Empire Socialism Part 12
What happened to the working class?
In this section I will draw on the stats quoted in Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race when Reni Eddo-Lodge discusses the British working class. The shaping of the argument is entirely mine, however.
The myth of the white working class
First, the old industrial working class in Birmingham, Northern England, North Wales and Glasgow have gone. The financialisation and flight of heavy industry to cheaper climes of the 1980’s destroyed the industrial base they depended on. There is a lasting legacy of severe deprivation in these areas. Ironically, given the Brexit vote, these areas received large sums of regeneration cash from the European development funds. You can imagine how the modern Tories would have made sure a good part of this money went in their own pockets, but this didn’t happen.
Quite rightly the people living in these areas feel abandoned. This is because they were. Thatcher’s government talked about managed decline for places like Merseyside, which was arrested to some extent by EU money and the intervention by unlikely people like Michael Heseltine after the riots in the 1980s.The places that didn’t riot, or weren’t financial hubs like Leeds or Manchester, were left to slowly crumble. Blair did nothing for these…
