Labour’s treacherous lies and cardinal betrayal of the working classes is obvious to all. But the really good news is that the radical left have all but vanished from defending the working classes.
—Jonathan Bowden, BNP activist
It was not an ideal day for knocking on doors. The 2010 general election was only a couple of months away, and I was pounding the streets with a team of activists to get out the vote for a left-wing backbencher. The long, freezing winter of 2010 had finally drawn to a close and it was one of the first sunny Sundays in months. Families were taking advantage of the warm weather, and houses with anyone inside were few and far between.
After fruitlessly knocking on a few doors, a middle-aged woman wearing an apron finally answered. It was obvious she wanted to speak her mind.
‘My son can’t get a job,’ she said angrily. ‘But there are all these immigrants coming in and they’re getting all the jobs. There are too many immigrants!’
It would be easy to dismiss someone with these views as a knuckle-dragging racist. But it was clear that she was not. I had to listen carefully to what she was saying, because she had a fairly strong accent—a Bengali accent, to be precise. Here was a woman of Indian origin berating immigrants for taking jobs from British workers like her son. What was going on?
That spring, activists of all political stripes found the immigration issue cropping up again and again. It had not come out of nowhere. Throughout the 2000s, a growing backlash against immigration had developed. Polls reflected an increasing hostility to more people entering the country. At the 2005 election, the Tories tried to tap into this groundswell with their infamous ‘It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration’ posters.
But nothing focused people’s minds on immigration more than the rise of the British National Party. In the early days of New Labour, back in 1999, the BNP had won just over a hundred thousand votes in the European elections; a decade later, they would poll not far short of a million. Far-right extremists celebrated jubilantly as BNP leader Nick Griffin and his Nazi-sympathizing colleague Andrew Brons became Members of the European Parliament.
The rising BNP tide spilled over into national elections, too. At the 1997 general election, it polled a paltry 35,832 votes, only a handful more than the eccentric National Law Party. Sixteen other parties did better. Eight years later, over 192,000 voted for BNP candidates, making the party the eighth largest in the country. There was huge relief following the 2010 general election that the BNP did not manage to pick up any seats. Yet it had still attracted nearly 564,000 votes. The BNP was now the fifth biggest party in Britain.
Is the BNP’s rise a sign that society is becoming more racist? The short answer is ‘no’. Back in 1958, a Gallup poll found that 71 per cent of Britons opposed interracial marriage—and yet there was no racist party even fielding candidates. So few people subscribe to such a view these days that pollsters do not bother recording the figure. Today, Britain has the highest levels of mixed-race marriages in Europe, and only 3 per cent admit to being ‘very racially prejudiced’. Four out of five people claim to have no prejudice whatsoever. The irony is that Britain has become less racist at the same time as it is faced with the most electorally successful racist party in British history.
To understand why people vote for the BNP, it is important to understand what the BNP is. Opinion polls are a bit unreliable because, outside of the anonymity of the polling booth, some potential voters are wary of admitting their support for the BNP. But they clearly show that the average BNP voter is likely to be working class: for example, one YouGov poll found that 61 per cent of BNP supporters were in the bottom three social classifications, the C2s, Ds and Es. The BNP has thrived in traditionally white working-class areas with a long history of returning Labour candidates. Little wonder that the rise of the BNP has reinforced one of the popular ‘chav’ caricatures of the white working class: a beer-bellied skinhead on a council estate, moaning about hordes of immigrants ‘coming in and taking our jobs’.
Indeed, it has suited many politicians and journalists to portray the BNP’s rise as a matter of white working-class people trying to preserve their identity from a non-white invasion. Frank Field, a right-wing, anti-immigration Labour MP, told me that the BNP are appealing to ‘a sense that people are losing their country without ever being asked whether that’s what they want’.
But it is not simply racism that has driven hundreds of thousands of working-class people into the waiting arms of the BNP. The rise of the far right is a reaction to the marginalization of working-class people. It is a product of politicians’ refusal to address working-class concerns, particularly affordable housing and a supply of decent, secure jobs. It has been fuelled by a popular perception that Labour had abandoned the people it was created to represent. Karl Marx once described religion as ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature’: something similar could be said about the rise of the far right today.
