The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class: Amazon.co.uk: Michael Collins: 9781862076006: Books

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Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

'Collins’s book may inform pre- poll debates.’

Michael Bracewell

‘As timely as it is compelling...If you want comparisons, think Tom Wolfe and George Orwell’

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In 1814 the prophetess Joanna Southcott died of a brain tumour in her mid-sixties, having convinced the followers from her 'House of God' at the Elephant & Castle that she was pregnant with the next Messiah. Read the first page

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover

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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Neither an elegy nor a manifesto, 10 Mar 2006

By

Gerard Lynch "paddingtonw2bear" (Belfast, Northern Ireland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class (Paperback)

Like Michael Collins, I'm another working-white boy who made his way into the professional heartland of the bourgeois-left élite. Like him I get angry at the prejudices of the BBC and the Guardian, not so much towards me, but towards my family, my friends, and the people I went to school with. I enjoyed angrily shouting along with him at the rampaging horde of environmentally-conscious, organic food-eating, inverse racist media trollops who've taken over so much on Inner London. I enjoyed his bitchy putdowns aimed at a class who specialise in the bitchy putdown (for Mr. Collins has a wonderful line in invective). It was a joy to read a book written by and for 'us' for a change.

I enjoyed the in depth trolling through the history of his ancestors in Southwark, his accounts, laced with the right amount of working-class sentimentality, of growing up in the 1970s.

More seriously, I appreciated the way he deconstructed the media-myth of the working-class white as ill-educated, uncouth and prejudiced. London's working-class whites have been at the sharp end of multi-cultural Britain for 60 yeards and, in most cases, have adapted to it and even thrived in it. He lifts the lid not only on the poverty and squalor of life for poor Londoners from Dickens' era onwards, but also exposes the bizarre social experimentation imposed on the British working-class by the bourgeois left in fields from architecture to education, from the 1950s onwards.

And yet, this book could have been so much more.

London is not the be all and end all of the world, and the white-working class experience is radically different in other parts of England - from the all-white rust belt towns of places like Durham or South Yorkshire, to racially charged mill-towns like Oldham or Burnley to the Dickensian squalor and transience of the seasonal workers of South Coast resorts like Torquay and Brighton. And all this is even before you look at Scotland, Wales and especially Northern Ireland. While the rootedness and nativism gives Collins' narrative much of its power, it either needed to claim less or do more.

The book peters out in the end into a sort of de-emotionalised elegy, and an unrealistic one at that where drugs are somehow the final straw that destroys what generations of alcoholism and violence couldn't.

Where next for London's working class whites, whether remaining in the Inner City like Collins' school friends who still live in Walworth, or transplanted out to the ageing suburbs of Bexleyheath or Crayford? Collins makes neither predictions or proposals, and that I feel is a weak point that drags his thesis into the realms of the purposeless whinge.

Finally, I think the book needed to pursue a little further the connection between the middle-class missionaries of yesterday and today. Why did the vast improvement in material conditions of working-class whites (and working-class blacks and Asians) in the 1980s provoke such anger among the commentariat? Was it annoyance at their rejection of the great Socialist dream propounded through the schools in the '60s and '70s? Was it pique at losing the Cold War both at home and abroad? Was it disgust at seeing many of their social 'inferiors' pass them by in material wealth? Was it the increasingly obvious fact that working-class whites neither wanted much to do with bourgeois-lefty missionaries, nor needed them? Without understanding the bourgeois-left attack on white working-class culture it's impossible to get a handle on why it's become so hip to hate poor whites.

However, this is an eminently readable mix of history and polemic, and the very antithesis of the self-congratulatory establishment hype that spawned TV programmes like 'Lefties', and as such deserves to be read.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding effort, 22 Jan 2012

By

SELondon_Al (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class (Paperback)

'White Working Class' is a term that has been a feature across all my life. A native of the outer South East edges of London, very much brought up to the values of the 'WWC', as my life, career etc moved on it somehow became a negative tag to my dismay and lack of understanding of why it'd became so. The Likes Of Us charts the downfall of what used to be the stock that kept the wheels of London turning to its current 'underclass' status. In his analysis, Michael Collins is clearly passionate about the stock that I quickly realised he feels proud part of yet he manages to be objective. Some chapters filled me with anger about how a whole building block of society has been left to rot and become the scapegoat for the failures and prejudices of others. Some chapters filled me with hope that this trend may be reversed. Some chapters just amused me and I lost count of the amount of times the anecdotes the author mentions relate to my own upbringing. Altogether, this is not a book for the socially faint-hearted; Michael Collins is direct and provocative and the passion is felt in every page. I would recommend this to everyone.

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Truly Excellent Book About a Fractured and Demonised Culture, 11 Sep 2011

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Dr. R. Brandon (England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class (Paperback)

I have no hesitation in saying this is a truly excellent book. It is very interesting and well written and is not a polemic (as might be suggested by the title) but is measured and objective as anyone familiar with the work of Michael Collins might expect. (Collins recently, 2010, wrote and narrated an excellent television programme on the rise and fall of the council estate.) Collins, who is a journalist, has a nice dry style and in telling the story of his family has managed to produce an important social document. The author's family come from Walworth, immediately adjacent to the Elephant and Castle in south London. He begins his story several generations back and whilst moving forward through each succeeding generation he relates the history of the area. Key to the book, and of vital interest, is how his white working class family were effected by the various outside middle to upper-class `do-gooders' who presumed, and still presume, to tell them how they ought to live and, indeed, who took steps to dictate how they should live. There is a fascinating chapter devoted to an analysis of liberal `slum-literature' of the 1890s. Later, Collins relates in a very poignant passage how his family and neighbours who, having been passed over for generations by the country at large, were then called upon to do their duty and volunteer for action in the First World War to save this self-same country. Then came a moment of fleeting affluence in the 1930s only to be blasted away by the Second World War and, most disastrous of all, the urban renewal programmes of the LCC which completely devastated the social fabric of the area. This last change finally resulting in a great migration to the outer London boroughs. Collins deals very well with black immigration and opens and closes the book with references to the effects of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Collins describes the demonisation of the white working class, again by the same middle class liberals, as routinely racist, right-wing thugs. This is a book written looking down the `telescope of life' from the `wrong' end, from the point of view of those who are always put-upon; the subjects of social surveys. This book, which contains much more of interest than my brief resume, is surely a `must-have' for any past residents of Walworth and the Elephant who would like to capture the nostalgia and feel for this part of London that has been changed beyond recognition. It would also be a very valuable learning experience for those who normally restrict their news intake to the Guardian and the BBC.

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