And so, David Walliams ascends into that ever-growing anti-pantheon of writers who have been canceled either posthumously or in vivo. While some parents proscribe Roald Dahl because the humor is crass, others object to his anti-semitism. Neil Gaiman lost his comic book publishing deal, and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter — give or take an evangelical book-burning session or two — is now protested more for the political beliefs of the author than the content of the books. But fan loyalty persists, even for the most egregious offenders. It’s easier to justify buying a problematic favorite when the author is long-dead and no longer in receipt of royalties, but walking home with a bagful of Harry Potter novels is likely to result in accusations of directly funding hate. The same is true of the upcoming Potter TV reboot, which will turn into a game of social-media chicken as viewers decide whether or not to risk admitting they watched it. At least they’ll have the choice. In the wake of the Walliams news, the BBC promptly removed an episode of Doctor Who he was in. 

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The trouble is, Walliams is one of a very small number of writers whom today’s children will insist on reading. Broadly aimed at ages eight to 12, the books have a natural constituency of readers who are old enough to have their own taste in stories, and young enough for that taste to center on Walliams-style crassness. Theirs is the demographic for which fiction carries its strongest and most basic moral instruction, typically via colorful stories in which good behavior is rewarded and bad is punished. The protagonist is invariably a child of similar age to the reader; all children are different, but not so different that they can’t relate to 11-year-old Harry, Ron or Hermione. Naturally, parents want the books to deliver appropriate messaging but, increasingly, they are expected to police their children’s interests based on very adult considerations. It’s no longer enough to decide whether the contents of a book are appropriate; the author must also pass a purity test. It’s not so long ago that Walliams’ first children’s book, The Boy in the Dress, was hailed as a progressive anthem, embraced by liberal parents for its message of acceptance and tolerance. Today, he’s not getting the grades. And parents are left wondering whether to explain that the funny man really was a baddie in disguise. It’s frustrating, because in the current childhood literacy crisis, kids need all the enjoyable books they can get. It is boys who are least likely to read for pleasure, and Walliams was one of the rare authors primarily read by them. Is it fair to demand they read something they enjoy less? 

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Some parents and teachers will greet Walliams’ demise with relief. The books might be popular with tweens, but have long been criticized for lazy writing, racial and class stereotypes and the general suspicion that four books a year smells a bit like a pocket-money grab. I have read several of them, and if they are turds, they’re the highly-polished variety. They are readable (damned with faint praise), sometimes linguistically witty (alliteration does a lot of lifting), and less reliant on snot, poo and farts than you might think. In a few years the whole thing will be moot, a cautionary tale fit for the fireside. In the meantime, what to tell the kids? 

Becky, a mother of two, isn’t going to take the books off her shelves. “Partly because I feel squeamish about censorship, and partly because I don’t want to have to explain why to a nine- and eight-year-old. I try to keep the reality of sex crimes from them just now. They’re too young.”

Richard, now 24, was a Walliams superfan when he was eight. Little Britain was extremely popular on the playground, and the books were marketed as a natural successor to Roald Dahl. “I saw Walliams as a role model. I was a huge comedy fan in general, and wanted to be a comedian or performer of some sort. Little Britain and the Walliams books gave me permission to be silly, to create characters and not conform to male stereotypes, which of course is bleakly ironic in hindsight.” He tells me his older brother was reading the books, as were his peers. “Walliams was very popular even with boys who didn’t normally read, and it wouldn’t have crossed our minds to question why we were enjoying them. They were just instantly rewarding.” 

By the age of 11 he had moved on to more mature prose, but this didn’t stop him from wanting Walliams to sign Mr Stink, his favorite novel by the author, at an event in a local bookshop. “I remember thinking he wasn’t particularly warm,” Richard says. “But afterwards, the book felt different. It was exciting that he had interacted with something that was in my hands and my house.” Richard’s edition became a venerated object; playground boasting rights, a core memory to be thumbed through at any time. He has no plans to get rid of it. He says that “by keeping the book, I’m not complicit in anything. It doesn’t mean I’m okay with what he’s alleged to have done.” 

