but not close enough to stop Harold Wilson becoming the first Labour Premier for thirteen years. James Callaghan and Gordon Brown both chose to ignore calls to seek an early election, and a personal mandate, and both ended up losing to untried Conservative Party leaders (Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and David Cameron in 2010).  Most recently, of course, in 2017 Theresa May went back on her initial refusal to call a General Election in the hope of increasing the modest majority she had inherited from Cameron. The gamble backfired, the majority was squandered, and everything that has happened since has simply been the slow motion car crash made inevitable by her decision to carry on regardless.

So what does all this tell us about Boris Johnson’s likely fate? Like his old schoolmate David Cameron, Johnson seems by nature to be something of a gambler, but will this lead him to wager that he can be the first person successfully to follow in Macmillan’s wait-and-see footsteps? Or, alternatively, will he be the first since Eden in 1955 to insist that, as an unelected PM he has a democratic duty to seek a personal mandate? It’s hard to know, but one suspects that like May in 2016, he’s likely to be tempted to risk calling an early election to take advantage of the apparent disarray in Labour ranks. But this only makes sense if he can find some way to overcome the disarray in his own ranks. He appears to have two diametrically opposed options. Either he can run headlong for a ‘No Deal’ whilst coming to a temporary electoral understanding with Nigel Farage to try and break the Parliamentary log jam, or he can dash in the opposite direction by seeking a broad-based, cross-party compromise (offering an immediate post-deal General Election, and, who knows, perhaps a Scottish referendum, as the carrots to achieve a Parliamentary majority).

Or perhaps he isn’t a gambler at all, and, like so many before him, he will just wait for the clock to run down on his Premiership (unlike them he will at least have the excuse of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, 2011 to justify his failure to seek a democratic mandate). But that’s not very Boris. Who knows, as in 2016, he may already have penned alternative Telegraph columns outlining the case for both of the radical punts available to him.

Jon Lawrence

University of Exeter

@JonHistorian
Author of Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-war England (June 2019) @ https://bit.ly/2UXL3jd

Johnson Image: (c) Andrew Parsons/i-images, licence Creative Commons

Tyneside Shipbuilders' voices, 1968-69

These posts are all direct quotations from the field-notes of a research project in the Swan Hunter shipyards at Wallsend led by Professor Richard Brown at Durham University in 1968-69. The notes themselves have been archived at the Modern Records Centre, Warwick University, and more information about this collection is available from the UK Data Service. As part of a Leverhulme-funded research project revisiting social science field-notes from the 1930s to the 1980s, I have recently written an essay focused specifically on closely reading the everyday speech of men working in the Wallsend yards. This gets its first public outing at the Essex University conference on the ‘Resurgence of Class in History’, 12-13 September, but I have been so struck by the vivacity of many of the men's comments that I thought I would also post some of them to Twitter in the run-up to the conference. The Modern Records Centre has kindly given permission for me to tweet these extracts, suitably anonymised. 

Of course it is hard to provide much context to a snippet of recorded speech in 140 characters, but I am hoping that some cumulative sense of the complex world-view of these supposedly ‘traditional’ industrial male workers will emerge as the sequence develops. The first post comes from a plumber, one of many employed by Swan Hunter as ships’ outfitters. I have come to think of him as the ‘philosopher plumber’ because of his unusual willingness to engage the researchers in extended debates about the meaning of life and his own personal philosophy. He cannot be said to be ‘typical,’ but then as he insisted so passionately, it is not clear that one should be searching for the ‘typical’ working man – to do so is to deny workers’ individuality when this was clearly so important to them. But this does not mean that we simply give up - declaring that social life was (and is) too complicated to understand. This is too defeatist. If we listen carefully to workers’ diverse voices we will hear distinct patterns and commonalities. Crucially, we will also begin to understand how people made sense of the changes happening around them - how they often understood their lives reflexively, applying both historical and social-science frames to make sense of social change.  By searching out workers’ ‘lost voices’ we are not simply trying to restore working people to the historical record as active subjects, nor are we involved in a doomed search for an ‘authentic’ popular culture untainted by dominant ideas and values. Rather, we are seeking to understand how people navigated these ideas and values in their everyday lives – what was internalised, what mutated, what made no impact whatsoever, and what ideas and values survived untouched from earlier cultural periods? 

