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.