The White Working Class

Quote: Rooster Booster "Thanks for that.

So no-one has taken over from Old Labour as such? Is that right Mintball? This may be the issue. I have a feeling that people appear to be heading right, because they feel that no-one is prepared to take on their concerns through fear of being labelled racist.

I strongly believe that we have to discuss things, intelligently with all walks of life, with all parties, with all allegiances, to try and just get on. No easy task I know.'"

There are parties on the left that have more traditional left stances, but the left in the UK is – as in many other places – fractured. There's no one party that, even now, comes close to challenging Labour.

But Labour, when in government, continued the basic political-economic philosophy of neo-liberalism that had initially been put in place at the beginning of the 1980s by the Conservative government of the time (which included de-industrialisation as a key tenet). New Labour continued with deregulation and privatisation.

The so-called 'third way' was really (as I see it) about using improved public services (some via privatisation and schemes such as the Private Finance Initiative – which has a toxic legacy) to try to balance out some of the problems being caused by those same policies. But a fair bit of that was simply making up for the state that services were in by 1997 – people dying on hospital trolleys; schools in a state of serious disrepair etc.

In a lot of way, it's understandable that Labour went down this route. The electorate had already rejected Michael Foot's much more traditional Labour Party, plus the version under Neil Kinnock. Having said that, perhaps something more like the former would have been elected anyway in 1997, given that it was less about a Labour victory and more about the country simply having had enough of the Conservatives. And of course, we never really had the chance to know what John Smith would have been like.

I don't think that the Labour government under Blair had any idea of how to deal with that loss of so much decently paid, skilled manual work. He was obsessed with the idea of the 'e-economy', for instance, presumably believing that this would solve all our problems and provide a way forward.

One of the problems with the idea of de-industrialisation (and letting the developing world do all that manufacturing stuff in order to develop their economies) is that it leaves huge swathes of people without comparable labour, income and, indeed, dignity. I had a couple of trips to Glasgow last year for work: on both occasions, because of where the hotel was, I had to use cabs to get anywhere. Most of the cabbies are former shipbuilders. They're not workshy – but they are utterly brassed off at having had a skilled job stripped away from them, finding themselves on greatly reduced incomes – and where those incomes are reducing even further, gradually but steadily. What alternative was – or is there – for them?

Add into this mix the rise of consumerism – indeed, the retail sector is massively important for the country's economy as a whole now (the service sector accounts for approximately 75% of the economy, if I remember correctly). So in other words, we actually need people to buy things. I think the last 30 years has seen a real increase in what may see as 'aspirationalism' – but a great deal of that has been about effectively saying that rampant consumerism is good. And with it, if you want more things, you have to get a better job. But where are all these 'better' jobs? And what is wrong with any job in the first place, so that some people deride people in lowly jobs? Even work, in other words, can be derided.

I think Mike made a number of very good points. One of those is snobbery. I touched on that in the previous paragraph, when I mentioned the snobbery against certain types of work. Well, that's always been around, but I do think it's got worse – at exactly a time when more people are having to take lowly work.

The entire 'chav' thing is really quite depressing. On the one hand, it's arguably an attitude toward what would classically have been known as the lumpen proletariat (so yes, the 'workshy', the 'feckless' etc), but it's also been code for something much wider. I've seen, on here, people being condemned as 'chavs' etc simply for wearing the 'wrong' jewellry – how dare they wear an Argos clown pendant – even when they're actually in work. Shopping at Iceland is another mark of someone to be abused.

It seems to me that, one of the results of a 'greed is good' consumerist society is a new strata of people to be derided: working people who don't dress the 'right' way or buy the 'right' things or buy enough etc. And of course, the internet makes it easier to spread such a culture of nastiness.

There are loads of other things I could add – many expanding on the points that Mike made – but that's quite enough at present.

Suffice it to say that we need a serious economic alternative that doesn't just work for a very small number in our society.