Making 'The Unmaking of the English Working Class'

The first lesson I learnt in making this programme for Radio 4 is that you can’t hope to say much in a 27½ minute slot, especially if you want to give half that time to other people to express their views. Inevitably, therefore, a great many issues got left on the cutting room floor. Three stand out for me and I thought I’d address them briefly here to set the record straight: they are nationality, ethnicity and gender.

First, nationality - why English? This was not just because I chose to hang the book on Thompson’s original and still thought-provoking book about the Making of the English Working Class. Though it was hardly unknown in the drawing rooms of Morningside or Kelvinside, the old, hierarchical version of class, with its fine gradations of status supposedly recognised by all, had its deepest roots in England. The Scots and the Welsh, and even more the Irish, can, and frequently do, tell themselves that class is a uniquely English obsession – the English disease – indeed this has become one of the important building blocks of national identity in each country (as it is also in the old Dominions such as Australia and New Zealand which tend to see themselves as having transcended the constrictions of the old, class-bound English system).  

Second, how might immigration, and the issue of ‘race’, complicate the story? Here it is crucial to confront head-on the gulf between our dominant myths about ‘the working class’ and the everyday lives of working people in all their diversity. The big story is not the racism that characterised working-class reactions to new immigrant groups in the second half of the twentieth-century. The racism could be real enough, but it was endemic across society, rather than the preserve of a class. Indeed, it was in working-class districts that one often also came across the most determined resistance to the divisive consequences of racism. Rather, the big story is the way that our perception of class, and especially of the working class, has been fixed in time – roughly at that moment in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the national culture became obsessed by the vivacity and ‘authenticity’ of urban, working-class culture – what Selina Todd calls the moment of the ‘working-class hero’ in her recent book The People.

Historically, ideas about class in England carried powerful racial undertones. In the nineteenth-century, the urban poor were often equated with the colonised peoples of the empire – both were, at best, noble savages in need of ‘civilisation’. In turn, champions of the poor presented them as the indigenous, dispossessed people of the island – the ‘true’ English who for centuries had supposedly been oppressed by the privileged Norman elite and their cronies. In World War Two it was this indigenous conception of ‘The People’ that became the backbone of national mythology – ‘the People’s War’ – and the beneficiary of the radically redrawn social settlement of 1945. Immigration destabilised this insular, island story. Outbursts of popular hostility to incomers, such as the Powellite movement of the late 1960s, were often presented in class terms, even though Powell’s social base was much more diverse. But as Camilla Schofield (UEA) has demonstrated the myths of World War Two were central to popular hostility to immigration, with ideas about entitlement to housing and welfare deeply marked by ideas about the people’s wartime sacrifices.

In popular culture the epitome of the white working-class racist was Alf Garnett, the bigoted, East End anti-hero of Johnny Speight’s popular sit com of the late sixties and early seventies, Till Death us Do Part.  Garnett was an anachronism - a ridiculous, reactionary throwback – but there was enough truth in the portrayal (which was apparently based in part on Speight’s own docker father), that it played its part in helping to fix ideas about the working class as white, urban and increasingly elderly at a time when the unions in particular were not just challenging racialised ideas about class, but also proving remarkably successful at unionising immigrant workers. The white working class is no more a ‘Thing’ than the working class – it is a cultural construction and one that is by its very nature corrosive of any more unifying politics of class.

And, finally, gender. Here too the myths about the working class play an important role. Social historians will rightly tell you that women were central to neighbourhood life and family survival in working-class districts. Until the late 1940s most married women did not work (regardless of class), and in predominantly working-class districts it was women who eked out a meagre wage (or more often part of a meagre wage) to keep the household economy afloat (the work of Andrew Davies and Elizabeth Roberts is key here, as are the contemporary accounts of Margery Spring Rice and Michael Young). But even so the myths about class focused overwhelmingly on men at work – on the world of production, and especially on the heroic proletarian figures of heavy industry and mining. These were the men idealised in proletarian fiction, or by social investigators such as George Orwell. Myths about class, especially the myths of the Left, were highly gendered. 

