The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class [Paperback]

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.

Of these, Collins' central grievance -- that the 'whiteness' of the British working-class has been ghettoised by a leftish, cosmopolitan media class historically far less qualified to pontificate about racial integration and the impact of immigration than the 'white trash' they patronise and demonise -- is a familiar theme, not least from the journalism of Julie Burchill, the book's unnamed muse. The meat Collins adds to this bone of an argument is valid and worthy of serious debate, but badly needs an injection of economic and historical context.

Since the many strong points of the book have been widely praised, I'll briefly note a few misgivings about the book as a work of history.

Firstly, Collins is very dewy-eyed about the 'traditional working-class culture' of South London, which he describes with affection for some dependable, unchanging essence. It's as though this organic, face-to-face community had remained at the calm eye of a hurricane of historical change. Collins writes as though the social and economic meaning of 'working-class' was a constant from 1814 to the present, and that, essentially, the same sorts of jobs were done by the same sorts of people throughout that period. No account of the transformation of the labour force from an industrial to a service-based economy, to name only one massive shift, is offered; that Collins cites a wide range of slum novelists and inheritors of Dickens, but not Thompson's 'Making of the English Working Class', confirms the book's neglect of the economic. Market forces have, it should go without saying, been an overwhelming influence on the pattern and quality of working-class life, but you wouldn't guess it from Collins' account. Here, the social planners of the Nanny State (Oxbridge to a man) are the all-powerful force against which authentic community values are defined.

For Collins the unflappable working-class are publicans, market hawkers and cabmen, just like in EastEnders. Here he's in danger of replacing one damaging myth of working-class identity with another. Collins' working-class are a humble, unassuming, essentially passive lot, and only ever 'politicised' when meddling bourgeois missionaries or deluded demagogues stick their oars in. The history of trade unionism gets very short shrift by this view; so does politics considered more widely. For Collins, easy-does-it 'evolution' and good old English tolerance is the path to social progress, not radical ideas which attempt to transform history (at the expense of native traditions). This populist Burkeism is unconvincing, particularly in the face of the recent hyper-development of the South Bank; presumably to properly analyse this frenzy of property speculation in economic terms would smack of marxism, and hence bourgeois interference. Instead this phenomenon, and its social cost, are absorbed into a wider contempt for an influx of 'foreigners', media-types and rootless students. Does this problem really have more to do with cosmopolitanism than capitalism?

Secondly, Collins' assertion that working-class culture is to be equated with some kind of ethnic identification needs further analysis. The notion that 'working-class traditions' such as community spirit, patriotism and solidarity are to do with 'whiteness' or Englishness, rather than a shared position in the social hierarchy, is offered without argument. There needs to be a critical re-visiting of white British identity, but this book is not it.

This becomes most apparent in a brief dismissal (pinched from a Burchill column) of Robin Cook's claim that there is 'no such thing as the British race'. Burchill and Collins read this as an act of historical erasure of breathtaking arrogance. Perhaps they might consider that Cook is a Scottish MP, and that outside England there us a strong consensus that 'British' is a political, not an ethnic category, and moreover unlikely ever to shake off its (rightly unfashionable) imperial and military connotations. 'Britishness' is a canard: the white working class of South London are quite simply not the white working class of Leeds, Newport, Aberdeen or Belfast. This highlights what is perhaps the most conspicuous oversight in the book, considered as a work of social history: the role of nationalism. Perhaps in multiracial south London 'Britishness' persists as a political, non-essentialist landmark for cultural identification, but in Scotland it is dead. The story may be very different in Belfast, Newport and Bradford. The point is that British 'whiteness', like the working-class, is far more complicated than Collins allows.

This may seem like a litany, but overall Collins' book is informative, stimulating and provocative. I hope it prompts the sort of considered discussion it only occasionally offers itself. One final thought: it's interesting to ponder what Collins makes of the recent phenomenon of 'chav'-bashing, which goes curiously unremarked here. (Could it be because the 'chav' phenomenon is associated with the generationally unemployed, rather than the 'respectable' working-class? If so, this perhaps illuminates the problem with defining the 'white working class' as a unitary tribe...)

In any case, if you were interested in this book as a critical history of British white identity, I'm afraid it comes up short.
The following quote by Toni Morrison might lead you in more productive directions:

"If we follow through on the self-reflexive nature of these encounters with Africanism, it falls clear: images of blackness can be evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desirable -- all of the self-contradictory features of the self. Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say."

Toni Morrison
(Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1993)