The BNP is often compared to the European fascist parties of the 1930s. Yet, in reality, it has flourished for completely different reasons. The fascism of the Great Depression era largely owed its support to small property-owners and big businesses who felt threatened by a growing left, whereas today’s BNP is a product of the left’s weakness. With no powerful left to answer the bread-and-butter concerns of working-class people in the neoliberal era of job insecurity and housing crisis, the BNP has filled the vacuum.
The Asian lady I spoke to was extremely unlikely to have plumped for the BNP come polling day. But she expressed the same anxiety—about the impact of immigration on jobs—as many BNP voters. This shows that the great backlash against immigration is being driven, above all, by material concerns. There was once a popular narrative that social problems were caused by the injustices of capitalism that, at the very least, had to be corrected. With these ideas forced out of the mainstream, it has been easy for the idea that all social problems are caused by outsiders, immigrants, to gain a foothold. It is a myth that, fanned by right-wing newspapers and journalists, has resonated in working-class communities across Britain.
That is not to completely dismiss ethnic identity as a factor. The BNP does well in certain overwhelmingly white areas that have seen a recent influx of new, ethnic minority residents. Former London mayor Ken Livingstone recalls:
I was the candidate in Hackney North and Stoke Newington in 1977 when the National Front got 5 per cent of the vote at the GLC [Greater London Council] election, just like the BNP did in London in 2008. And they were in Hoxton and Haggerston, the two southern wards. On the night of the GLC election, they didn’t have a majority, but they were the leading party in those wards … But two years ago, they virtually got no votes—just a couple of per cent. So I think you tend to get a problem of racism in an area undergoing transition.’
Hackney is one of the most mixed areas in the country, and as a result the far right has died out there. But it flourishes in areas such as Barking and Dagenham, where mass immigration is a new phenomenon and where the BNP has done well; or, conversely, where there is very little immigration but a tremendous fear of it.
The demonization of the working class has also had a real role to play in the BNP’s success story. Although ruling elites have made it clear that there is nothing of worth in working-class culture, we have been (rightly) urged to celebrate the identities of minority groups. What’s more, liberal multiculturalism has understood inequality purely through the prism of race, disregarding that of class. Taken together, this has encouraged white working-class people to develop similar notions of ethnic pride, and to build an identity based on race so as to gain acceptance in multicultural society. The BNP has made the most of this disastrous redefinition of white working-class people as, effectively, another marginalized ethnic minority. ‘Treating the white working class as a new ethnic group only does the BNP a massive favour,’ says anthropologist Dr Gillian Evans, ‘and so does not talking about a multiracial working class.’
It is unlikely that the BNP will ever win significant power, not least because of chronic incompetence and infighting, of the kind that crippled the party after the 2010 general election. But its rise is like a warning shot. Unless working-class people are properly represented once again and their concerns taken seriously, Britain faces the prospect of an angry new right-wing populism.
It was ten days before Christmas, and Dagenham Heathway’s Mall shopping centre was thronged with bargain-hunters. I was standing thirteen miles east of the House of Commons, but it felt like a world away from the tearooms of Westminster. Dagenham and neighbouring Barking are solidly working-class areas in the borderlands of East London and Essex. Dagenham was once the manufacturing hub of London: during Britain’s industrial heyday in the 1950s, the iconic local Ford factory employed tens of thousands of workers. As one anti-racist campaigner put it to me, this was ‘the BNP frontline’.
Barking and Dagenham first appeared on the national political radar in 2006, when the BNP stormed on to the local council with an apparent avalanche of support. With eleven seats in the bag, it was now the main opposition to Labour. It had only stood candidates in thirteen out of the fifty-one seats up for grabs. This was a political earthquake whose tremors were felt across the country. Among the BNP’s new councillors was Richard Barnbrook, who would go on to be elected to the London Assembly in 2008.
