I'm white and working class. I'm sick of Brexiters saying they speak for me

[Denzil_DC]

Phil McDuff

"Ordinary hard-working people have genuine concerns about immigration, and to ignore immigration is to undemocratically ignore their needs." Other than the resurgent importance of jam, this is the clearest message we are supposed to take out of Brexit.

So concerned are we that the government’s hands are tied that it must send all the doctors back where they came from. It must crack down on students coming here to get educated in our universities in exchange for money. It must check teenagers’ teeth lest we accidentally extend compassion to a Syrian adult.

Who are “ordinary hard-working people” though? It seems the consensus following Brexit is that they’re the marginalised white working class; the people who have been left behind by modernity, who feel alienated by the “liberal metropolitan elite”. I’m a white man from the north-east, living in strongly Brexit-voting Middlesbrough, so you might expect me to tell you all off for looking down on us from your ivory towers. But the truth is that this outbreak of “the poor proles can’t help it” is both incorrect and patronising.

The working class mostly lack our own voices in the media. Instead, we are reported on. This reporting seems, even now, to believe that the true working-class identity is, as Kelvin MacKenzie put it in the 1980s, “a right old fascist”. Culturally insular, not interested in or smart enough to understand real news, generally afraid of people not like him (it’s always a him).

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/25/white-working-class-brexiters-politicians-bigotry

[LeftishBrit]

1. Great article

This is an interesting follow-up article:

http://www.philpercs.com/2016/10/working-class-is-not-equivalent-to-white-working-class-let-alone-racist-white-working-class.html