But while individuals can use their own discretion when it comes to Walliams and beloved tomes, schools have little choice in the matter. Many have already sent out emails reassuring parents they are on the case. One primary school teaching assistant told me this week that the kids had not mentioned the news, it perhaps being “above their heads”. But she still felt  she had little option but to remove the books — because of the parents. “The only reason we are removing them is potential reaction from parents if their kid brings one of the books home,” she says. It’s hard to say whether those parents would be justified in complaining should their child be caught innocently reading The Boy in the Dress under the covers. But it’s easier for schools to avoid the issue entirely, undoubtedly damned either way.  

We’re only briefly children, and those of us lucky enough to have been keen readers will be reluctant to let go of a foundational joy. I ask the school assistant to ask what will be done with the removed titles. She tells me the kids make Christmas tree collages from old books, so they might be used for that. “If not,” she says, “they’ll go in the bin”.

Then came a grim reminder of what happens when people entrusted with our breasts fail to regard them first and foremost as parts of our biology. An NHS trust in north-East England admitted that at least 20 women had undergone unnecessary mastectomies in its care. Hundreds of patients suffered harm while being treated at the breast unit of County Durham and Darlington Foundation Trust (CDDFT). One patient is known to have died.

When I read the story, my reaction was not shock or horror but resigned familiarity. This has happened before, and it will happen again. I know, because it happened to me.

I eschew the word “victim”, although medically and legally that is what I am. I prefer “patient”, to give the horror story its proper context. In 2006, I was operated on by Ian Paterson, a charming, reassuring surgeon who had examined what he claimed was a rare type of potentially cancerous lump in my breast when I was 30. He wanted to operate urgently, and I believed that, by doing so, he had saved my life. It was all lies. I was never actually at risk of breast cancer: the lump was just a swollen lymph node, and I should never have gone under the knife. I was one of hundreds, if not thousands, of women who had unnecessary surgery at his hands, and consider myself one of the luckier ones to leave with just a small scar on one breast. Many of Paterson’s patients had mastectomies that they simply did not need.

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The “butcher surgeon” — a media sobriquet I hate for its sensationalism, and respect for its honesty — was sentenced to a 20-year prison sentence in 2017 for botched and unnecessary surgery. As well as undertaking needless operations in both the NHS and the private sector, Paterson was found to have carried out “cleavage-sparing mastectomies”, leaving tissue behind instead of a flat chest wall so that a woman still “looked good in a bikini”. But this meant that the cancer could return — and for hundreds it did. Of his 1,206 mastectomy patients, 675 died. There was an inescapable assumption buried inside Paterson’s actions. Even when a woman was lying on an operating table with her life in the balance, she was treated with less humanity and dignity for reasons explicitly related to her femaleness. The breast was an object for the man to do with what he wished.

Women learn young that breasts do not wholly belong to them. Even toddlers are put in two-piece bikinis, and by about the age of seven, little girls are expected to cover their flat chests for reasons everyone knows but no one will articulate. Well before puberty, I was aware that my chest was different from that of my male peers. During our Eighties sex education lessons, in between incredibly graphic videos of childbirth and awkward explanations of primitive period products, we were taught that the primary function of our developing “secondary sex characteristics” would eventually be to breastfeed. It wasn’t long before boys disabused me of this idea with crude comments and staring. Girls were taught that breasts exist to feed babies, but boys believed their primary function is to feed the male gaze.

I know where they learned this. I grew up in the era of Page 3 “girls”, David Sullivan’s “Countdown to 16” in the Sunday Sport, Benny Hill and Carry On. Prime time comedy was dominated by men who leaned heavily on boobs-as-punchline in lieu of actual jokes. The breast message was clear: you could be either hot — or funny.

As young women in the Nineties, while Pamela Anderson was running into the Baywatch surf, we were sold lies, lingerie, and boob jobs. There was Eva Herzigova’s “hello boys” Wonderbra — designed not for comfort or convenience, but for maximum cleavage, delivering precisely what men want — and the “balconette” bra, a romantic lace balcony from which our mammary Juliets could be courted. In the 2000s, bigger boobs were even bigger business, confirmed by the cultural impact of Hooters, Katie Price and the tragic Lolo (French slang for breasts) Ferrari. Breast implant surgery was surging. Then, in 2004, Janet Jackson’s right breast changed the world forever after Justin Timberlake exposed it to 90 million viewers at a Super Bowl halftime show.