Why was a once solidly Labour area defecting to what was until recently a fringe racist party? Margaret Owen, a retired home carer, was among the shoppers out that afternoon. I asked her if she lived in a tightly knit community. ‘No, I wouldn’t say so,’ she said. ‘It’s changing.’ When I asked her what she felt the number one issue facing the community was, she paused. ‘No. I mustn’t.’ I gently pressed her again, and she looked cautiously from side to side before leaning in and whispering: ‘Well, it’s all these foreigners coming in. Our borough is just changing. It used to be so nice.’ Over what sort of period had this change taken place, I asked? ‘It’s changed in the last, what, six or seven years? Yes. Very much.’
It did not take long to understand the real reason for her dislike. ‘They’re getting the houses, and our people, our children can’t get the houses. Foreigners come in here and get places … I never got that. My children never got it. It’s just going down the pan. If I can get out of Dagenham, I will.’
Many local residents harbour similar frustrations. Danny, a lanky, thoughtful man in his late thirties, has lived in the area since he was eight years old. A printer by trade until the industry went bust, he found work in a warehouse in nearby Romford and then in a furniture shop. After that he was made redundant, and was out of a job for two years. Legislation introduced by New Labour compelled him to work for his dole money, and he was told that he would either have to work for a company for nothing, or go into voluntary service. He ended up volunteering in a local charity shop, ‘because if I work for a company, I’m earning them money, when all I’m getting is my basic giro, which is below the minimum wage.’
Like Margaret Owen, Danny insisted that housing was the main local grievance. ‘There’s 10,000 people on the housing list who are trying to get a house,’ he said. Danny was wary about discussing the BNP’s local rise. It was, he said, a ‘dodgy subject’ because he feared being labelled a racist.
Which is not good, because you think that, at the end of the day, there has been a lot of influx of foreigners. Whether they’re taking the jobs and the houses is debatable, but they’re being housed and fed—you know what I mean?—so they’ve got to be put somewhere, which is obviously taking away from the people who’ve lived in Dagenham all their lives, putting taxes in, and they’re scooped aside, and getting pushed further and further out of Dagenham.
A friend of his is bringing up a child on her own and has been shunted around temporary accommodation for years. But while there is not enough affordable housing to meet the need, a large prison is being built: a source of real exasperation among the locals. ‘Why don’t they build houses over there, instead of building a prison?’
Unsurprisingly, the issue of jobs weighs heavily on Danny’s mind. At its height, the Ford factory employed 40,000 people and was at the heart of the community. Sam Tarry, a leading local anti-racist campaigner who has lived in East London all his life, points out that ‘part of Dagenham was actually built to house the workers from that particular factory.’ Danny paints a picture of insecure, low-paid work for many local people in the post-Ford era:
Because obviously Ford was the main thing round here. I mean, I’ve not worked for Ford, there were other companies, but they’re all going bust. That’s the problem. You try and get a job, it’s either before Christmas, or it’s temporary for six months for Christmas, January comes along and you’re back in the same boat again, so it’s a vicious circle. Or if you do go and get a job, they don’t pay you enough to pay all your bills.
Danny is not short of frustrations, but he has no faith in the ability of traditional political parties to alleviate them.
I think a lot of the politicians have been to public school… when they come out they just have no concept of real life. They’ve never scrimped or scraped, they’ve never had to do fourteen jobs to earn a living or whatever! Because they’re on sixty or eighty grand a year, and then there was all this thing with expenses. They’re still taking the mick.
I did not actually meet anyone willing to admit voting for the BNP, and Danny says that he does not vote. But he eloquently describes some of the ingredients that, together, have made a toxic brew: massive housing shortages, a lack of secure jobs, and a convenient scapegoat, plus total disillusionment with the political establishment added in for good measure.
Brendan Duffield, a local trade union official who has lived in the area for three decades, is keen to stress that genuine mixing between communities does take place. ‘I’ve run football teams for over twenty years,’ he tells me.