This always mattered – historically the Labour Party routinely did better with men than women, but as women entered the world of paid employment in greater and greater numbers from the 1950s it began to destabilise the whole Left political project. Bea Campbell captured this brilliantly in her 1984 book Wigan Pier Revisited. Again, there was no reason why these changes should have weakened a coherent politics of class, or have accentuated a sense that the working class was somehow in decline – only the fixity with which old models of class were clung to can explain this. 

Unmaking the English Working Class - script

The Unmaking of the English Working Class (presenter's script)

Broadcast BBC Radio 4, 9 June @ 8pm.

Presenter Jon Lawrence, Producer Tim Dee.

Participants:
Danny Dorling, Dept of Geography, University of Oxford LINK
Jon Lawrence, Emmanuel College, Cambridge LINK
Mike Savage, London School of Economics LINK
Jil Mathieson, National Statistician, Chief Executive, UK Statistics Authority LINK
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Clare College, Cambridge LINK
Selina Todd, St Hilda's College, Oxford LINK

Useful Links:
Danny Dorling, All That is Solid (2014)
Selina Todd, The People (2014)
The Great British Class Survey results

By Jon Lawrence:
'Blue Labour, One Nation Labour and the Lessons of History,' Renewal 21, 2/3 (2013) 
'Back to Work: The Making and Unmaking of the English Working Class,' Juncture [IPPR] 20, 1 (2013)
'Social-Science Encounters and the Negotiation of Difference in early-1960s England,' History Workshop Journal (2014)

Presenter's script: 

1.     Introduction 

<< Jon Lawrence re-visiting 125 Two Mile Hill for the first time since 1978>>

This is the first time I’ve been back to my childhood home in East Bristol for more than 30 years. I wanted to spark memories of how I understood social difference in the 1960s and 1970s – why, despite being a shopkeeper’s son, I came to think of myself as ‘working-class’ and later, to use a cliché of the time: as ‘working-class and proud’.  It was an identity that helped me to make sense of, and survive, the social dislocation of first grammar school and then Cambridge University.  It also provided the backbone of my commitment to Left politics, though from the start I was convinced that most of the Left failed to understand the working class I knew. But does class still matter today? Is there still scope for a distinctive politics of the working class; or has all this vanished along with the bulk of heavy industry that once dominated working-class life in many parts of the country?

Fifty years ago, just before my parents bought their shop in East Bristol, E.P. Thompson published his ground-breaking study: The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson’s book offers a brilliantly vivid account of the half century of rapid social and economic change which marked Britain’s emergence as the world’s first industrial nation in the late 18^th and early 19^th century.  As Britain industrialised, Thompson argued, a politically conscious working class was born – created from below by the men and women at the sharp end of industrial transformation.

<<Selina Todd (Oxford) on the significance of Thompson’s approach to class>>

When I was a student in the 1980s the Pelican paperback edition of The Making of the English Working Class seemed to be the one book on every Labour activist’s bookshelf. Who knows how many had actually read its 900+ pages, but they knew it was about the necessity, and nobility, of working-class political struggle – that was what mattered. And that was what had dominated my adolescence in the 1970s.

We have seen 50 years of equally rapid change since the book was published – Britain has de-industrialised, trade unions have become much weaker, and the politics of class have been pushed to the margins.  Indeed, change has been so rapid that I am now in the middle of a research project about the last 50 years which I have called ‘UNMAKING the English working class’

But just as Thompson was not interested in the making of a THING called the ‘working class’, but rather in the idea of a working-class POLITICS, so I too am primarily interested in the apparent collapse of a coherent political sense of class in modern Britain.

Has this happened because the working class has dwindled to a tiny minority, or does it reflect quite separate political and cultural changes? And have we, in the process, become deaf to the call for social justice that Thompson’s working class first raised in the early nineteenth century?  By any measure Britain has become more unequal in the last 50 years; how come it has also become less aware of class inequality?

