by Owen Jones
Middle-class teenagers are certainly less likely to fall pregnant in the first place, but they are also significantly more likely to have an abortion. I chatted to a few middle-class young women, some of whom had had a termination as teenagers. Their reason for not wanting a child now was the same: fear of the impact it would have on their career at such an early stage. But if you live in an area of high unemployment and with only unappealing, low-paid jobs on offer, why wait for mother- hood? 'In some cases there will be an element of people who don' t see a lot of routes for themselves in terms of what they can do with their life,' says Fiona Weir. 'They might be looking for a sense of role, and purpose, and meaning, and wanting to be useful and to matter.'
One recent, detailed study showed that teenage pregnancy can bring with it many positives, particularly for young people from poorer back- grounds. 'Our research makes it clear that young parenthood can make sense and be valued and even provide an impetus for teenage mothers and fathers to strive to provide a better life for their children,' said Dr Claire Alexander, one of the report's authors. Indeed, having a child can actually be empowering. As another study put it: 'Particu- larly amongst those who come from disadvantaged groups, for whom there may be little perceived reward for delaying parenthood, early motherhood can provide the opportunity to attain self-respect and adult status.'
We have seen that some of the things people associate with 'chavs' have a basis in reality. There are some alienated, angry young people out there who take out some of their frustrations in anti-social ways. Things like crime and drug addiction are more common in working- class areas than in the average middle-class suburb. A working-class teenager is considerably more likely to give birth than her middle-class peer. But the reality is rather different from the vicious generalizations and victim-blaming that accompanies chav-hare. Poverty, unemploy- ment and a housing crisis provide fertile ground for a range of social problems. These are working-class communities that took the brunt of a class war first unleashed by Thatcher three decades ago. Indeed, it would be far more startling if life had gone on, much like before, even as the pillars of the community collapsed one by one.
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Proclaiming that people are responsible for their situation makes it easier to oppose the social reforms that would otherwise be necessary to help them. But such demonization does not stand up to scrutiny. People born into poor, working-class communities do not deserve their fate, nor have they contributed to it. As the industries that sustained their lives disappeared, the once-tight bonds holding many working-class communities together unravelled at a breathtaking pace. Those living there could once look forward to respected, relatively well-paid jobs. Their lives had structure. Today, large swathes of communities are haunted by despair, frustration and boredom. Without real economic recovery, the social diseases that accompany hopelessness have flourished.
It would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of the Tories. After all, New Labour left manufacturing to wilt, too. At the end of their rule, they toyed with the beginnings of an industrial strategy to encourage a revival, but it was too little and, for them, far, far too late. Britain did not suffer the same ruinous level of unemployment as in the 1980s and 1990s,even as the economy went into free fall following the 2008 finan- cial crash. But all too often it was part-time and low-paid service sector jobs that filled the vacuum, and they could not resucitate the communi- ties worst hit by the Thatcherite experiment in the 1980s. This is why many of New Labour's policies amounted to sticking plasters in communities ravaged by the Tories under their eighteen-year rule-- plasters that are now being torn off, the wounds still bleeding underneath.
It is not surprising that so many working-class people felt alienated from Labour. They felt it was no longer fighting on their side. Some succumbed to apathy-but not all. Deprived of a narrative to explain what was happening to their lives, some began to grope for other logics. It was not the wealthy victors of Thatcher's class war who found themselves on the sharp end. The frustrations and anger of millions of working-class people were channelled into a backlash against immigrants.
8
Backlash
Labour's treacherous lies and cardinal betrayal of the working classes is obvious to all. But the really good news is that the radical left have all but vanished from defending the working classes.
-Jonathan Bowden, BNP activist
It was not an ideal day for knocking on doors. The 2010 general election was only a couple of months away, and I was pounding the streets with a team of activists to get out the vote for a left-wing backbencher. The long, freezing winter of 2010 had finally drawn to a close and it was one of the first sunny Sundays in months. Families were taking advantage of the warm weather, and houses with anyone inside were few and far between.
After fruitlessly knocking on a few doors, a middle-aged woman wearing an apron finally answered. Itwas obvious she wan ted to speak her mind.
'My son can't get a job,' she said angrily. 'But there are all these immigrants coming in and they're getting all the jobs. There are too many immigrants!'
It would be easy todismiss someone with these views as a knuckle dragging racist. But it was clear that she was not. I had to listen carefully to what she was saying, because she had a fairly strong accent-a Bengali accent, to be precise. Here was a woman of Indian origin beraj blaming immigrants for taking jobs from British workers like her son. What was going on?
That spring, activists of all political stripes found the immigration issue cropping up again and again. It had not come out of nowhere. Throughout the 2000s, a growing backlash against immigration had developed. Polls reflected an increasing hostility to more people entering the country. At the 2005 election, the Tories tried to tap into this groundswell with their infamous 'It's not racist to impose limits on immigration' posters.