I’ve had teams from youngsters right up to men’s teams, and I’ve met every different nationality you could imagine: I’ve had Irish, I’ve had Scotch, I’ve had Africans, I’ve had Asians … And they’ve been great, supportive and everything. And everyone seems to get on very well… so, I’m a bit amazed that people keep saying that this is a racist area, because I’ve not really seen too many things in this area happening, like racial attacks … You get idiots in every area that you go in the country, who’ve got nothing better to do.
But Brendan has seen the impact that housing shortages have had. ‘I’m a bit ashamed to say, but I think this authority now has just started building thirteen houses for the first time in over—I think it’s over thirty years, since Margaret Thatcher was in.’ He is in no doubt that this issue, above all else, has unleashed a political whirlwind in his community. ‘I think if Labour would have carried on building houses in this area, you wouldn’t have half the trouble with the BNP.’
There was, undoubtedly, a steep rise in the number of foreign immigrants moving to Dagenham during the New Labour era. This has clearly been a disorientating experience for some who have lived there all their lives. ‘Empirically it’s the fastest-changing borough in Britain. Empirically, that’s a fact,’ says local Labour MP Jon Cruddas, who has represented Dagenham since 2001. But what has turned disorientation into outright resentment and hostility is what is on every local resident’s lips: housing. ‘It’s the lowest-cost housing market in Greater London, at a time of exponential rise in the value of property, and at the same time, the effect of right-to-buy means that we have more of a private market,’ says Cruddas. ‘So you’ve seen the housing market in one small borough disproportionately take the strain in terms of broader patterns of migration into and within the borough.’
Looming over the whole borough is the shadow of right-to-buy, which massively depleted the borough’s council-housing stock. ‘You’ve got many people here who took the opportunity to buy their house under the right-to-buy schemes in the eighties and nineties,’ says Sam Tarry. ‘Many of them have now reached a point where they’ve got grown-up children who are either having to live at home, or having to move quite far out of the area to get a house, even just to rent a house, let alone to buy one.’ Many of the houses bought up by their owners ended up in the hands of private landlords. They have been particularly attractive to what Sam calls
new kinds of migrant communities, particularly the African community in Barking, because if for the same rent you pay, for the price of a house, you can rent somewhere that’s got two, three bedrooms, a back garden, a front garden, compared to the sorts of houses in Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham—it’s a bit of a no-brainer in terms of wanting to have somewhere that’s a bit more pleasant to live!
Again, he identifies insecure employment as an issue further feeding the frustrations of local people. ‘The difficulty is that actually the generation of people in their late thirties, forties, fifties, is a generation of people who I think weren’t employed by the Ford factory, they didn’t have a skilled trade, and left school certainly with no further education qualifications, and very little basic, secondary-level qualifications,’ he says.
And often you find people working in a flexible jobs market, the sort of job where you’re more likely to be able to be hired and fired at will, where you’re not necessarily going to have a pension, you’re often on the minimum wage. It creates a further sense of insecurity, which added to the concerns around housing and other local public services provision, starts to create a tense or uncertain atmosphere.
Cruddas agrees, blaming the ‘extraordinary de-industrialization’ that has taken place. ‘This was the centre of manufacturing in London, with its associated predictabilities in terms of pensions and employment. And it’s no surprise that the BNP move in.’
In Barking and Dagenham, the BNP has cleverly managed to latch on to the consequences of unfettered neoliberalism. New Labour was ideologically opposed to building council housing, because of its commitment to building a ‘property-owning democracy’ and its distrust of local authorities. Affordable housing and secure, well-paid jobs became increasingly scarce resources. The response of the BNP was to delegitimize non-native competition, goading people to think: ‘We don’t have enough homes to go round, so why are we giving them to foreigners?’
Cruddas describes the BNP as hinging their strategy on ‘change versus enduring inequalities, and they racialize it’. All issues, whether housing or jobs, are approached in terms of race. ‘It allows people to render intelligible the changes around them, in terms of their own insecurities, material insecurities as well as cultural ones.’ Yes, it is a narrative based on myths. After all, only one in twenty social houses goes to a foreign national. But, with the government refusing to build homes and large numbers of foreign-looking people arriving in certain communities, the BNP’s narrative just seems to make sense to a lot of people.
The BNP’s strategy has been obligingly boosted by the right-wing tabloids. ‘£5m benefits for disabled migrants who flew home’, screams one Daily Express headline. ‘Secret report warns of migration meltdown in Britain’, warns the Daily Mail. ‘Illegal immigrant mum gets four-bedroom house’, gasps the Sun. If you are a working-class person struggling to scrape by, who cannot get an affordable home or at least knows others in that position, then being bombarded with these stories gives credence to the BNP narrative: that there aren’t enough resources to go round, and immigrants are getting the lion’s share of them.
Coupled with this strategy is an audacious attempt by the BNP to encroach on Labour’s terrain. With New Labour having apparently abdicated the party’s traditional role of shielding working-class communities from the worst excesses ofmarket forces, the BNP has wrapped itself in Labour clothes. ‘I would say that we’re more Labour than Labour are,’ says former local BNP councillor Richard Barnbrook. BNP literature describes the organization as ‘the Labour party your grandfather voted for’.
Sifting through the BNP’s policies exposes this as a nonsense. Their tax policy, for example, includes abolishing income tax and increasing VAT instead—a policy beloved of extreme right-wing libertarian economists that would benefit the rich at the expense of ordinary working people. The party freely adopts Thatcherite rhetoric, committing itself to the ‘private-enterprise economy’ and arguing ‘that private property should be encouraged and spread to as many individual members of our nation as possible’.
And yet, in communities such as Barking and Dagenham, the BNP has cleverly managed to package itself as the champion of the white working class. As well as counterposing the interests of white working-class people to those of ethnic minorities, the BNP has won support by throwing itself into community politics. Party activists organise fêtes, help to clear rubbish, help out in pensioners’ gardens—things that give the impression that they are rooted in the local community. ‘You see lots of old people saying “the BNP put on a bingo night”, or “the BNP wants people to stop gathering on street corners”, and it’s really classic community politics that masks what they’re really about,’ says trade union leader Mark Serwotka.
Disturbingly, it is not just former Labour voters that the BNP has managed to attract. ‘One interesting factor, which we certainly saw in the 2006 elections, when the BNP got their eleven councillors elected, was the fact it wasn’t just disenfranchised Labour voters,’ says Sam Tarry. ‘They actually turned out great numbers who’d never voted at all before, so-called virgin voters. To actually motivate people who would usually just not bother with the political system, to actually go and take their first political step and doing it hand-in-hand with the BNP is an extremely worrying sign.’ The far right has managed to mobilize people who have never voted before because they feel that the traditional political parties simply do not represent their interests.
It is clear that the BNP has thrived by offering reactionary, hateful solutions to the everyday problems of working-class people. But the demonization of working-class Britain has also played a role. For Tarry, it has fuelled a crisis of identity that accelerated the growth of the BNP and the wider anti-immigrant backlash. As well as recent national soul-searching about what constitutes Englishness and Britishness, the question raised in communities like Barking and Dagenham is: ‘What does it mean to be working class?’
‘We’ve seen a switch into a sort of English nationalism, and you’ll see a lot of the white families deliberately hanging out the English flag from their windows, almost as though they’re staking out the territory, in a slightly aggressive, non-inclusive way,’ says Tarry.
For me, there is an element there which I can’t quite put my finger on about this sense of what it means to be from a working-class background: what it means to be English, and where your sense of identity and purpose and direction actually now come from, because of that decline of those traditional kinds of social structures that gave working-class people their sense of purpose and identity, and kinship and brotherhood through the trade union movement. And that still seems to have declined, even though we still have such a strong trade union movement in this area.
Pride in being working class has been ground down over the past three decades. Being working class has become increasingly regarded as an identity to leave behind. The old community bonds that came from industry and social housing have been broken. But working-class identity was something that used to be central to the lives of people living in communities like Barking and Dagenham. It gave a sense of belonging and of self-worth, as well as a feeling of solidarity with other local people. When this pride was stripped away, it left a vacuum that the waking beast of English nationalism has partly filled.