2.     Class as Occupation

Let us turn first to the question of class as occupation - what can the recent, 2011, population census tell us?  Has the working class really disappeared ‘as a thing’? Well, perhaps inevitably, it all depends on how we define class, and that is something which sociologists have changed their minds on in recent years.

<<Jil Mathieson (National Statistician, ONS) on changes to social structure since 1911 and how these have been reflected in the categories used for the national census>>

<<Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (Cambridge) on the fall in manual employment and in manufacturing 1961-2011>>

Perhaps we are all too wedded to images of a working class dominated by the hard physical labour of the foundry and the pit to see call centre workers or junior office staff as ‘working class’. But manufacturing itself has also changed. Today a foundry can be as high-tech and spot-less as any corporate headquarters.

If our ideas about what’s ‘working class’ struggle to accommodate new types of occupation perhaps that’s because other things matter just as much as what we do for a living – like where we live and how we live.

3.     Housing & Place

Given our tendency to live alongside people much like ourselves, place is often a convenient short-hand for class; think Mayfair and the Old Kent Road on the original British Monopoly board.  As a child I lived the geography of class before I had the vocabulary to make sense of it intellectually.  And it was this that came back to me most strongly when I revisited my childhood home.

<< Jon Lawrence outside shop in Two Mile Hill and on Brandon Hill, Bristol discussing the social geography of class in Britain as he experienced it in childhood.>>

As Lynsey Hanley has movingly described in her book Estates: An Intimate History, Britain’s inter-war and post-war municipal housing estates have come to be uniquely stigmatised places in recent decades, as gentrification has gradually transformed the character of the old, inner-city districts once labelled ‘slums’.  

<<Danny Dorling (Oxford) on Barton roundabout discussing housing as a class issue & his take on the class politics of place as seen in the East Oxford he knew as a child.>>

4.     Class as Lifestyle

How we live – our tastes and our lifestyle - are also frequently taken as markers of social class.  In 2013 a team of sociologists headed by Mike Savage from the LSE worked with the BBC to develop a new survey of class which gave equal weight to cultural, social and economic factors.  Their descriptive model of social class identified seven distinct groupings: elite, established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, emergent service workers and a disadvantaged group, representing 15 per cent of the population, which they labelled the ‘precariat’. 

<<Mike Savage (London School of Economics) on the Great British Class Survey, including the massive public response, and on why Britons still identify as working class in greater numbers than elsewhere.>>

5.     Identity and Class

Certainly asking people what class they are tends to generate notoriously slippery results. Ask British people to choose between labelling themselves ‘working class’ or ‘middle class’ and close to two-thirds generally opt to be ‘working class’. Give them the intermediate option of being ‘lower middle class’ and those choosing to be ‘working class’ shrinks to barely a third; add the fourth option of ‘upper working class’ and ‘working classness’ once again becomes the choice of the majority. 

Arguably what this tells us is not that class means nothing, but rather that in many ways it means too much. Our instinct is to see class as a fixed, ontological category – that is a statement about who we are – but that’s not how people generally use class in everyday life – as the polling evidence demonstrates. Perhaps we should learn to see class more as a cultural resource – something people use to help them navigate social differences, and especially inequalities of power.

But why should class – and particularly the idea of the working class - be so slippery and unstable? To understand this we need to go back to Thompson and the ‘Making’ of the Working Class as a political idea in the nineteenth century.

Pre-industrial English society was organised around fine gradations of status and rank that were meant to be recognised by all – this is the world Jane Austen conveys to us in novels such as Mansfield Park and Pride and Prejudice. But by the 1830s industrial society was coming to recognise a starker differentiation – the three-class system of ‘Lower’, ‘Middle’ and ‘Upper’ lampooned by Ronnie Corbett, Ronnie Barker and John Cleese in the famous 1966 ‘Class Sketch’ where Corbett was the put upon working man looked down on by the others.

But Thompson’s heroes – the trade union leaders and their allies – never accepted this stigmatising view of the new industrial workers. They talked, not of the ‘lower’ classes, but of the working classes. Mixing socialism and Protestantism they emphasised the nobility of labour and insisted that all wealth was derived from the hard work of the so-called ‘lower’ classes.

