On holiday recently, I played a game of “check your privilege” around the dinner table with my husband and our friends: you got a point for any aspect that might allow a socially-aware company to feel good about itself by employing you.
On the first round – before we started to argue the refinements of our positions – my friend and I won a point each for being women, my husband won a point for being of Indian origin, and then we all looked at my friend’s husband, a member of the white working-class whose parents were employed in the same factory for most of their working lives. “I’m working-class,” he said, “Do I get a point for that?”
None of us was sure. Typically, both the media and business now talk a lot about inclusivity on the basis of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation, but not so much about class – and yet, in so many discussions about equality of opportunity, it’s the elephant in the room.
We have been hearing for some years now that the single worst-performing group educationally in the UK is white British working-class boys.1 One theory as to why disadvantaged white boys are doing so badly in particular is that the most concentrated drive for improvements in state schools has been in London, which has a higher concentration of ethnic minority pupils, rather than in rural and coastal areas which are predominantly white. Another is that many immigrant parents have strong educational aspirations on behalf of their children – a sense of possibility which has, for complicated reasons, too often atrophied in disadvantaged white British families.
Part of the problem, however, lies not just in how poorer white families understand their place in society, but how middle-class society routinely depicts them. Before and since the sneery use of the word “chav” started up in the late 90s, to describe a caricature of a feckless white working-class person obsessed by gossip and bling, government policies have conspired to make life harder for the white working-classes. For them, the old post-war securities – a job with regular hours, paid holiday and sick pay – frequently melted away into a new landscape of non-unionised labour and zero-hours contracts, spun as “flexibility”.
House prices, as discussed in Liam Halligan’s home truths series, have soared beyond the reach of those on low incomes; rents are high, and decent council housing – once plentiful, now scarce – can often be attained only by a grotesque form of competitive victimhood which awards housing to those judged by councils to be in direst need. These factors affect and damage all low-income people, of course, but more recent arrivals to Britain often retain the tighter sense of community and co-operation that was once a feature of the English working-class: they are partly fuelled by the sense of possibility, of social motion, while among the disadvantaged white British population that has been replaced by a wider sense of stagnation and loss.
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Subscribe[…] Dabei stört es auch nicht, wenn etwa in Großbritannien bekannt wird, dass inzwischen weiße Jungen aus der Unterschicht die schlechtesten Lebenschancen haben. Weiße Jungen können aufgrund der Ideologie nicht als Opfer oder […]