“Nipplegate” led to the creation of YouTube, because a man wanted to share the clip. Two days after the live event, Jackson’s breast became the most searched-for image in internet history, even beating “9/11” for the record of most searches in a 24-hour period. The entire world was lusting after and laughing at a single boob. While Jackson was vilified, shamed and punished, Timberlake suffered no consequences and even performed at the same Grammys from which Jackson was blacklisted.

This was the cultural background against which the NHS produced its 2004 report into potential wrongdoing by Paterson. But that report resulted in no meaningful action, nor did another in 2008 in which consultant and investigator Rex Polson described Paterson as performing these “bikini-friendly” surgeries because he wanted to achieve “an improved cosmetic result”. Whistleblowers were left feeling stonewalled and patients — mostly women — continued to be harmed.

As Deborah Douglas, campaigner and patient of the surgeon, writes in her 2026 book The Cost of Trust: “We live in a society that wants women’s bodies to be a certain way; to have a nice cleavage and flat stomach, to look good in a bikini…The operation that Paterson sold me also prioritized looks. This seemed like a win-win.” Douglas was given a mastectomy with reconstruction and chemotherapy. None of it was necessary.

Few women would choose to have a more aesthetically appealing operation if it meant their cancer could return, but Paterson’s victims were not given the choice. He simply assumed that any woman would prefer some sort of natural cleavage to none at all — the male gaze was more important than a safe outcome.

This was certainly the case for Marie Pinfield, who in 2006 was diagnosed with cancer in one breast. She asked Paterson for a double mastectomy as a precautionary measure, but he said he wouldn’t remove a healthy breast unless she underwent a psychological evaluation. Against her wishes, he performed his signature “cleavage-sparing” mastectomy and Pinfield woke to discover she still had a lot of breast tissue, reduced from a G-cup to a D-cup. She demanded a revision operation, which Paterson angrily agreed to — but even then he would not give her a flat chest wall. It was too late anyway. Her cancer had returned and in 2008 she died, aged 49. Her case is one of hundreds of deaths linked to Paterson currently being investigated by the Birmingham coroner in the largest inquest since Hillsborough. Paterson fought hard not to give evidence to the inquests, causing even further distress to bereaved families, but was eventually forced by the court. He now appears regularly at the inquests from prison via video link, and continues to deny wrongdoing. He will be released from prison in 2027 while the inquests are still ongoing.

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The NHS and private sector wanted us to believe that Paterson was a lone actor, a rogue in an otherwise healthy system, but that is not true. In The Cost of Trust, Douglas warns that “He is a symptom of a system that not only allowed him to carry out his crimes but actively helped to cover them up.” The NHS knew for years that Paterson was doing incomplete mastectomies and prioritizing looks over patient safety, but he was getting the waiting lists down and was seemingly protected by the old boys’ network that has long dogged the field of medicine.

In the cases of both Paterson and the CDDFT breast unit, there are of course multiple factors at play, including the role of the profit motive in the private sector, and the push to reduce NHS waiting lists at any cost. But casting a shadow across all of this — and indeed across much of women’s experiences of healthcare — is something that is now labeled “medical misogyny”: the fact that the entire field of medicine has historically defaulted to male anatomy, neglected research into female medical conditions, and ignored women’s complaints.

The medical establishment is slow to acknowledge this. The British Medical Association produced a report on sexism in medicine in 2021, but it was only concerned with the treatment of female medics rather than patients. The General Medical Council acknowledges a culture of sexism, but again its focus has been on female doctors. Earlier this year, now-former Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced plans to tackle some of the issues. He has since been replaced by Yvette Cooper, whose office did not reply when I asked whether she is committed to those same plans.

It’s a start. But as all women know, misogyny isn’t born in hospitals. Outside the ward doors is a culture — and a media — happier to obsess over the virtues of Sydney Sweeney’s breasts than address the fact that girls are growing up bombarded with targeted ads for breast augmentation (now payable in installments or at a bargain price in Turkey). The key to taking women’s health seriously is to understand the assumptions projected onto our bodies before we even enter the waiting room.

