Why does everyone keep getting the white working class wrong?

This is an edited, updated extract from Underdogs by Joel Budd.

Britain’s white working class is strange. It accounts for a smaller share of the population every year, because Britain is gradually becoming more middle class, more ethnically varied and more foreign-born. Yet it seems to grow more politically powerful every year. If Reform UK breaks through in the local elections on 1 May, or humiliates Labour in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election on the same day, it will be the white working class wot won it. 

Unfortunately, Britain has got itself into a terrible muddle. Politicians, commentators and journalists talk a lot about white working-class people, either frankly or by using code words like ‘red wall voters’ or ‘the traditional working class’. They don’t think at all clearly about this large, diverse group of people. They make wild claims about how white working-class people think and what they want. It’s a peculiar tale that begins two decades ago. 

In the early 2000s, there was a burst of media and political commentary about the white working class. Several things seem to have caused it. The far-right British National Party managed to win a few local council seats in Burnley, a poor town in Lancashire, by courting white working-class voters. It also picked up votes in and around London.

• Reform UK’s climate denialism could devastate the very towns and cities they want to represent
• The middle class sucked the fun out of owning a dog and football. What’s next?
• Stephen Graham and Steven Knight on class, boxing and new drama A Thousand Blows

Britain was still reverberating from the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in south-east London in 1993.
Brutal and sometimes funny caricatures of white working-class people were appearing on television, including Vicky Pollard, a gormless tracksuited woman created by the comedian Matt Lucas for Little Britain, and the dysfunctional Gallagher family in Shameless.

At the time, the commentary was venomous. Left-wing and right-wing journalists alike dropped insults such as ‘white trash’ and ‘chav’ into their copy. A columnist in The Times attacked “gym-slip mums who choose to get pregnant as a career option; pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who’ll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye”. Another conservative writer advised the Tories that they should not try to win white working-class votes by banging on about immigration. They would be wiser to court ethnic-minority voters, whose “self-reliance and belief in the family were profoundly conservative”.

So much has changed since then. People on the political right have continued to speak and write a good deal about white working-class people, but their language and arguments have shifted dramatically.

Especially since the Brexit referendum in 2016, the right has taken to lionising white working-class Britons as sensible truth-tellers and bulwarks against left-wing nonsense. Any problems that white working-class people might have are no longer seen as a consequence of their own moral failings,
as they were in the first decade of this century. Rather, they are said to reveal the harm that liberalism has wrought.

According to conservative populists, white working-class people have become the victims of a left-wing,
secular, internationalist elite. This elite is said to be keen on environmentalism, immigration and transgender rights, and is so hostile to racism that it claims to see discrimination where it does not exist. It pushes its values on everyone else, and brooks no opposition. 

The mass immigration that the elite has tolerated is said to be crushing working-class wages, burdening the public services that working-class people rely on and filling their neighbourhoods with strangers. When white working-class people complain, they are called xenophobes and racists. They are barely even allowed to express their views. The political scientist Matthew Goodwin wrote in 2021 of “a sort of informal alliance between white elites, corporations and minorities against the white working class”.

This story also comes in an American-accented version, represented well by JD Vance, who pulled off the turn from depicting white working-class people as feckless to arguing that they are victims of liberalism with amazing speed. In 2016, Vance published a memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which lamented the irresponsibility of some of the people he grew up with – in particular, his drug-addicted mother. At the time, Vance regretted that many white working-class people were attracted to Donald Trump’s simplistic, populist message. 

But within a few years Vance had joined Trump’s ragged band and had dropped his earlier argument that poor white people’s misery was largely self-inflicted. He soon claimed to be defending the white working class against what he calls ‘the regime’, a shadowy liberal elite that supposedly runs the country.

This tale is nonsense. It omits a crucial character, the elite conservative, whose power and influence is far from trivial in Britain and is enormous in America. It also gets white working-class people badly wrong. In reality, they do not all sit around resenting immigrants and metropolitan liberals, and wondering what has become of manufacturing. As the 2024 election showed, many white working-class people care more about boring things such as economic stability, inflation and the NHS.

I think that the conservative populists have got one important thing right, though. Although their analysis of modern Britain strikes me as dodgy, their focus is spot on. White working-class Britons are indeed distinctive in some ways. They do live in particular places, they do think differently about some things, and they do vote differently from other working-class people. In a few ways, notably the performance of their children in school, the situation of white working-class Britons is especially worrying.

The left, by contrast, has mostly fallen silent on the subject. Many Labour politicians have never been comfortable talking about the white working class, at least in public (they are franker when you put your notebook away). In 2002, Tony Blair, then the prime minister, was asked why some white working-class men were drawn to far-right politics. He responded: “I don’t really break people up into those sorts of groups.” 

Your support changes lives. Find out how you can help us help more people by signing up for a subscription

Sir Keir Starmer talks a lot about class. He loves the phrase ‘working people’ and often points out that his father was a toolmaker. He does not talk about the white working class. Left-wingers often try to change the subject, pointing out, correctly, that the British working class is ethnically diverse and that working-class people from Black and Asian backgrounds must cope with racism as well as class disadvantage. Some argue that it is dangerous even to speak of a white working class. In effect, the left is leaving the discussion about white working-class Britons to its opponents. 