In radical argument the opposite of the ‘working’ classes were the ‘idle’ classes, but in everyday usage the term often remained just a synonym for ‘lower class’. Hence much of the ambiguity and uncertainty which continues to surround the claim to be ‘working class’ – and why people tend to be happier claiming to be ‘working class’ than being labelled working-class by others.   

<<Mike Savage (LSE) on what people mean when they say they are ‘working class’>>

But sociologist Beverley Skeggs has explored how young women in particular often actively reject the idea that they might be ‘working class’ - seeing it as a negative, stigmatising category almost completely stripped of the overtones of dignity and worth that Thompson’s radicals sought to give it. In Skegg’s classic 1997 book Formations of Class and Gender Sam, a young care worker, explains that,

“To me if you are working class it basically means that you are poor. That you have nothing. You know nothing.”

Skeggs talks of the women’s ‘dis-identification’ with being working class, and is clear that fear of being looked down on by others largely explains their outlook. True, we still hear a great deal of talk about ‘hard-working people’ from the mouths of Oxbridge-educated politicians – but its toil more than nobility that this phrase tends to conjure up, and the imagined opposite is no longer the idle rich, but rather the non-working poor.  And alongside this pious language of hard work, we now have a public culture which routinely and viciously denigrates the poor and disadvantaged in the name of entertainment, something that was all but unimaginable fifty years ago (in the 1966 class sketch the punch line involved each man saying what they got out of the class system - Corbett, the diminutive working man, got a ‘pain in the neck’.)

In his widely acclaimed 2011 book Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class, Owen Jones sought to expose the pernicious influence of a new hate-speech of class across the mainstream media. He wrote that ‘In the current climate of chav-hate the class warriors of Fleet Street can finally get away with it, openly and flagrantly: caricaturing working-class people as stupid, idle, racist, sexually promiscuous, dirty, and fond of vulgar clothes. Nothing of worth is seen to emanate from working-class Britain.’

How has this happened, and happened so quickly? Three years after Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class appeared in paperback John Lennon was telling the world: ‘A Working Class Hero is something to be’ - I, for one, believed him, and it became something of a personal anthem as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the early 1980s.  Now we live in a world of 'Chav' jokes and Vicky Pollard imitations. Time and again the media tell us that being poor is somehow a lifestyle choice, and that our own advantages are hard-earned. We tell ourselves Britain is a ‘meritocracy’, forgetting the continued importance of inherited wealth and privilege, and forgetting that the term itself was coined to describe a dystopic future in which a despised and denigrated underclass finally rose up to overthrow a self-perpetuating elite.

The new hate-speech of class has emerged from the collapse of the political idea of the working class in the fifty years since Thompson wrote The Making. And though it may seem harmless fun to many, we should be mindful of the serious injuries it inflicts not just on the poor and disadvantaged, but on the fabric of our society.

But there are, at last, some signs that the tide is turning. The fall-out from the 2007-8 crash has encouraged a widespread questioning of where we are heading. The general benefits of living in a more equal society have been widely championed, most notably by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s influential book The Spirit Level. Owen Jones has challenged the denigration of working-class people, and most recently, Selina Todd has written a sweeping history of the working class across the last century which demonstrates how much we can learn from the lives and values of working people, past and present.

<<Selina Todd (Oxford) on the continued personal relevance of class to explain the injustice done to loved ones and why politicians should still seek to mobilise around the idea of the ‘working class’>>

6.     Conclusions

So what conclusions should we draw from all this? 

Firstly, that Britain is unusual for the large number of people who continue to identify as ‘working class’ – it is still a term that carries positive connotations for many people.

However, public culture no longer celebrates working-class life, as it did in the 1960s, instead we have seen the emergence of a new hate-speech of class which feeds off the neo-liberal lie that we all get what we deserve in life.

People with power and privilege tell us that class no longer matters, even that we are all classless now. Superficially their arguments are attractive – no one likes to be labelled in class terms – but we should be wary of relinquishing the language of class. It is the most powerful tool we possess for challenging inequality and privilege - it is also the one resource that the unprivileged possess to label their experiences as unfair and, most importantly, as changeable. Class still matters because without it the top 1 per cent really will be untouchable.