On 13 November 1968, a 35-year-old Labour politician got to his feet in the House of Commons and had a go at the ranks of Conservative members who faced him. Six or so months after Enoch Powell had delivered his infamously racist “rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham, David Winnick – who was then the MP for Croydon South – had decided to attack the Tory fashion for bemoaning immigration to the UK from such countries as India and Pakistan and expressing faux sympathy with deprived communities in British cities. “Many of those who act as the champions of the white person against immigrants,” he said, “have not in the past gone out of their way to defend the interests of the white working class.”
As the Economist journalist Joel Budd points out in this nuanced, enlightening book about the people and places Winnick was referring to, this was the first time “white working class” had been used to describe a certain kind of Briton. And in that sense, that small parliamentary moment was a prescient glimpse of a subject that would explode half a century later, when hostility to immigration fed into the result of the 2016 referendum on Brexit. At that point, the term “white working class’” became more ubiquitous than ever, and an insurgent political right made up of Powell’s political heirs – split between Tory Brexiters and the forces led by Nigel Farage – affected to speak for a kind of voter they claimed had been neglected and betrayed.
Underdogs is based on a powerful argument: that as those political changes happened, the media’s understanding of whole swaths of the UK – and England in particular – was warped. In places that had backed Brexit, microphones tended to be pointed at irate older men who probably did not have that much to moan about, while younger, less angry, more economically precarious people were overlooked.
“The white working-class Britons with the problems,” Budd points out, “are not the white working-class Britons with the complaints.” More specifically, “a young woman living in a poor coastal town… who is now working in a shop and trying to raise a child without much help from her sickly mother or her erratically employed ex-boyfriend… has very severe problems. A retired miner who is in a stable marriage, who owns his house and two cars, has many fewer problems.”
To get nearer the truth, Budd tends to concentrate on such elemental themes as place, housing and work: his is the kind of journalism that works as accessible sociology. Early on in the book, he divides largely working-class communities into three broad categories. “Heartlands” are old industrial centres, often seemingly locked into decline. An “enclave” is the kind of place – sometimes on the periphery of a big city – “that was once overwhelmingly white and working class but is becoming less so”. Most interesting, perhaps, are what he terms “colonies”, to which people have moved from other places. Some are archetypal new towns, but Budd explores Thetford in Norfolk, “one of the oddest and most wonderful places in Britain” where local factories drew families from east London half a century ago, and many latter-day cliches quickly fall apart. When he talks to the locals, he finds that “awareness of their own history as migrants takes the edge off xenophobic instincts … in half a dozen trips to Thetford, I have never heard anyone complain that immigrants are failing to assimilate”.
The book’s best material is like this, all about the messy and often fitful ways that society progresses, and written in elegant, understated prose that acts as the proverbial window pane. The New Parks estate in Leicester, Budd says, was once kept largely white thanks to the reluctance of black and Asian people to try moving there, and plentiful instances of local young men committing shocking acts of racist violence. Now, by contrast, its population is increasingly diverse, and white residents offer level-headed opinions that would gladden liberal hearts: “It’s not good for Leicester to be split into whites, blacks, Asians, Chinese or whatever.”
Up close, even people with apparently reactionary instincts can turn out to have more nuanced thoughts, something highlighted by a sixtysomething resident of the same city whom Budd calls John. “There’s two sides now,” John says. “There’s the immigrants, and there’s families that were born here.” But only a breath or two later, he offers the opinion that “Britain’s always been a racist country… the English working class thought they were a cut above the Irish, then above the Windrush [sic], then above the Asians.” Even people who might recently have been derided using the dread – and rather snobbish – insult of “gammon” sometimes turn out to be more complicated than they first let on.
Everyday life, moreover, contains plenty of evidence of the quiet solidarity and small kindnesses people who live outside working-class communities barely see. In the south Mancunian neighbourhood of Wythenshawe, some people “speak sharply about asylum seekers”, but a community centre “was flooded with pushchairs and other donations when word got around that newly arrived Afghan families needed them”. At one point, Budd wonders if the nastiness that defines some well-heeled rightwing politicians is often projected on to places where it runs a lot less deep, meaning that “the prejudices of the suburban golf club are imputed to the council-estate boxing club… a kind of ventriloquised xenophobia.”
There’s an occasional sense that these insights should have been developed further: when the narrative flow is disrupted by apparent reprises of Budd’s past journalism about the rise and fall of armed robbery and the cult of so-called highly modified cars, it feels as if he is wasting space on things that barely touch his key themes. He also ends up making a series of half-cocked political points that sometimes verge on the risible: “Britain does not need lots more social housing”, for example, is a claim that would probably cause most of the people he encounters to loudly guffaw. But most of Underdogs vividly illustrates the point it was written to make: that in a political era as overheated and mendacious as ours, the plain truths of everyday life need to be heard and understood. In that sense, this book is not just well-timed but admirably powerful.
Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class by Joel Budd is published by Picador (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Maybe I’m Amazed by John Harris (John Murray Press, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