It’s undeniable that Steven Knight’s creation — on both big screen and small — has brought investment and tourism to what remains England’s second-poorest local authority. The Japanese ambassador dressed in a peaked cap on a recent visit, and the show has offered opportunities for fan groups to reclaim their working-class identities. Nor does Peaky Blinders’s influence end at Birmingham’s limits. There’s a “Peaky Blinders” unit of the Ukrainian army, while in far-off Afghanistan the Taliban censured four men for dressing in costumes inspired by the show.

This influence is unsurprising. From The Godfather to the Kray Twins, gangsters have always made marketable anti-heroes. What’s not to love about immigrants escaping poverty, creating riches from organized crime, the oppressed becoming the oppressor? Naturally, the banal, brutal reality of gangsterism and its impact on victims isn’t entertaining or sexy, and so is neatly ignored. The same is true of Peaky Blinders. In reality, Birmingham’s gangs were disbanded by the First World War, and were anyway always more street thugs than globetrotting criminal masterminds. Even the titular blinder is apocryphal: early Birmingham criminals wore something closer to bowlers, with these “billycock hats” popular among the city’s working-class Irish diaspora. No razor blades were involved.

More than that, Birmingham’s demography has always been about far more than gangs. This, after all, is a town built on immigrant labor. My own great-grandparents were Ukrainian Jewish refugees who arrived here at the turn of the 20th century. I grew up in a cross-cultural environment, and married into the Birmingham Irish community in the early 2000s. The culture of my in-laws was hardly unfamiliar: like the city’s Jews, Birmingham’s Irish arrived to find work, escaping famine and hardship, and have long contributed to life in the West Midlands. They built factories and canals in the 19th century, and founded pubs in the 20th, while the second- or third-generation Irish Brummies keep the culture thriving.

There are darker connotations here too. Even today, Birmingham lives in the long shadow of the Birmingham pub bombings, especially now that Gerry Adams — who in 2004 said he “regrets” the blasts — is in the news once more. Locals still recall stories of that grim night in 1974. My dad had been in a nearby pub when it happened, and I’ve got friends who were caught up in the blast at the cinema next door. Anti-Irish sentiment in the city soon skyrocketed. Catholic schools held special assemblies to try and calm tensions, and the subsequent grotesque miscarriage of justice for the Birmingham Six forced non-Irish Brummies into a reckoning of conscience.

That perhaps explains why Irish Birmingham enjoyed such a renaissance through the Nineties. The St Patrick’s Day Parade —suspended for two decades — returned as a major event and grew to be the third biggest on Earth: until the cash-strapped council shut it down. Digbeth, long the city’s unofficial Irish quarter, was famous for its boozers, family places with names like The Spotted Dog and Hennessey’s Bar.

As that last one implies, this revival often came with stereotypes, from foam leprechaun hats to fake ginger beards. To that extent, at least, the Peaky Blinders flat caps are nothing new. Nor are Irish Brummies the only cartoon-ified community in Knight’s extended universe. Consider his movie’s Roma characters. Barry Keoghan’s Duke is a mass of uncontrolled violence, feeding victims to pigs and commandeering weapons meant for British troops. Kaulo, Duke’s aunt, is that other lazy stereotype: the magical sexy gypsy, who communicates with ghosts, uses sex to break a curse, and floats about mysteriously, all wild hair and whispers.

And if, like the Birmingham Irish, there’s a blurred line between cinema and the city streets — Birmingham City fans long blamed their team’s failures on a “curse” placed on the team’s stadium when Roma settlers were evicted to build it — neither Duke nor Kaulo do justice to the city’s genuine Roma history.

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Reaching Europe from India via Egypt (hence the name), Roma Gypsies first arrived in England in 1505: after being banished from countries across Europe. They were banned here, too, due to distrust of their Catholicism and a general fear of foreignness. By 1554, thanks to the so-called Egyptian Act, simply being Roma was enough to get the death penalty. Some evaded capture or were sheltered by sympathetic residents, and over the next two centuries made a living however they could, becoming by necessity a secretive group.

In 1783 the Egyptian Act was repealed — after the diaspora finally started to be understood — though the 1824 Vagrancy Act specifically targeted Roma Gypsies in an attempt to close their settlements. Still, the travelers endured. And, by the 20th century, they’d become an established part of Birmingham’s cultural scene, providing labor or entertainment at events like Aston’s Onion Fair. A celebration centered on Michaelmas, and attracting thousands of spectators, the Roma wowed visitors with their boxing, horses and traveling menageries.

By the Second World War, Roma were designated racial enemies by Hitler, with perhaps 500,000 exterminated in the so-called Porajmos (“Devouring”). In the aftermath, and unlike Jews, Roma were excluded from postwar reparations; remarkably, the West German government argued the community was persecuted not because of their race but because they were criminals. There is no clear data on Birmingham’s current Roma population — but the 2021 census suggests 1,833 locals identified as “White Roma”, the first time the category was included. And, perhaps because they now encompass such a small minority, anti-gypsy sentiments live on in Birmingham, not least around their supposed dishonesty.

Even sympathetic observers slump into stereotype too. To promote his film, Knight did an “ask me anything” on Reddit, where a fan asked about his knowledge of the Roma. The writer’s response? That his research came from attending horse fairs with his blacksmith father as a child: a neat explanation of why, in the film’s closing scene, Tommy Shelby literally declares himself a horse. Yet like their Celtic counterparts, there is another, truer community of Brummie Roma. Certainly, that’s hinted at in the Council’s Birmingham Development Plan. It identifies the need for an additional eight pitches for “Gypsies, Travelers and Traveling Showpeople” by 2031, recognizing that a lack of space negatively impacts their wellbeing, and causes conflict with landowners.

These days, of course, Birmingham’s Irish and Roma communities are relatively small, with discourse in the city more often centered on its large and growing South Asian population. While Peaky Blinders offers glimmers of these older diasporas — and provides the city’s tourism board with much-needed attention — the real Workshop of the World has better tales to tell.

Working-class women are damned by the impossible dichotomy of the lowest expectations and the highest standards. The ruling classes will scrutinize and judge us for signs that we are no better than we ought to be, while our own will turn on us if we show any sign of ambition. Far be it from us to want to be heroines.

To thrive against these odds, and to have any hope of getting by, there are two things working-class girls shouldn’t do. The first is to leave school without any qualifications. The second is to get pregnant at 16. Angela Rayner did both. And she defied Lennon. Rather than getting stuck in a council house with a menial job, as happens to so many, she rose to become one of the most powerful women in Britain. Until yesterday, that is.

But to me, Rayner is the epitome of a working-class heroine. The odds were stacked against her, economically and culturally. She grew up on a council estate in Stockport in poverty: her mother suffered from bipolar disorder, and her grandmother worked three jobs to keep the family afloat. She worked in social care, and later entered politics not via the Oxford Union, but through union activism. She has a Northern accent, uses coarse language, and she’s a woman who doesn’t know her place.

Class, though, is not a protected characteristic and Rayner’s origins have been the easiest and laziest tool for her critics. She vapes, they gasp; she wears green trousers and leopard print, the Daily Mail howls. She’s been called “thick as mince”, criticized for drinking vodka, and has been the subject of endless abuse. And yet, she’s never tried to hide her background. She leaned all the way in, defying critics by wearing what she wanted, dancing and drinking, and instructing Hansard transcribers not to correct her grammar.

And she was useful to her party. Rayner was the rarest of representations in a party that has badly lost its way. She was a politician of a type so scarce her background had to be part of every conversation, because it is staggeringly rare for an MP to emerge from her demographic. In the Seventies, Labour could boast around one-in-three working-class MPs; in 2023, it was just one in 10. As a result, the party used her as a human lamppost flag at every opportunity, even to the last. Keir Starmer, responding to the controversy, said he was proud to sit alongside a deputy PM from a working-class background (putting his hand on her shoulder in a way I’m not sure he’d have done with a man).

Of course, Starmer was never going to be able to save her — her sin was too grave. But the irony is that she was never going to be enough to save Labour. Working-class voters don’t like Starmer; his party isn’t for them any more. A YouGov poll earlier this year found that 31% of those living in households with an income of more than £70,000 a year intend to vote for Labour, compared with 19% of those in households earning less than £20,000. It’s all a gift to Nigel Farage, who couldn’t be more delighted to declare Reform the “party of the working class” — despite being a privately-educated former banker. 

