Obiter Dicta

Thursday, August 16^th

Little bit of politics this time  round.  I have been reading ‘Chavs’ by Owen Jones, a polemic in which he outlines the demonisation of the working class in this country, a process that originated with the policies of the Wicked Witch herself, Margaret Thatcher. It’s a fascinating piece of work, overblown in some places, but insightful and, given a few forgivable excesses, undoubtedly true.

            What we have to remember, he says, is that the Conservative Party has always been a coalition of privileged interests. It exists purely to protect those interest and privileges, and to see that they are not more widely distributed. It succeeds, when it does succeed, at election time, by offering just enough to just enough people. (So, as Bobs White, an old Labour man and friend of my father once said on TV, ‘Any working man who votes Tory is either a halfwit or a belly-crawler’.)

            Thatcher and her cohorts were just a more extreme version of the coalition of privilege. They understood that the rise of the working class in the 20^th century, via Trade Unionism, threatened their privilege. They set out to crush the working class and, via the defeat of the Miners in ’84 and the deindustrialisation of the UK that followed it, combined with the successful ‘sale of council houses’ scheme, which over time reduced council housing to sink estates, and by encouraging the attitude that self-enrichment was the only attribute worth inculcating, pretty much achieved it. Achieved it, at least, to the extent that ‘we are all middle class now’ as Tony Blair once said, and to be working class is to be regarded as feral, criminal or buffoonish. Jones’s book analyses these processes in great detail and it is hard to argue with his conclusions, or deny the viciousness with which the whole campaign was orchestrated and carried out.  Anyone who is not middle class or reasonably well-off, or who might be poorly paid, or a single parent or trapped on benefits is derided and patronised as being part of a feral underclass.

            It breaks my heart. I am working class. I have always been working class, although some would say I haven’t exactly broken my back with work. I am ‘educated working class’ – an education that I got because, back in the late 60’s, before the Class Warriors of the Aloof were mobilised, I got a grant that enabled me to go to university. It paid my fees and a pittance of roughly £120 a term to do everything else on. (A parental contribution was assumed.) By the time our daughter was of university age, it was different. Her fees were paid but everything else had to come from us. It wasn’t easy – and we both had reasonably good jobs. Herself in fact worked two jobs, the regular one Monday to Friday, and a second, part-time one at weekends. I, a teacher at that time, got work with a local builder and carried heavy things again, as I had one once before in my youth. We didn’t grudge any of it – we love our daughter and we wanted her to have a university education. So we worked and got the money we needed. Now, as our grand-daughters face the prospect of university education in eight years or so, hell knows how their parents will fund that. My point is that in the 60s, it was still thought worth spending state money on educating bright kids, no matter their background. We’re heading back to the days when it was only for the privileged, those who could afford it.

            I went to uni because my family, and most of the working class people we lived among, valued education as an end in itself. Not as a passport to the middle class – that would never have occurred to us – but as a way of bettering ourselves as human beings. It would probably mean that those of us fortunate enough to get that education would work in an office or a classroom rather than a mine or a foundry, which was what parents wanted for their kids, but it wouldn’t stop us being working class. We would just be a different kind of worker. ‘Workers by hand or brain’, as Sidney Webb’s Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution put it. (Abolished by New Labour – who borrowed many of the Tories’ clothes). We did not look down upon, or sneer at, our peers who went into apprenticeships, or who took up manual jobs.

            All gone. That ethos. Most of the jobs, too, of course. The community I came from is the community I still come from. And how the Snooties hate that term and that concept! Community! Remember ‘there is no such thing as Society, merely individuals and their families’? Not in the working class areas of my childhood and young adulthood. – or elsewhere at the time. The working-class values were: pride in one’s work, honesty, dignity, decency, respectability, love of one’s family AND pride in one’s community – the town, village, estate in which one lived and worked. Neighbours knew each other, helped each other, rejoiced with each other and mourned with each other. No such thing as society! Not if you’re only interested in ‘man mind thyself’ and acquiring as much as you can. Under Thatcher, the prevailing attitude of vast sections of society became:  ‘Fuck you, Jack; I’m all right.’ Not among working people. Not then. And still not now. The villages and towns of West Lothian still believe in Community.

            I’m writing a piece of fiction at the moment for which I had to research the streets I lived in in the 1950s. In Ramsay Crescent, in 1957, some of the male householders had the following jobs: roller driver, rent collector, railway worker, steel worker, foundry worker, student (my father), butcher, engineer, baker, burgh surveyor, clerk, papermill worker, art teacher, watchmaker, bus driver, miner, salesman, architect, motor mechanic, policeman, and cinema manager. I could scan the list for hours. I remember most of the men this described. All dead now, of course. So are most of the jobs.

            And I still socialise – when I do socialise – with ‘working class’ people.  They are genuine, resilient, witty, capable and loyal. So stuff your aspirant middle classness. I’ll stick with my community.  The Internationale unites the human race. Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer!