'Some Working Classes are Very Pleasant'

I'll tell you who makes the Nazis...Here's Two excellent pieces on the BBC's ridiculously dangerous 'White' season, in which the experience of the 'white working class' is boiled down to having a bee in one's bonnet about immigrants - something motivated, as Lynsey Hanley's piece points out, by the Beeb's own cossetted middle class fuckwittery, in a world where these things are excitingly exotic. Note also that on the comments appending her piece the working classes are accused of stupidity and smelling of piss by someone clearly unfamiliar with the niceties of English grammar. An interestingly common thing on Comment is Free and its ilk, the grammatically and verbally challenged rantings of right-wing arseholes who still, somehow, manage to maintain a sense of impregnable superiority.



This middle-class reductiveness (pioneered in Michael Collins' sentimentalist The Likes of Us) is something that I find particularly infuriating, as it constantly declares that the white working class that make up most of my family - mostly politically active, with an autodidact or two amongst them, committed to working class solidarity and education - don't exist, never did exist. Similarly, the history of the East End has to be rewritten in a way that ensures that the Great Dock Strike, Cable Street, decades as one of the few places in Britain where 'Communist' wasn't a pejorative, are all secondary to a Sun reading bestiary. All particularly grotesque in an area that has seen the mass social cleansing that is gentrification expel working class inhabitants, black or white, off to the peripheries.