Notes and Thoughts derived from reading
The New Working Class
How to win Hearts, Minds and Votes
Claire Ainsley, Policy Press 2018
How do we connect with and ‘educate’ the new working-class?
Who or what groups constitute the new working-class?
The Invisible, the Precariat,
Remembered, they say, only at elections.
The ones who don’t vote because they say and feel that
The politicians don’t understand us,
The JAMS, ‘Just about managing’,
Clegg’s ‘Alarm clock Britain’,
Ed Miliband’s ‘squeezed middle’,
David Goodhart’s ‘Somewheres’, as opposed to
The educated ‘Anywheres’ –
The list of tropes and figurative inventions go on and on,
But the questions remain the same:
How do we connect with and ‘educate’ the new working-class?
Who or what groups constitute the new working class?
And a new one:
What are the preoccupations of the new working class?
‘The dominant values of the new working class are family, fairness, hard work and decency’ – equality and freedom come lower down the list, say YouGov:
Putting the kids and family first,
Even if that means going without a meal yourself;
Seeking that heaven of secure housing,
While proud of being ‘down to earth’:
‘The new working class is multi-ethnic, of all abilities, and more likely to be female than male. If ever there was a ‘typical’ working-class person previously, there certainly isn’t now’… ‘Cleaners, shopworkers, bar tenders, cooks, carers, teaching assistants, secretaries, delivery workers and so on’:
Service sector employees, some with no sick pay,
No pension, no holiday pay,
Zero hours contracts, the gig economy,
De-unionised,
Some, just one pay cheque away from catastrophe,
Facing the fractal, fickle finger of fate,
An economy trumpeted as modernity,
Yet mirroring 19th century dockers,
Queuing up at the gates for a job for the day,
But now
A fractured, atomised, individualised working class,
With multiple social identities.
But underpinning all of this,
Lie the consequence of forty years and more
Of monetarist balancing the budget dogma,
Underpinned by two hundred years of self-help
Standing on your own two feet
Samuel Smilesian morality:
‘We might be down to earth but we’re the salt of the earth,
And we’re respectable, I’ll have you know’ –
You could have heard that in 1820 and 1920,
And we still hear the echo of that even now in 2020,
As Martin Kettle wrote in The Guardian:
‘Labour ignores aspiration and the desire to do well at its peril.
Individualism and community are not incompatible.’
But I disagree with him when he says
That there should be ‘an avoidance of slogans’ –
Getting ‘Brexit over the line’ worked for the Tories;
I think we need a series of down to earth slogans,
Slogans that explain left-wing economics,
Slogans that subvert Tory orthodoxy,
And the world of ‘common sense’ economics,
So that we incrementally subvert
The balance the budget mentality,
The outlook that automatically equates
The national budget with that of a household;
The outlook that equates income tax
With government intrusion and loss of income,
Rather than part of a series of steps
Towards a progressive redistribution of wealth -
This is, after all, an age of narcissism,
With a culture of narcissistic celebrityisation,
A television diet of relentless competitiveness,
A cultural hegemony based upon winners and losers,
And the celebration of charity rather than collectivism:
This is the culture that we have to engage with.
And so, how to do it?
How do we communicate and connect with this?
In the abstract, and rhetorical,
How do we create a whole series of Venn diagrams,
And a whole series of seven handshakes, because:
‘The new working class is not one cohesive, monolithic whole but comprised of the constituent parts of what it means to be working class today. It is not unified by collective identity or culture, but does share some similarities of economic and financial experience … around half the population.’
I suppose that implies that there isn’t a class consciousness,
But there is the possibility of building one.
But farewell to the days of the party-political broadcast,
A partial farewell to the days of MSM,
What an anachronism it all seems at the BBC,
When it ignores the election on election day,
A sort of Reithian nod towards impartiality,
But really a joke to many on the Left,
When all around the avenues of social media,
The exhortation on election day
Is to clock on as much as possible,
While slews of right-wing persuasive mail shots
Are micro-targeted at the susceptible.
But does it have to be farewell to the history
And practice of, for example, ‘Red Clydeside’?
Can’t we readapt and reinvent for the twenty-first century?