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Another gift to Farage has been the defection of the suddenly working-class politician Nadine Dorries. And the comparison is telling. The novelist and former Tory MP defected to Reform this week and ran her working-class credentials up the flag-pole in the Daily Mail, reminiscing fondly about her Dickensian childhood. “My father, a bus driver,” she wrote, “suffered from Raynaud’s disease, an agonizing circulatory disorder that led to the amputation of his toes. It limited his ability to work. There were many times when I would be dragged under the kitchen sink to hide from the rent man as he banged on the front door or peered in through the window.” In the excitement that followed Nadine’s conversion to Nigel, few remembered that Dorries herself had been entangled in financial controversy not so long ago. But luckily for Dorries, she was the right sort of working class. She talks the right way, wears the right clothes, and doesn’t wear her class on her Boden sleeve (unless it suits her).

Yet only a year ago, Dorries had the gall to attack Rayner for “weaponizing her working class roots”. To me, this is the most frustrating insult of all: the one that comes from inside the house. It goes to the heart of the working-class woman’s paradox. Rayner has betrayed circumstances she didn’t choose in favor of those she did, and that is treachery. “She’s worse than a hypocrite, she’s a working class traitor”, insisted Lisa McKenzie, an anarchist and lecturer, during a recent LBC interview. McKenzie doesn’t believe in social mobility, saying it’s “essentially cherry picking individuals and allowing them into the middle class from the working class”. 

Obviously, I too, would like to live in a country in which there are ample opportunities for everyone regardless of birth circumstance; but surely those opportunities are allowed to include things such as “becoming a politician”, “earning money” and “buying property”, ambitions no one much minds when they’re chosen by someone who went to private school and is in line for a nice inheritance. It’s what’s expected, the natural order of things. But Rayner is an aberration.

The real test then, will be how Labour treats Rayner going forward. When Peter Mandelson resigned in 1998, following a furor over a £373,000 loan to buy a home, he was out for just 10 months before triumphantly returning — only to resign again in 2001 after being accused of interfering in a passport application. He then enjoyed a lucrative tenure as a European Commissioner before returning to government in 2008 as business secretary and the warm welcome of a peerage. He’s now happily hobnobbing with Donald Trump in another addition to his portfolio: a fancy mansion in Washington. The chances of Rayner following are non-existent; there is little chance of redemption, regardless of atonement — she simply doesn’t fit the mold.

Rayner’s opponents have long had it in for her, and she foolishly handed them the weapon. Sure, we could blame the complexity of our tax laws, but the truth is her stamp-duty downfall this week was quite simply the sort of mistake a working-class woman cannot afford to make.

I couldn’t get a ticket to see them play, so I spent the weekend doing Sabbath-adjacent stuff. I went to Castle Bromwich Gardens to hear legendary Birmingham sound engineer Johnny Haynes talk about recording their first ever demo tape (he even brought the original mic) and visited the one-off exhibition — mostly photos of the Prince of Darkness doing his trademark gurn. Lest I need spell it out: I worship at the shrine of Black Sabbath.

That weekend we celebrated the homecoming of our Prince for what would not only be his final gig, but his final anything. His death was a gut-punch, not just because I love his music, but because he was unapologetically Birmingham. For my entire life I’ve known that to be a Brummie, like Ozzy, is to be a punchline. His behaviour may have earned him a nihilistic nickname, but his accent made him a joke. We Brummies are ridiculed for our cadences and our city mocked for lacking ambition. People forget — or perhaps never knew — that it was once a cradle of innovation and manufacturing. From the industrial to the digital revolution, we were creators.

So people hold their noses and sneer as they drive through on their way to somewhere else. Our city’s stereotype is only compounded by the ineptitude of Birmingham City Council who have managed to bankrupt themselves, close the public libraries, defund the arts, and cause a plague of rats by way of a never-ending bin strike. These days, even the Balti Triangle has lost its edge. And Birmingham’s self-sabotage often makes it fair game for mockery.

We Brummies know this, and defend what was once a mighty city even while laughingly apologising. We’ve developed a protective sense of humour and a fierce loyalty to our roots — just as some of us deny them by concealing our “most hated” accent. Michael Buerk hid his in order to pass through the RP corridors of the BBC, and few would realize that silken-voiced actor Anton Lesser hails from Britain’s second city. I dropped my own singsong inflection for a while (until my sister told me I “sounded posh” on the radio). But never Ozzy.

