Race and the Undeserving Poor

From Abolition to Brexit

Robbie Shilliam

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781788210386
• eBook ISBN: 9781788211284
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi afroamericani

Over recent years, tabloid readers have become familiar with the concept of the "white working class", those thought to have been "left behind" by globalization, including immigration. Such sentiments were weaponized by politicians on all sides to fuel the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Brexit campaign. And this racialized narrative has emerged repeatedly in mature democracies – in the political campaigns of Trump, Le Pen and others – and continues to gain traction in the guise of economic nationalism and populism. The need to understand the putative emergence of the white working class has become both intellectually significant and politically urgent.

In Race and the Undeserving Poor, Robbie Shilliam does just this. He charts the development over the past 200 years of a shifting postcolonial settlement that has produced a racialized distinction between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, the latest incarnation of which is a distinction between a deserving, neglected white working class and "others" who are undeserving, not indigenous, and not white. Shilliam's analysis shows that the white working class are not an indigenous constituency, but a product of the struggles to consolidate and defend imperial order that have shaped British society since the abolition of slavery.

Chapter 1

Introduction

In 1885 influential jurist Albert Venn Dicey (1889: 38) defined Britain’s parliamentary sovereignty as “the right to make or unmake any law whatever”. For Dicey, the strength of this sovereignty was such that no person or group could “override or set aside the legislation of Parliament”. Parliament’s sovereignty was ill-disposed towards the sentiments of the “people” entering the halls of Westminster in an unmediated fashion. Rather, the people’s representatives had to exercise independent reason in deliberation and decision making. For right or wrong, parliamentary sovereignty has always demanded representative rather than direct democracy. Except that when, in June 2016, the British public voted by 51.9 per cent to leave the EU, influential politicians and pundits claimed that the non-binding referendum result was a direct, unmediated expression of the “popular will”. The government, they argued, was bound to legislate on this will.

In the months following the referendum, it became routine for politicians and pundits to claim that the will of “the people” was paramount, even over parliamentary sovereignty. In the first Conservative Party conference following the referendum, Theresa May (2016b) commanded her government to “respect what the people told us on the 23rd of June – and take Britain out of the European Union”. When, in November, the Supreme Court of Justice ruled that parliament had to legislate on Brexit, the Daily Mail newspaper accused the judiciary of being “enemies of the people” (Phipps 2016). The justice secretary, Liz Truss, was noticeably slow to defend the judges. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) warned that a 100,000 strong “people’s army” might march on the Supreme Court to ensure that the popular will was enacted (Payton 2016).

But who is morally worthy to count as “the people”? Pouring scorn on the European Parliament just days after the referendum, Farage (2016) argued that Brexit was the will of the “little people”. Douglas Carswell (2016), UKIP’s first elected MP, envisaged his party becoming the heir to the Chartists – a nineteenth-century labour movement for working-class suffrage and representation. Similarly, when introducing herself to the public as the new prime minister, May (2016a) appealed first and foremost to the “just about managing”. In describing what she envisaged to be Britain’s post-EU “shared society”, May (2017) placed the “ordinary working class” as its prime deserving constituency.

What, then, counts as an “ordinary” member of the working class? To answer that question, it is useful to chart the re-entry of “class” back into the political grammar of mainstream media and debate. The language of class returned largely in the wake of the global financial crisis that took hold of Britain in 2008. A BBC poll conducted in March of that year for Newsnight found that 58 per cent of the “working-class” believed “nobody speaks out for people like me in Britain today”. Accompanying the poll, a “white season” of shows was broadcast on the national network. The season controversially drew attention to a sense of unfairness amongst self-identifying white members of the working class in contrast to the positive discriminations purportedly enjoyed by Britain’s Black and minority ethnic populations (Rhodes 2010: 83; Kenny 2012: 23).

Parliamentary politics responded. Looking ahead to elections in 2010, the Fabian Society, a gradualist and reformist left-of-centre organization, hosted a meeting at the 2008 Labour Party conference that sought to clarify for the party the putative demands of the “white working class” (Sveinsson 2009: 4). Phil Woolas, Labour’s immigration minister, argued that skills shortages had to be met by better equipping Britain’s “indigenous population” for work (Moore 2008). One year later, and to the delight of the Daily Mail, Hazel Blears, then communities secretary, acknowledged that lower-income white people felt their “acute fears” over immigration had been ignored (Reid 2009). Panicked by the possible loss of their voting base, in the last months of the election campaign Labour shifted back to associating social injustice with class rather than with race (BBC News 2010). Such a shift was consolidated under the new Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government and most commonly expressed in criticisms of education, a proxy for social mobility.

