Both votes were an expression of white working-class men’s frustrations over globalization and the decline in their living standards. The winners on both sides of the pond were able to link this decline in living standards and employment opportunities to immigration. They successfully promoted fear of the ‘other’, inciting a revolt against the establishment by white working-class men in the UK and US – resulting, in some extreme cases, in violence.
Fear of the ‘other’ is not endemic or inevitable. The UK has not had the same history of segregation as the US, and ‘other’ ethnic groups in the UK have lived alongside the white working class for decades. White working-class men in the US even helped to elect the first African-American president in US history. So what’s changed?
White working-class men have been manipulated and discarded for political and economic expediency for longer than any of the other groups. They’ve been conscripted to colonize the Earth, to fight wars, and to fuel the industrialization of the West. And the reason they have endured these hardships and the exclusion from the full bounties enjoyed by the elites until recently is the unspoken agreement of entitlement – the idea that they, like the people who rule them, are the indigenous group, and are therefore entitled to a modest but credible standard of living, provided they are willing to work. It’s not an unreasonable expectation by any means, considering the contribution they and their predecessors have made to their nation’s prosperity, but somewhere along the way that unspoken agreement has been broken by the ruling class, and it’s left a lot of working-class white men behind. So how exactly did this happen, and what can we do to heal these wounds and regain the trust that has been lost?
The lost world
If you were lucky enough to grow up in a white working-class area in East London as I did, you will have experienced a real community. This area endured the Blitz during the Second World War, so I grew up among a community of elders for whom being a good neighbour was part of survival. If a bomb dropped on your home, it was one of your neighbours who would shelter you and your family. Britain survived the war, and this is a badge of pride among white working-class men, especially if your grandfather served. And this pride and strong sense of community, along with standing up for yourself and your country, doing a good day’s graft (usually manual work), and a willingness to appreciate your lot, were values instilled in white working-class males as standard.
And so they just got on with it. The blue-collar vocations laid out for them did not require higher education, focusing much more on practical and skills-based learning. Back then, the economy had a clear place for this group of men – there would be a job at a local factory where many of their mates worked, and there they would stay until retirement. A lack of social mobility was not a deal-breaker for white working-class men as long as they had employment and their way of life remained unchanged.
But change was in the air, whether they liked it or not. As soon as the elites in Europe and America came to realize that the movement of industry and people was required to maintain their margins as the rest of the world started to develop, the argument that the indigenous population should be entitled to work for a fair day’s pay became worthless. The need to meet the demand for labour after the war ushered in immigration, nearly always in working-class communities. Some working-class men did resent the newcomers, fearing change as many people do, but most welcomed migrants into their homes, local pubs, and families. Some even marched in solidarity with these new immigrants against far-right groups. It’s fair to say that the response to Windrush, the ship that brought one of the first groups of post-Second World War immigrants to the UK, and the subsequent waves of immigration that followed, was mixed across the country. But unlike in America, the overarching moral response was always ‘live and let live’, enabling Britain to claim the mantle of being a bastion of tolerance and diversity. However, this was based on the expectation that the ‘agreement’ between the working class and the elites would be upheld.
But as infrastructure in other parts of the world developed, it was no longer necessary to import labour and skills to the West, since we could just as easily export the working-class jobs to the rest of the world where costs (wages) were cheaper. Great for bosses and those with capital to invest; not so great for the white working-class male.
Fast-forward a few decades to the twenty-first century, and working-class neighbourhoods have experienced yet more dramatic change. The Thatcherite revolution in the UK, and Reaganomics in the US, oversaw deindustrialization of their respective industrial bases, resulting in the erosion of traditional white working-class jobs. Economically, the decline in manufacturing has hit the working-class male the hardest, demoting him in many cases from full-time breadwinner for his family and household. His jobs have been replaced by less well-paid and often part-time service sector jobs that (from a traditional male perspective) require skills aligned more with female workers. Many of these jobs are paid as zero hours contracts intended to supplement the family income, as opposed to replacing a bread-winner’s salary, yet in many cases this is exactly what has happened. The result is quite a come-down for the white working-class man: as a factory worker he took pride in the goods he made, which were shipped across the globe, but somehow making and serving lattes for a minimum wage doesn’t quite match up.
If white working-class males wanted to maintain their standard of living they would need to do what ‘foreign’ parents were demanding of their kids – work hard at school. But by now, white working-class males had the lowest levels of educational attainment and parents without a traditional reverence for higher education, and this trend continued.
A white working-class boy is less than half as likely to get five good GCSEs, including the core subjects, as the average student in England.*
At present, white working-class boys have the lowest literacy levels in British schools and are the least likely group to attend university. Throw in the free movement of higher-educated and skilled multilingual migrants from former communist Eastern Europe, with a couple of colourful demagogues who can spice up discontent with provocative statements, and we have ourselves a working-class populist revolt seasoned with an unfortunate taste of resentment. As an ardent pro-EU campaigner, I am disheartened to see the results of this shift to the right in Western democracies – but I also understand the legitimate concerns of those communities that have been failed by globalization. I have no criticism for the victims – they are the symptom, not the cause – and until we treat the cause, the symptoms will just get worse.
Toxic masculinity
A key exacerbating factor in the populist revolt we are now witnessing is the disenfranchised white working-class male’s notion of traditional masculinity. Within this subculture, authority tends to be spurned, and violence – often in the form of hooliganism – is deemed acceptable. Males in academia and office jobs are not viewed as ‘proper men’: they have soft hands, never break a sweat, and don’t build or make anything. They put on ‘airs and graces’ and work in offices where political correctness wins the day. The white working-class male prefers blunt straight-talking.
But what happens when the world moves on from this version of masculinity? Professor Michael Kimmel, a sociologist at Stony Brook University in New York, is one of the world’s leading authorities on masculinity. He examines the parallel phenomenon happening in the US in his book Angry White Men, and writes that many of the white working-class men from forgotten Rust Belt communities feel ‘betrayed by the country they love, discarded like trash on the side of the information superhighway’. In many ways the plight of the white working-class male may perhaps be the easiest to dissect in terms of understanding where the growing dissent comes from. According to Kimmel, the men he studied see positions that were once their birthright disappearing, and are no longer sure where they fit in the societal pecking order. They are white and male in a society that values those two attributes above all others – yet being white and male no longer has the same guarantees, at least not for white men who look and sound like them.