But nothing focused people's minds on immigration more than the rise of the British National Party. In the early days of New Labour, back in 1999, the BNP had won just over a hundred thousand votes in the European elections; a decade later, they would poll not far short of a million. Far-right extremists celebrated jubilantly as BNP leader Nick Griffin and his Nazi-sympathizing colleague Andrew Brons became Members of the European Parliament.
The rising BNP tide spilled over into national elections, too. At the 1997 general election, it polled a paltry 35,832 votes, only a handful more than the eccentric National Law Party. Sixteen other parties did better. Eight years later, over 192,000 voted for BNP candidates, making the party the eighth largest in the country. There was huge relief following the 2010 general election that the BNP did not manage to pick up any seats. Yet ithad still attracted nearly 564,000 votes. The BNP was now the fifth biggest party in Britain.
Is the BNP's rise a sign that society is becoming more racist? The short answer is 'no' . Back in 1958, a Gallup poll found that 71 per cent of Britons opposed interracial marriage--and yet there was no racist party even fielding candidates. So few people subscribe to such a view these days that pollsters do not bother recording the figure. Today, Britain has the highest levels of mixed-race marriages in Europe, and only 3 per cent admit to being 'very racially prejudiced'. Four out of five people claim to have no prejudice whatsoever. The irony is that Britain has become less racist at the same time asitis faced with the most electorally successful racist party in British history.
To understand why people vote for the BNP, it is important to understand what the BNP is. Opinion polls are a bit unreliable because, outside of the anonymity of the polling booth, some potential voters are wary of admitting their support for the BNP. But they clearly show that the average BNP voter is likely to be working class: for example, one YouGov poll found that 61 per cent of BNP supporters were in the bottom three social classifications, the C2s, Ds and Es. The BNP has thrived in traditionally white working-class areas with a long history of returning Labour candidates. Little wonder that the rise of the BNP has reinforced one of the popular 'chav' caricature
s of the white working class: a beer-bellied skinhead on a council estate, moaning about hordes of immigrants 'coming in and taking our jobs'.
Indeed, ithas suited many politicians and journalists to portray the BNP's rise as a matter of white working-class people trying to preserve their identity from a non-white invasion. Frank Field, a right-wing, anti-immigration Labour MP, told me that the BNP are appealing to 'a sense that people are losing their country without ever being asked whether that's what they want'.
But it is not simply racism that has driven hundreds of thousands of working-class people into the waiting arms of the BNP. The rise of the far right is a reaction to the marginalization of working-class people. It is a product of politicians' refusal to address working-class concerns, particularly affordable housing and a supply of decent, secure jobs. It has been fuelled by a popular perception that Labour had abandoned the people it was created to represent. Karl Marx once described religion as 'the sigh of the oppressed creature': something similar could be said about the rise of the far right today.
The BNP is often compared to the European fascist parties of the 1930s. Yet, in reality, ithas flourished for completely different reasons. The fascism of the Great Depression era largely owed its support to small property-owners and big businesses who felt threatened by a growing left, whereas today's BNP is a product of the left's weakness. With no powerful left to answer the bread-and-butter concerns of working-class people in the neoliberal era of job insecurity and housing crisis, the BNP has filled the vacuum.
The Asian lady I spoke to was extremely unlikely tohave plumped for the BNP come polling day. But she expressed the same anxiety_ about the impact of immigration on jobs--as many BNP voters. This shows that the great backlash against immigration is being driven, above all, by material concerns. There was once a popular narrative that social problems were caused by the injustices of capitalism that, at the very least, had to be corrected. With these ideas forced out of the mainstream, ithas been easy for the idea that all social problems are caused by outsiders, immigrants, to gain a foothold. It is a myth that, fanned by right-wing newspapers and journalists, has resonated in working-class communities across Britain.
That is not to completely dismiss ethnic identity as a factor. The BNP does well in certain overwhelmingly white areas that have seen a recent influx of new, ethnic minority residents. Former London mayor Ken Livingstone recalls:
I was the candidate in Hackney North and Stoke Newington in 1977 when the National Front got 5 percent of the vote at the GLC [Greater London Council] election, just like the BNP did in London in 2008. And they were in Hoxton and Haggerston, the two southern wards. On the night of the GLC election, they didn't have a majority, but they were the leading party in those wards ... But two years ago, they virtually got no votes-just a couple of per cent. So I think you tend to get a problem of racism in an area undergoing transition.'
Hackney is one of the most mixed areas in the country, and as a result the far right has died out there. But it flourishes in areas such as Barking and Dagenham, where mass immigration is a new phenomenon and where the BNP has done well; or, conversely, where there is very little immigration but a tremendous fear of it.