A good way of explaining how my view differs from those of politicians and commentators on the right and the left is to think about two questions. The first is: do you think that white British working-class people have particular problems? That is, do they face difficulties that are distinct to them, or are larger for them than for other groups? 

The second question is: do you think that problems white working-class people have are the result of policies targeting them as a group? To put it crudely, are white working-class Britons being done down? Are other groups, particularly people with ethnic-minority backgrounds, being favoured over them?

A conservative populist would nod in response to both questions. Of course, he or she would say. White working-class people are discriminated against, their opinions are ignored or suppressed, and they are faring badly as a consequence. 

A left-winger would answer both questions negatively. No, white working-class people do not have particular problems. They face the heavy disadvantages of their social class, but no additional ones. And no, they are not being done down. Nobody has set out to harm them as a group. Those who argue otherwise are lying. They are trying to divide the working class and yoke its white members to a right-wing political project.

To see how utterly incompatible these two positions are, and how the free-fire zone between them makes it impossible to think clearly about the problems white working-class people face, consider what happened in 2021 when parliament tried to investigate the poor performance of white working-class boys in English schools. This is a real problem, well worth looking into. 

The education committee, which had a Conservative majority, listened to various experts and produced a 63-page report that said mostly sensible things. But the report also contained a section on the concept of ‘white privilege’. It argued that talking about white privilege was liable to confuse poor white children, who are not all that privileged, and to sap sympathy for their plight. The report concluded that the education department should ensure that young people are not ‘inadvertently being inducted into political movements’. I can only assume the committee was referring to movements such as Black Lives Matter.

This was far too much for the Labour Party MPs on the committee. They disowned the entire report and came up with their own conclusions. Poor white boys’ bad performance in exams is simply the result of social-class disadvantage and regional inequality, they declared. It has nothing whatsoever to do with ethnicity. Indeed, the focus on white children is misguided. Obsessing about white children, the Labour MPs argued, “would systematically disadvantage other ethnic groups and increase racial educational inequalities”.

It was an awful outcome, which should shame every single MP on the committee. Parliament set out to investigate a genuine problem and ended up fighting a culture war, with both sides flinging charges of racial bias. Much nonsense was confidently spoken. 

Perhaps it is true that teaching children about white privilege harms them, but, if so, there is no evidence for it whatsoever. As for the Labour MPs’ assertion that the poor performance of white working-class boys is simply a matter of poverty and place, there is good evidence that they were dead wrong. Nothing useful was learned as a result of the inquiry. The dismal educational performance of white working-class boys (and, by the way, white working-class girls) continues.

My answers to the two questions I have posed are ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Yes, I think that white working-class Britons have large problems. Some of these problems weigh particularly heavily on them. Although I agree with the left that they do not suffer because of their ethnicity (on the contrary, they tend to benefit from it), they do face distinctive difficulties that are partly a result of history and geography. 

Working-class white Britons tend to live in regions of the country that lack successful big cities. Within those regions, they often live far from the most dynamic, job-creating parts. Working-class minority ethnic Britons are luckier because they, their parents, or their grandparents tended to land in the places where jobs were being created, and they have stuck around.

No, I do not believe that anybody is out to get white working-class people. There is no conspiracy against them, nor is there a concerted effort to favour non-white people over them. The sneering and slights that they endure, largely from middle-class white people, are contemptible. But these slights do not point to a campaign to do them down. 

Relative to working-class people from ethnic minority backgrounds, working-class white Britons are well favoured in some ways. They are not so frequently insulted by politicians or journalists (if you don’t believe me, ask an immigrant from Romania or Somalia). They are much less likely to live in overcrowded housing. Many neighbourhoods dominated by white working-class people are pleasant, with wide roads, gardens and plenty of space in which to park the car. 

A retired miner or steelworker who is in a stable marriage, with a good pension, who owns his house and two cars, might not have many problems. On the other hand, he may have opinions about the state of Britain, which journalists, politicians and researchers have listened to diligently. This man probably doesn’t think much of mass immigration; he is likely to believe that racial equality has gone a bit too far; he probably voted to leave the EU in 2016. 

Now imagine a young working-class white woman living in a poor coastal town who got bad marks in her GCSEs, who is working in a shop and trying to raise a child without much help from her sickly mother or her erratically employed ex-boyfriend. She has severe problems, but she probably doesn’t have severe attitudes to match. Immigration doesn’t upset her much, and ethnic diversity doesn’t upset her at all. 

By and large, the white working-class Britons with the problems are not the white working-class Britons with the complaints. But guess who is more likely to vote in the local elections on 1 May, or in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election? 

If those elections are like most other elections, the polling stations will be busy with middle-aged and old people, homeowners, and people on higher incomes. Few young working-class people of any ethnicity will turn up. And yet, after the votes are counted, politicians and commentators will surely conclude that they know what the entire white working class thinks. 

This is an extract from Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class, out now (Picador, £20). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.