Even in 2008, education was considered a key arena wherein unfairness towards the “white working class” took hold. Then, a Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills report was released that primarily addressed gender gaps in higher education. However, the Telegraph seized upon a minor part of the report which mentioned the relative paucity of “white working class boys” attending university. These boys, the newspaper claimed, were “becoming an underclass” (Paton 2008; see also Gillborn 2010). In 2012, the Telegraph once more sounded the alarm that private school bursaries available to poor pupils were increasingly – and by implication unfairly – being claimed by children from “Asian, Afro-Caribbean and Eastern European families” (Paton 2012). Shortly afterwards, in 2013, David Willetts, universities minister, suggested that when it came to higher education, “white working class” boys should be targeted in the same way as other “disadvantaged groups” were by the Office for Fair Access (Silverman 2013).

These concerns continued to be voiced during the next Conservative government. In 2015, newspapers picked up on a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission that “white working class” boys were falling further behind other social and ethnic groups at school (Telegraph 2015). In February 2016, four months before the EU referendum, David Cameron wrote an article for the Sunday Times, which drew attention to the relative paucity of Black and minority ethnic students in prestigious universities. The Spectator took issue with Cameron’s focus: “But he is wrong about the ethnicity of those students and wrong about where the problem lies. It’s working-class white boys who fare the worst, not Black boys” (Young 2016). In March 2016, three months before the referendum date, Liam Fox, a Conservative MP (soon to become a key Brexit minister in May’s government), opined: “Everyone talks about the need for diversity and yet nobody seems to worry about poor white boys. We need to stop obsessing with particular minorities” (Charlotte Street Partners 2016).

What might be drawn out from these commentaries and debates? Fundamentally, this: in the years preceding the global financial crisis, inequality was rarely spoken of – or legislated on – in the language of class but rather through proxy concepts such as “social exclusion” (Griffith & Glennie 2014); since then, class has returned to the diet of parliamentary and public discourse as a constitutively racialized phenomenon. By “racialization”, I refer to the way in which racist attributes and hierarchies come to determine the everyday meaning and common sense valuation of an entity or phenomenon. Criticisms have gathered over the often glib or metaphorical use of “racialization” (Murji & Solomos 2005). My use of the term in this book is specifically concerned with the shifting distinctions between those considered deserving and undeserving of an acceptable level of social security and welfare.

With this in mind, consider the way in which class has returned, racialized, as the white working-class. At a minimum, whiteness infers respectability. Yet by the 2000s poor residents of council estates were explicitly racialized as white at a time when whiteness normatively inferred middle-class respectability. This white “underclass” was thereby imbued with a hyper-visible social dysfunctionality and a moral character undeserving of welfare (see Lawler 2012). Now contemplate May’s recent comments, which normalize the working-classness of whiteness. Indeed, in the years leading up to Brexit, the “white working class” have been more and more defined as the deserving people that neoliberal politicians and global business has unfairly “left behind” (Open Society Foundations 2014).

Despite these recent shifts in meaning, the racialization of the working class is not a new phenomenon. Neither has the “white working class” always been considered a constituency indigenous to the British Isles. In actuality, the category of the “white working class” has a much longer genealogy, one that is embedded in a colonial past, and thus requires us to gazette a historical field wider than that of an “island story”.

For much of the twentieth century the “white working class” was part of an analytical vocabulary used by socialists and anti-colonial activists to investigate the racialized division of labour in the United States and apartheid South Africa. Oftentimes the category was deployed in arguments over the possibility of class unity (for example Johnson 1936; Kennedy & Leary 1947; see also Roediger 1991). For instance, James S. Allen (1938: 44), member of the Communist Party USA, wrote on the eve of the Second World War of the “special task of the white workers”, who had to “wipe out all traces of the white superiority idea in themselves and be the first to demand and fight for the special demands of the Negro people”.

