THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
My
father worked in a greengrocers' shop for 35 years; my
mother was a housewife before she committed suicide in
1987. They were both lifelong Labour voters. My mother
hanged herself in the house she lived in all her life, in
Southall, west London, a town that had changed beyond all
recognition. It is today the least white place in the
whole of Britain.
She
wrote in her suicide note: "I hate Southall, I feel
so alone." In case anyone dare accuse her of any
racism, she may have hated Southall, but my mother was
incapable of hating people. She worked in the last years
of her life as a dinner lady in an all-Asian school and
was much loved. But she was lost. Her world had
disappeared.
Her
dilemma is partly the dilemma of the white working
class...
By
what methods were the white working classes (WWC)
despatched? The first development that undermined WWC
hopes and morale was the great betrayal in educationthe abolition of grammar schools and the retention of
private schools.
Grammar
schools, in the guilt-ridden WLMC [white liberal middle
classes] view of things, favoured
middle-class children over working-class children. What
they actually favouredor could have favoured, if the
tests were designed sufficiently wellwas clever
children over less clever children. And if you look at the
dynamism of the post-war grammocracy (Pinter, Dyke,
Potter, Jacobson, Sillitoe, Bragg, Bennett and hundreds of
others), it provided a crucial injection of WWC
sensibility into the wider culture...
The
second great betrayal was multiculturalism. This was the
creed that said all cultures were as valid as each other
(in theory) but that minority cultures were somehowno
one was quite sure howactually superior to the host
white indigenous culture which was axiomatically racist.
So even if you happen to come from a culture that endorsed
female circumcision and was misogynist and homophobic, it
was a given that you were a "victim." And who
were the "victimisers"? The WWC who were faced
with the profound challenge and stresses of assimilation.
There
was a lot of WWC resistance to immigration. This was
partly about racism, which, of course, the WLMC are immune
to. Something in the organic bread, I think. But it was
also about losing housing opportunities, cheap labour
taking away jobs, and the simple, profound problem of
learning to exist in a new kind of culture, which in some
cases overwhelmed and bewildered the indigenous one. The
trick of learning to feel ashamed at the same time as
everything was being taken away from you was a really hard
one to pull off...
The
third great betrayal was the WLMC determination to stamp
out nationalismat least if you were English. If you
were Scottish, Welsh or Irish, of course, you could
celebrate your flag and your culture as loudly and proudly
as you liked. But if you were native WWC, to celebrate St
George and the English flag was racist. This is because
the WWC, despite being stuck down mines and corralled in
factories, apparently managed to exploit their colonial
brothers and sisters throughout the previous centuries, so
they could no longer show pride in their own country, the
country that their parents and grandparents died for and
suffered for in two world warsin the second one
fighting a racist tyrant. They continue to die in Iraq and
Afghanistan. And without complaint, because they have
learned to be quiet and to be ashamed of who they are and
accept that they aren't "good" like the WLMC,
who lived in all-white enclaves and to whom
multiculturalism meant a nice Continental deli at the end
of the road.
What
else? The utopian council estates of the 1960s and 1970sthe WLMC, pursuing their project of bracing
architectural piety, uprooted whole WWC communities and
put them in ugly, unliveable blocks, leaving them without
a sense of place or meaning, while the architects and town
planners themselves lived in little Edwardian terraces or
Cotswold villages. Since the great council house sell-off
of the 1980sfiercely opposed, of course, by the
liberal leftmany of the WWC have bettered themselves.
But now that the housing stock has run out and run down,
those left behind are beached and helpless.
Who
can wonder why the white working classes have got
themselves a bad name? Who can wonder why they are angry,
why they are despairing, why they carry knives, fight and
drink themselves into oblivion...
Do I
look down on the WWC now that I am middle class myself?
Probably. But I don't hate them, not in the way I hate the
people who destroyed and abandoned them, the ideologues
and meddlers that have left them without a meaning and
without a home and without an escape. I'll keep voting
Left because I can't imagine voting Tory, and the Lib Dems
are a wasted vote. But I know that, in the end, I am
voting for a double-talking mealy-mouthed enemy of
everything they purport to be promotingequality,
opportunity, fairness. They are the living embodiment of
Lao Tse's greatest truth and the source of the white
working classes tragedythat "goody goodies are
the enemies of virtue."
Tim
Lott, "White,
Working Class And Threatened With Extinction: It's The
Do-Gooding Liberal Middle Classes That Have Betrayed Those
'Beneath' Them," Independent, 9 March 2008
Kevin
Michael Grace,
12.05 pm, 27 March 2008►