In a similar way, we have seen Scottish and Welsh nationalism gain new roots in the hitherto Labour-voting estates of Glasgow and the Rhondda Valley. But there is a key difference: Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) shun ethnic-based nationalism in favour of a progressive-leaning, inclusive nationalism. Indeed, Plaid Cymru boasts of having more ethnic minority councillors than the other Welsh parties put together, while the first Asian elected to the Scottish Parliament was a member of the SNP. Central to the jingoist streak in English nationalism is the long, sordid history of Empire. ‘It’s not that long ago, certainly when I was growing up, when you had the map with all the red blocks of where the British Empire ruled,’ trade union leader Billy Hayes notes. The centuries-old traditions of domination over other peoples have left a very large imprint in the national psyche, which the BNP constantly manipulates.
The far right have switched their targets of choice over the years: Jews, Irish, blacks and Asians were each the villains at various points. Today, above all others, it is Muslims. An ugly wave of Islamophobia has accompanied the so-called war on terror that was launched following the 9/11 attacks. British soldiers are at war with Muslim peoples in Muslim lands. Aided by hysterical media baiting of Muslims, the BNP has made Islamophobia into the very core of its propaganda.
More perversely, the BNP has cynically manipulated mainstream multiculturalism with its focus on inequality as an issue of race. BNP propaganda has tapped into this by recasting white working-class people as an oppressed ethnic minority, allowing it to appropriate anti-racist language. BNP leaflets are full of bogus talk of the ‘white minority’ and ‘anti-white racism’. When the party was taken to court for its ‘whites-only’ Constitution, it retorted by asking why it should be any different from other ethnic minority organizations, like the National Black Police Association.
Of course, this represents a distortion of mainstream multiculturalism. Irrespective of its flaws, multiculturalism is essentially about defending the rights of ethnic groups, who make up only one in ten of the population in our overwhelmingly white society. But this is one of the consequences of eliminating class from our understanding of inequality—because a group like the BNP can simply argue that it is defending the rights of whites in a multicultural society, just as others might defend the rights of Muslims or black people.
It would be simplistic to maintain that the waves of immigration that took place under New Labour have had no impact in and of themselves. By historical standards immigration has been high, and this alone would have provoked anxiety or hostility among some people. If you have always lived in a homogenously white area, with little or no experience of—or contact with—different cultures, then a sudden change in your community may, to begin with, be a cause of confusion or alarm. Even though history has shown this tension dissipates within a generation or so when genuine mixing has taken place, there may inevitably be tensions in communities undergoing transition.
But economic insecurities have lent added ferocity to the backlash against immigration—and it is this that the BNP has so successfully manipulated. ‘The wider issue is that there weren’t jobs created for working-class people and there weren’t homes for their children to live in,’ says Ken Livingstone. ‘And it’s easy for the BNP to say, well, the blacks are getting it all. In reality no one was getting any, because they weren’t building any or making any.’
It would be wrong to caricature communities like Barking and Dagenham as stuffed with angry white working-class people frothing at the mouth about immigrants. There are many who are disgusted with the BNP and have gone out of their way to welcome immigrants hailing from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Indian subcontinent.
When I asked Leslie, a home carer, and her friend Mora, a pensioner, what the main issues in the community were, they came up with the usual answer: ‘That same old thing—housing.’ But that did not mean they had automatically rushed into the BNP camp. ‘They’re bad. They’re trouble. Very bad,’ they both say. ‘I mean, I’m quite happy in Barking and Dagenham,’ says Leslie, and Mora agrees: ‘We were born here. And I would never move out of Dagenham.’ They are both deeply scornful of’the crap that the BNP are coming out with … At the moment they’re frightening people, they’re saying old people can get chucked out of their house, and it’s given to the “illegals”. If they can say where the illegals are, fine. But there are no illegal immigrants in this borough. There’s not. I mean, there’s good and bad in everybody. But the BNP are very bad.’ ‘They’re very racist, aren’t they?’ asks Leslie, drawing a quick response from Mora: ‘Very, very racist, they are.’
