On 13th July 2016, Theresa May gave her first speech as Conservative leader and British Prime Minister outside 10 Downing Street. Her predecessor, David Cameron , had resigned less than a month earlier after losing a referendum on Britainâs European Union membership that had exposed deep divisions within the country, and she sought to reinforce her image as a one-nation Conservative by speaking directly to people previously excluded from the political process. These included working-class voters who had been marginalized or ignored by the Conservatives, who were, as May herself had recognized more than a decade earlier, âtoo narrowâ in their âsympathiesâ (White and Perkins). Her speech promised a new relation between government and the governed founded on an extension of these sympathies to include the poor and precarious:
If youâre from an ordinary working class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realise. You have a job but you donât always have job security. You have your own home but you worry about paying the mortgage. You can just about manage, but you worry about the cost of living and getting your kids into a good school. If youâre one of those families, if youâre just managing, I want to address you directly. I know youâre working around the clock, I know youâre doing your best and I know that sometimes life can be a struggle. The Government I lead will be driven, not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours. We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives.
Even in her relatively brief remarks, May repeatedly returned to the claim that her government would âprioritize not the wealthy, but you,â that it would âwork for every one of usâ (May). She not only addressed a working-class audience (âyouâ) but identified with it, including herself in a national âus,â implicitly constructed in opposition to an ill-defined but powerful âthem.â She maintained this approach at the Conservative Party conference later in the year, in a speech Charlie Cooper described for Politico as making a âbold appeal to working-class voters disillusioned by rising inequality,â in which she promised to shift âthe balance of Britain decisively in favour of ordinary working-class peopleâ (âTheresa Mayâ). The idea of âblue-collar Conservatismâ promoted by David Cameron , with its emphasis on âhard-workingâ families who wanted the âdignity of a job, the pride of a paycheque, a home of their own,â (Mason and Watt) became a defining feature of May âs early tenure, a response not only to the immediate conditions of Brexit but to longer-term economic and political changes.
In practice, Mayâs government has not supported âordinary working-class peopleâ against the âprivileged fewâ; her commitment was always rhetorical not material. Her speech is significant, not as a statement of intent, but because it demonstrates both the increased prominence of the working classes in political discourse since the Great Recession began in 2008 and its limited impact on political practice. Despite the promise to give the working class âmore controlâ over their lives their concerns and perspectives have not shaped policy and have largely been represented by powerful forces and figures who claim to speak on their behalf. The process is not confined to Britain; there are parallels between May âs promise to articulate the concerns of âordinaryâ people and Donald Trump âs insistence in his inaugural address that he represented the interests of the âforgotten men and women of our countryâ (âInaugural Addressâ). Trump âs speech may have been, as his Republican predecessor George W. Bush allegedly said, âsome weird shitâ (Tracy) but his claim continued a major strategy of his campaign; as Molly Ball argued, the âblue collar man is the mascot and enigma of the Trump era,â (Ball) repeatedly evoked to suggest his distance from âelites,â a vaguely-defined category which, as Cathleen Decker pointed out, has so far included âthe governmentâs intelligence agencies, the media, foreign allies, the Department of Justice, establishment politicians, scientists and the Congressional Budget Officeâ (Decker). Both May and Trump recognize that economic and political pressures demand a renewed concern with the working classes , but have sought, in different ways, to confine this to their representation, to give them, in Walter Benjamin âs terms, ânot their right, but instead a chance to express themselves,â (234) or, more strictly, to be expressed. Despite conspicuous differences between the methods the two employ, perhaps best demonstrated in the contrast between Trump âs disorderly, sometimes violent populist rallies and May âs limited, uncomfortable, choreographed interactions with the public, there are common elements in the conditions they confront and their attempts to address them without altering the distribution of power.
What has been largely absent from recent discussions has been the perspectives and voices of the working classes , and consequently any substantive attempt to examine, disrupt, or extend existing understandings of them. Despite considerable media attention, they have largely been both celebrated and demonized in stereotypical terms, as, on the one hand, the âordinary,â hard-working families of May âs speech and, on the other, as the kind of dysfunctional communities represented by Kevin Williamson , âwhose main products are misery and used heroin needlesâ (Williamson). Political discourse continues to engage, not with the working classes , but with fantasies that simplify the people they purport to describe. These images are determined by their function rather than their ostensible object, the ways in which they can be used to justify specific political and economic practices. The policies of both the Trump administration and some advocates of Brexit , for example, depend partly on their ability to deploy an idea of the working class as a neglected white, ânativeâ population, centred on traditional manufacturing industries and threatened, not only by ill-defined transnational elites and âoutsidersâ such as refugees, but by minorities within the country, who supposedly received preferential treatment from previous, more liberal, governments. Defining the working class in this way limits both inclusion in the nation and the values it embodies and has an effect on the distribution of material as well as symbolic resources. There is consequently something at stake in such acts of interpretation. Changing the ways in which the working classes are represented and understood has the potential to alter the political culture and actions of notionally democratic states whose legitimacy depends upon their claim to represent the will of the âpeople.â This means not only recognizing the agency of working class people, their ability to speak about their own interests, but the diversity of experiences and identities potentially encompassed by the category âworking class â itself. Accepting that the âforgotten men and womenâ of America include Hispanic agricultural workers in California as well as white coal miners in Virginia would lead to a radically different understanding of the United States to that which currently shapes government policy, though it is not a matter of simply substituting one for the other. The object of a new critical and political practice cannot be choosing between existing narratives of oppression, a process that inevitably results in what Sally Munt calls the âfragmentation of sympathetic discourse,â (7) but must involve an extension of existing categories that recognizes the material and experiential connections between seemingly disparate people and phenomena. Despite their differences, undocumented cleaners and unemployed former steel workers are victims of the same system, which forces them into competition with one another.
Struggles over definitions necessarily occur in a variety of cultural spaces, and, within universities, across a range of disciplines. This volume contends that the production, reading , and analysis of literature is central to this process, that it can make a distinct, valuable contribution to the understanding not only of working-class histories but the category âworking class â itself, and that a greater critical attention to class, and the working class in particular, would extend both the methods and object of literary studies. While important work has been done in this area, many of the key texts, such as Jeremy Hawthorn âs collection The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century (1984), Andy Croftâs Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (1990), Pamela Fox âs Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel , 1890â1945 (1994), and Ian Haywood âs Working-Class Fiction: From Chartism to Trainspotting (1997), are now more than twenty years old. The marginalization of working-class studies not only exposes the conservatism of many literature departments but changes in the priorities of many on the left. Critical attention began to shift away from questions of class as early as the nineteen-seventies in response to new theoretical ideas, social conditions and emancipatory movements; as Munt argues, the fact that âthe CCCS [the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies ] moved away from working-class (primarily youth) subjects and subcultures, to critique other social structures such as gender , sexuality and raceâ at this time responded to â[m]ore general political transformationsâ (5). The change in focus exposed the limitat...