In South Africa, Isaac Tabata (1945) of the Non European Unity Movement argued that the “white worker” had “so long fed on colour prejudice, that he has been completely blinded to his real position as a worker and has aligned himself with the exploiter”. By the 1970s, academic critiques of racialized class structures had spread to discussions of the struggles over quasi-apartheid rule in neighbouring Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), whose white settler elite had broken away from British dominion (for example Wolpe 1972; Maxey 1976).

In Britain, the category of the “white working class” gained prominence through all these vectors as well as via the influence of the global Black Power movement in the era of decolonization. Black Power was met positively by many young Black scholars and activists in the late 1960s, and woven into existing traditions of struggle transmitted from Caribbean and South Asian heritages. Activists and intellectuals questioned prevailing concerns for the orderly integration of non-white Commonwealth immigrants and framed the problem, instead, in terms of the structural racism of British society (see Allen & Smith 1974). For instance, commenting upon racism in English trade unions in 1973, Black activist and Pan-Africanist Cecil Gutzmore argued that: “The white working class tend to be more or less willing agents of the ruling class in regard to Blacks, which is precisely why one section of the working class finds it is necessary to use industrial action against another” (Bailey 1973).

By the early 1980s the mildly liberal Institute of Race Relations had been transformed into a radical organization. Its new journal, Race and Class, became a key forum for discussing the “white working class” and its hierarchical relationship to the Black working classes within British imperialism.

The evidence is striking: decades before the global financial crisis, the category of the “white working class” had already become regular currency in scholarly and activist debates over racism and neo-imperialism. Then, the “white working class” was a fundamental part of a race–class equation, and a term that signified a hierarchy of oppression within a division of labour that exceeded the British Isles. This historical debate, with coordinates embedded in Britain’s past imperial hinterland and postcolonial present, prefigures but is also silenced by contemporary debates. Today, the “white working class” is introduced as a forgotten indigenous constituency, independent of colonial pasts, and unfairly displaced by multi-coloured newcomers. This disjuncture should give us pause for thought about the claims being made on behalf of a deserving “white working class” in distinction to undeserving others.

In the following pages I seek to demonstrate that the “white working class” is neither an indigenous constituency, nor its own progenitor, but a constituency produced and reproduced through struggles to consolidate and defend British imperial order, struggles that have subsequently shaped the contours of Britain’s postcolonial society. To be crystal clear, I am arguing that the “white working class” is not a natural or neutral category of political economy. As a constituency, the “white working class” has rarely been self-authored, self-empowered or self-directed. Rather, this constituency must be apprehended as an elite artefact of political domination.

Over the course of the book, I will utilize “elite” in a purposefully capacious rather than sociologically exacting fashion. This is because I wish to demonstrate how race cuts across – or at the very least problematizes – common sense political divisions between left and right, as well as common sense distinctions between the domains of politics, law, economy, culture and knowledge-production. Furthermore, even on those occasions when non-elites have been actively involved in processes of racialization, I will argue that they have been guided for the most part by the directions laid down by elites. My core argument, then, is that elite actors have racialized and re-racialized the historical distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor through ever more expansive terms that have incorporated working classes, colonial “natives” and nationalities. Elite actors have always been driven in this endeavour by concerns for the integrity of Britain’s imperial – and then postcolonial – order. That has been the case from abolition to Brexit.

Nonetheless, I would not presume to tell a smooth story of political domination. Instead, the book seeks to chart the consistent shifting of these racialized coordinates by connecting various moments of struggle and crisis across British empire and postcolonial Britain: namely, the abolition of slavery and poor law reform (1780s–1830s); Anglo-Saxon empire, eugenics and national insurance (1840s–1910s); welfare and colonial development (1890s–1950s); universal welfare, trade unions and Commonwealth migration (1940s–1970s); social conservatism, workfare and the emerg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 English poor laws and Caribbean slavery
• Chapter 3 Anglo-Saxon empire and the residuum
• Chapter 4 National welfare and colonial development
• Chapter 5 Commonwealth labour and the white working class
• Chapter 6 Social conservatism and the white underclass
• Chapter 7 Brexit and the return of the white working class
• Chapter 8 Conclusion: Brexit, viewed from Grenfell Tower
• References
• Index