This white working class stuff is a media invention

A monochrome group has been 'driven' to vote for the BNP, goes the fable, such is their terrible ignorance and suffering


It took roughly a month for the BNP's new London assembly member, Richard Barnbrook, to use his newfound influence to "blame the immigrants", as he did this week in a blog post hosted under the Daily Telegraph's august banner. While he raved and ranted about the "ethnic block-vote", a new block vote was being conjured into existence by a media dying to appear more in touch than it truly is.

There is now a group that is said to act as one and for whom a vote for the BNP can't truly be condemned, such is their suffering and ignorance - the "white working class". Its members are believed to have separate values, needs and motivations to working-class people who aren't white, and are said to be revolting at not having received preferential treatment from a Labour government.

There is a small problem with this take on things. Voting for the BNP is a deliberate decision: you are not "driven" to it any more than a car drives itself. It is a decision to allow self-pity to influence your vote and to disguise it as righteous anger. Contrary to the claim made in another newspaper that votes for the BNP are "a cry of white working-class anguish" (thereby letting middle-class BNP voters off the hook), the vast majority of voters refuse to vote for a fascist party because they know what it means to do so.

The idea that working-class people make active choices, rather than have their lives foisted upon them, is convenient to their supporters on the left when that agency is put to noble and dignified use. Then it's called "resistance". Put to other, more chauvinist uses, such agency is played down or forgotten about altogether.

The estate on which I grew up, just outside Birmingham, has had a BNP councillor since 2006. The estate which adjoins it, of near-identical social and economic makeup, has just elected a Green councillor. Interestingly, there has been little hand-wringing over residents of the latter estate being "driven" into the arms of environmentalists, rather than fascists. What motivated "the white working class" there? Are they, as one, "victims" of climate change just as voters in the next ward are "victims" of an unthinking liberal elite?

It's far easier to blame people - whoever you decide represents "them", rather than "us" - than it is to identify a structure and to accept one's part in holding it up. It is entirely possible to live your life without feeling existentially threatened by people whose skin colour is different. You don't have to be educated or to feel broadly in control of your life in order to do so, but it can help. If you view the world as being essentially hostile, your chief aim will be to defend the bits of it that make sense to you and to reject, sometimes violently, the parts that don't. One way to do this is to vote for the BNP, whose claims indulge your view that all change is preventable.

Voters know what they are voting both for and against. Gordon Brown's fantastical telling of Britain's current "story", a place of "hard-working families" broadly in the middle range of incomes and expectations, will not ring true to someone whose pay is half the average and whose prospects, for social or economic mobility or for political influence, feel nonexistent. This is where Labour should be coming in and saying that they recognise the existence of millions of hard-pressed working-class people (not, for pity's sake, "hard-working families") for whom secure, well-paid work is elusive and average living standards impossible to attain without going into debt. The government has repeatedly failed to acknowledge that this is the case for millions of people living in ex-industrial centres.

A sense of being actively overlooked, or having your experiences dismissed or denied, can cause anger to curdle into bitterness and self-pity. But if you take what seems like a logical step - one you know is wrong, but what the hell, you don't care any more - to vote for pariahs and find that you haven't made yourself a pariah in the process, you may start to believe that self-pity is righteous.

If you happen to be white, you now have apologists queuing up to pat you on the head. Not content with having your dignity stripped by outside forces, you start to collude in the process of stripping it further and find that you're excused for it in the name of - what? - an inverse form of political correctness. This could only happen in a class-warped society whose leaders are hellbent on pretending that class no longer matters.

There are two battles required: one is to persuade all voters to acknowledge to themselves and to each other what they already know: that nothing good can come from hatred and division. The other is to persuade the government and others who hold influence that no one is inherently stupid. We seem to be living in an age of terrible bad faith. Is there anyone else but members of this media-invented "white working class" whom we'd excuse for voting BNP? No way. So why hold them to a lower standard?