Red Clydeside with its own bank, cinema,
Evening classes, dance classes, printing press,
Restaurant, food husbandry and supply;
Hear this from Jean McNichol’s LRB review;
“In When the Clyde Ran Red, Maggie Craig quotes an article published in the Times just after the 1922 election which suspiciously lists some of the things organised by the ILP: ‘Socialist study circles, socialist economics classes, socialist music festivals, socialist athletics competitions, socialist choirs, socialist dramatic societies, socialist plays – these are only a few of the devious ways in which they attempt to reach the unconverted.’ There were also socialist Sunday schools, cycling and hiking clubs, several newspapers and, unsurprisingly, endless meetings.”
So how can we readapt and reinvent this for the twenty-first century?
So that we are part of the new working-class culture,
Just as we were with the old working class,
With working men’s clubs, trade unions,
Football teams, outings, mechanics’ institutes,
Reading groups, study groups, walking groups.
We need to be part of that brave new world,
Where it isn’t just ‘the economy, stupid’,
It’s also about shared community values,
That both straddle the sphere of the economic,
But lie beyond it too – sometimes, contradictorily;
It’s about getting rooted in those values and communities,
With activities that mould and meld:
Book groups, discussion groups, film, tv, football,
Advice, support, help, health and social care –
Support for bids for grants;
Support over benefits appeals,
But it’s also about getting the balance right between
Economic and social values (‘The Brexit syndrome’),
It’s about getting the balance right between
Explanation and education, patience and illumination,
It’s about getting the balance right between
Smilesian individualist self-help, and collectivism:
And all in down to earth language:
Short, pithy cogent slogans to summarise,
Short, pithy cogent slogans to intrigue
‘Low-to-middle-income households’ that
‘spend a much higher proportion of their budget
on essentials like heating and food’,
And where attitudes towards the economy are
‘not particularly ideological’-
Only just under 50% favoured
Some sort of income redistribution
Through government taxation;
There was only minority support
For extra spending on unemployment benefit;
33% wanted government to be as small as possible,
And the government spending they favoured
Would be on health and education.
Yet, what does the Rowntree Foundation discover?
50% of those in poverty are in work,
Despite Tory ideological mantras
About work being the route out of poverty,
Despite the Big Issue positive stories
About vendors ‘getting their lives back on track’
By obtaining paid employment;
The author further comments thus:
‘There is a specific and problematic link to disability, gender and ethnicity … The new working class is multi-ethnic, of all abilities, and more likely to be female than male.’
This atomised universality,
Offers both problems and opportunities
The antithesis portrayed between London and the North,
Is simultaneously false but believed as having traction …
Yet uniting everyone, is, it seems,
A desire for ‘a good job’ – meaning,
That it’s interesting, with job security,
Sick pay and a pension,
And some ability to save …
Forty odd years of economic orthodoxy
Have led to this Victorian resurrection,
But queuing for a job for the day,
Early morning, every day of the week,
Is now called a service gig economy,
Where instead of queuing at the gates,
You glance continuously and anxiously at your phone,
And where Victorian piece rates are now ‘targets’,
And subject to performance management,
And all that CV career development illusion -
With immigrants blamed for taking jobs,
Whilst people simultaneously believe
That anyone can get a job if they try hard enough.
It seems as this is where we are now,
So where are we now again, exactly?
‘Welfare’ has become a pejorative;
There is a widespread fear of being sanctioned,
And being sent, as it were, to the food bank;
Overcrowding is ubiquitous,
Families living in one room,
The new working class might be atomised,
May not be as the author says,
Unduly ‘ideological’,
But despite the commodification of life and culture,
Despite the demonisation of working-class people on tv,
With ‘benefits porn’ and ‘poverty porn’ type shows,
Salient economic facts still shout out:
Replacing Trident will cost £40-50 billion,
About 1% of the country owns about 50% of the wealth:
These facts speak for themselves,
But need to be communicated in down to earth language,
To the post-Brexit ‘left behind’,
Down to earth language:
No ideological discourse,
No mention of cultural hegemony,
Short snappy slogans instead,
And for a kick-off:
About 1% of the country
owns about 50% of the wealth.
Let’s sloganise!
And that’s what I am doing now:
I’m making postcards to send through the post,
And hand out in the street,
And leave in pubs and cafes and thoroughfares,
Or when out walking, or at fetes and community events,
Or at book groups and at community events
Or at football matches or when playing,
But instead of being Alone in Berlin,
I’ll be connecting and reinventing,
And reconnecting past, present and future,
In a new solidarity,
In more ways than one.
But for a kick-off, let’s also revive
Thomas Spence’s ‘free and easies’,
Politics in down to earth language,
With spoken word and song and good humour
But let’s make sure we live in the present tense too.
