Progessives Tire of White Working Class

In Britain as in the United States the progressives have gone sour on the white working class. Writes Andrew Gimson.

Our rulers do not think of themselves as being in the slightest bit prejudiced. They know they are the most open-minded people since records began.

But when it comes to the white working class, they have gone on the bigger and better things. Like race.

The white working class is an inconvenient relic, and the sooner it ceases to exist, the better. That is the underlying assumption of our political establishment. The white working class is not just expected to seek salvation by acquiring bourgeois virtues: it is blamed for failing to acquire those virtues more quickly.

It sounds like the United States where Democrats got impatient with the white blue collar class during the school busing crisis a generation ago. Remember? The Southies of South Boston wanted to keep their children going to school in their Irish neighborhood. But the judges and the politicians had other ideas.

The result is that the working class in Britain is expected to keep voting for Labour just as they always have for a century, but they are beginning to flirt with the right-wing BNP. Here in the United States the white ethnics have been slowly leaving the Democrats for a generation.

In Britain, the Conservative Party is self-consciously moving to gain the votes of the moderate educated metropolitan vote and seem to be ignoring the working class completely. In the United States, the Republicans seem to be doing better.

Let us not be patronising. But the problem is that the white working class has more or less sold its soul to the welfare state. A century ago the white working class proudly belonged to labor unions and friendly societies and drinking clubs that they had built with their own hands. Today they get all their social safety net from the government. And it shows.

Sometime soon, some politician is going to figure out how to win the votes and the enthusiasm of the white working/blue collar class. Why shouldn’t it be a conservative?