Underdogs: the Truth About Britain’s White Working Class. By Joel Budd. Picador £10.99.
By working class here is meant those who fall into the census groups of lower supervisory and technical occupations, semi-routine and routine occupations and long-term unemployed (this covers 40 percent of adults, and includes jobs such as baristas, gardeners, bricklayers, chefs and shop assistants). People count as white if that is how they see themselves or how most people would see them. But ethnicity, it is said, is not a stable characteristic, and people born in Ireland or with recent Irish ancestors, can be described as Britons.
Budd investigates white workers by means of statistical studies and his own visits and interviews, which were overwhelmingly done in England and Wales. Three main kinds of area are distinguished. Heartlands, such as Rhymney in south Wales, have very high proportions of white workers who are mostly quite old. Wythenshawe is an enclave, a large council estate on the edge of Manchester and ‘an example of deep poverty in a pleasant setting’. Thetford in Norfolk is a colony, settled by white working class people from elsewhere (mainly London). The three types are not mutually exclusive, and Edlington near Doncaster is a mixture of a heartland and a colony, mainly white but with people who have come from all over England and Ireland.
The book contains a number of interesting points. For instance, poorer white British children generally do very badly at school, while better-off kids do fine. Poorer children can have high aspirations in terms of education and career, but lack high expectations. Few people expect to move for a new job, and young people from poor places usually stick around, so Britain is now ‘a nation of stayers-at-home’. Moving to a new city or town can be expensive and the rewards are not obvious.
Attitudes to immigration are determined not so much by class as by age, as ‘young white working-class Britons … are largely unbothered by immigration and ethnic diversity’, seeing diversity as ‘a fact of life’. Class (in the sense used here) does not indicate how a person will vote but whether they will vote at all, with poor people less likely to vote. White Britons have largely ceased voting Labour, but this change applies less to black and Asian Britons.
One informative section deals with the Lithuanian community in Boston in Lincolnshire. Agricultural work in Fenland is badly paid, and much of it is now done by immigrants from Eastern Europe. A community organisation teaches English to migrants and Lithuanian to their British-born children. The children have an accent that is ‘part Lincolnshire, part Multicultural London English’. More generally, language skills can vary by gender, with Polish women speaking decent English if they work in industries such as care and hospitality, while men often work on building sites with other Polish speakers and so their English is much less good.
An informative look at part of the British population, but without placing it within the general social structure of the UK.
Paul Bennett
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