It took a while for me to find him: I grew up in the Eighties, when Black Sabbath were out of favor, Ozzy having left the band due to “erratic” behaviour. I lived on various Birmingham council estates being something I later learned the middle classes called “underclass”. Benefits class. Criminal class. We had a Social Worker and hid from debt collectors. To be working class was an aspiration. The Nineties — the last good decade — did offer girls like me the potential of upward mobility, but I was playing a game I didn’t understand with a lousy deck of cards. Without money, access to culture was limited, and I didn’t yet know what I wanted. The furthest into music experimentation I’d got was the soundtrack to Miss Saigon and a copy of Harry Connick Jr’s album We Are In Love, when one day my sister came home and declared she was now into rock and heavy metal. Perhaps I might like to join her?

She introduced me to her new friends, boys with eyeliner and bum-length hair, girls in corsets and Doc Martens. As a bookish computer nerd with trauma problems and no affability, I realized I had discovered my people. We united by not fitting in. These black-clad kids weren’t the devil-worshipping, baby-sacrificers we’d been warned about; they were the bullied, the weirdos, the gentle souls with geeky interests, gallows humour and malformed social skills. None of us had thrived in a regular school environment. All of us were poor. But we found each other and the music found us.

They took me to see Metallica at Milton Keynes Bowl, and over the coach’s sound system played me songs from bands composed of people just like us, singing about the fury of the disposable classes. It was here I first heard Ozzy Osbourne wailing Geezer Butler’s deceptively simple lyrical angst about poverty, mental health, the exploitation of working-class bodies, rebellion against organised religion, and the political class’s terror of self-expression.

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It was all oddly familiar. Butler’s father was a military man turned engineer. My dad, though a remarkably intelligent man, had left school at 16 to work in a factory like his father and grandfather, part of Birmingham’s then-still-booming manufacturing industry. He hated it, and promptly joined the RAF which recognized his talents and trained him in engineering. While stationed in Cyprus during the “Bloody Christmas” civil war, he experienced trauma he never talked about, and coped via alcoholism which eventually impeded his ability to hold down a job after the military. He was killed, aged 44, during a street fight with teenage boys. He had had a lot to be angry about, and I, five years after his death, did too.

“People think I’m insane/because I am frowning all the time,” sang Ozzy, whose father was also a factory worker. He had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of school bullies, and attempted suicide several times. And now, here was my personal pain, manifest in Ozzy’s vocals. To the polite, the posh, or the moralizing Christians he sounded terrifying, but I only heard reassurance. I transformed overnight, adopted the black uniform of my clan, and felt safe for the first time in years.

One of the reasons working-class kids want to be singers or footballers is because it’s free to try and, if you have talent, is a potential pathway to riches. Naturally, aged 18, I joined a rock band. Our three-chords-and-the-truth schtick carried us to the dizzying heights of Wolverhampton’s Wulfrun Hall, before we crashed and burned in a fire of mediocrity. But my ambition to no longer be poor did not die. I had learned from Black Sabbath that if you have something to say, you can just stand up and say it, and keep saying it even while you’re shouted down, so I kept trying until I succeeded. I took a different (less lucrative but far safer) path from Ozzy, who climbed to the top of the precarious ladder of fame, addiction and bad behavior.

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By Tom Chivers

But he never rejected his home city or hid his accent, even as he bit the head off a bat and crashed his quad bike. He laughed at himself harder than anyone laughed at him, all the while winking to those of us who were in on the joke. Now I see that same proud sense of humor in a new generation of Birmingham’s working-class performers, from poet Bradley Taylor and artist Tat Vision to comedian Jo Enright (and if you didn’t laugh along with Alison Hammond’s chaotic interview with Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling, then you will never get us).

When earlier this year, Ozzy, aged 76, was offered the Freedom of Birmingham, he said, “Really, me? But I’ve been in prison!” This was surely more sardonic winking from a man who has sold over 70 million records. He knew that for many, once an underclass Brummie, always an underclass Brummie. But it also acknowledged, to me: more fool those who underestimate us. It was an honor to be a small part of his final homecoming in a misunderstood city, smiling at strangers, united by Ozzy. A working-class Brummie who took the punchline and turned it into a power.