The demonization of the working class has also had a real role to play in the BNP's success story. Although ruling elites have made itclear that there is nothing of worth in working-class culture, we have been (rightly) urged to celebrate the identities of minority groups. What's more, liberal multiculturalism has understood inequality purely through the prism of race, disregarding that of class. Taken together, this has encouraged white working-class people to develop similar notions of ethnic pride, and to build an identity based on race so as to gain acceptance in multicultural society. The BNP has made the most of this disastrous redefinition of white working-class people as, effectively, another marginalized ethnic minority. 'Treating the white working class as a new ethnic group only does the BNP a massive favour,' says anthropologist Dr Gillian Evans, 'and so does not talking about a multiracial working class.'
It is unlikely that the BNP will ever win significant power, not least because of chronic incompetence and infighting, of the kind that crippled the party after the 20I0 general election. But its rise is like a warning shot. Unless working-class people are properly represented once again and their concerns taken seriously, Britain faces the prospect of an angry new right-wing populism.
It was ten days before Christmas, and Dagenham Heathway's Mall shopping centre was thronged with bargain-hunters. I was standing thirteen miles east of the House of Commons, but it felt like a world away from the tearooms of Westminster. Dagenham and neighbouring Barking are solidly working-class areas in the borderlands of East London and Essex. Dagenham was once the manufacturing hub of London: during Britain's industrial heyday in the 1950s,the iconic local Ford factory employed tens of thousands of workers. As one anti-racist campaigner put it to me, this was 'the BNP frontline'.
Barking and Dagenham first appeared on the national political radar in2006, when the BNP stormed on to the local council with an apparent avalanche of support. With eleven seats in the bag, it was now the main opposition to Labour. It had only stood candidates in thirteen out of the fifty-one seats up for grabs. This was a political earthquake whose tremors were felt across the country. Among the BNP's new councilors was Richard Barnhrook, who would go on to be elected to the London Assembly in 2008.
Why was a once solidly Labour area defecting to what was until recently a fringe racist party? Margaret Owen, a retired home carer, was among the shoppers out that afternoon. I asked her if she lived in a tightly knit community. 'No, I wouldn't say so,' she said. 'It's changing: When I asked her what she felt the number one issue facing the community was, she paused. 'No. I mustn't: I gently pressed her again, and she looked cautiously from side to side before leaning in and whispering: 'Well, it's all these foreigners coming in. Our borough is just changing. It used to be so nice: Over what sort of period had this change taken place, I asked? 'It's changed in the last, what, six or seven years? Yes. Very much:
It did not take long to understand the real reason for her dislike. 'They're getting the houses, and our people, our children can't get the houses. Foreigners come in here and get places ... I never got that. My children never got it. It's just going down the pan. If I can get out of Dagenham, I will:
Many local residents harbour similar frustrations. Danny, a lanky, thoughtful man in his late thirties, has lived in the area since he was eight years old. A printer by trade until the industry went bust, he found work in a warehouse in nearby Romford and then in a furniture shop. After that he was made redundant, and was out of a job for two years. Legislation introduced by New Labour compelled him to work for his dole money, and he was told that he would either have to work for a company for nothing, or go into voluntary service. He ended up volun- teering in a local charity shop, 'because if I work for a company, I'm earning them money, when all I'm getting is my basic giro, which is below the minimum wage:
Like Margaret Owen, Danny insisted that housing was the main local grievance. 'There's 10,000 people on the housing list who are trying to get a house,' he said. Danny was wary about discussing the BNP's local rise. It was, he said, a 'dodgy subject' because he feared being labelled a racist.
Which is not good, because you think that, at the end of the day, there has been a lot of influx of foreigners. Whether they're taking the jobs and the houses is debatable, but they're being housed and fed-you know what I meanr-c-so they've got to be put somewhere, which is obviously taking away from the people who've lived in Dagenham all their lives, putting taxes in, and they're scooped aside, and getting pushed further and further out of Dagenham.
A friend of his is bringing up a child on her own and has been shunted around temporary accommodation for years. But while there is not enough affordable housing tomeet the need, a large prison is being built: a source of real exasperation among the locals. 'Why don't they build houses over th
ere, instead of building a prison?'
Unsurprisingly, the issue of jobs weighs heavily on Danny's mind. At its height, the Ford factory employed 40,000 people and was at the heart of the community. Sam Tarry, a leading local anti-racist campaigner who has lived in East London all his life, points out that 'part of Dagenham was actually built tohouse the workers from that particular factory.' Danny paints a picture of insecure, low-paid work for many local people in the post-Ford era:
Because obviously Ford was the main thing round here. Imean, I've not worked for Ford, there were other companies, but they're allgoing bust. That's the problem. You try and get a job, it's either before Christmas, or it's temporary for six months for Christmas, January comes along and you're back in the same boat again, so it's a vicious circle. Or if you do go and get a job, they don't pay you enough to pay all your bills.
Danny is not short of frustrations, but he has no faith in the ability of traditional political parties to alleviate them.
I think a lot of the politicians have been to public school ... when they come out they just have no concept of real life. They've never scrimped or scraped, they've never had to do fourteen jobs to earn a living or whatever! Because they're on sixty or eighty grand a year, and then there was all this thing with expenses. They're still taking the mick.