Although neither had faith in politicians at the national level, they did trust their local Labour councillors. But their impression of the BNP was of total incompetence. ‘They have done nothing. You try and get hold of them, you can’t get hold of them. And yet they have the cheek to stand and say that Labour’s doing nothing … You can get in touch with the Labour Party, they do listen to you, they sort out your problems, but the BNP—no!’ Both are insistent that they mix with people of all backgrounds in their community. Leslie works with black managers and carers, for example. ‘We’ve got an Indian family across the road from us,’ adds Mora. ‘Every now and then they bring over a meal. Very, very nice.’
These were the sorts of sentiments that anti-racist campaigners built on in the run-up to the 2010 general and local elections. The ‘HOPE not hate’ campaign built a formidable network of campaigners, developed literature targeted at particular groups in specific localities and exposed the incompetence of BNP councillors. Community organizing was the backbone of the campaign, and trade unions played a central role in funding the effort and spreading the word among local working-class people.
The campaign paid off beyond the wildest expectations of anti-racist activists. The fear was that the BNP would pick up at least one MP in the two local constituencies; the nightmare scenario was that it would take control of the council. In the event the BNP was completely wiped out, losing all twelve of their councillors. Labour may have faced a disastrous rout at the polls in the May general election, but the local Labour Party took every single seat on Barking and Dagenham Council. BNP leader Nick Griffin responded by throwing his toys out of the pram, claiming that the ‘English’ had been driven out of London.
Yet there are no grounds for complacency. The BNP was defeated above all by vastly increased voter turnout, itself the product of an extremely effective campaign. In the Barking parliamentary constituency, the BNP vote went up from 4,916 votes in 2005 to 6,620 in 2010: but at the same time overall turnout dramatically increased from 28,906 to 44,343, meaning the BNP vote share dropped. BNP council candidates did lose votes, but only around one hundred votes in each ward; indeed, many candidates topped 1,000 votes. Even before the impact of the most sweeping public sector cuts in modern history had been felt, the BNP had retained a solid base within Barking and Dagenham.
The reality is that the grievances that spurred on the BNP upsurge are greater than ever. There is still a critical lack of affordable housing, and well-paid, secure jobs remain thin on the ground. Working-class people in Barking and Dagenham, as elsewhere in the country, will continue to demand answers. The future of our communities depends on who gives them.
The rise of the BNP is just the tip of the iceberg of the great anti-immigrant backlash of the early twenty-first century. There is no avoiding the difficult truth that the vast majority of Britons believe immigration levels are too high. Take one poll for the Sun in October 2007: nearly two-thirds of the population wanted immigration laws toughened. But, while only 6 per cent of people in the top three social categories wanted immigration stopped altogether, three times as many in the bottom third wanted the borders completely sealed. These sentiments are not confined to areas that have experienced large influxes from abroad like Barking and Dagenham. Across the country, anti-immigration has become the rallying cry of people who would never dream of voting for the BNP.
It was the sort of thing we were told belonged to the 1970s. In defiance of some of the most stringent anti-union laws in the Western world, workers at the Lindsey oil refinery downed tools in a spontaneous walkout at the end of January 2009. Media commentators were dumbfounded as sympathy strikes spread to towns such as Grangemouth, Sellafield, Wilton, Staythorpe and Didcot, among others. This was not supposed to happen in twenty-first-century Britain.
But there was a twist to this apparent renewed union militancy. The media spin was that these were semi-racist, anti-immigrant strikes in protest at foreign workers. There were close-up shots of placards being waved on picket lines demanding ‘British jobs for British workers’, repeating a disastrous promise by the then prime minister Gordon Brown at the 2007 Labour Party Conference. Even to some on the left this looked uncomfortably like chauvinism, reminiscent of the dockers who marched to support Enoch Powell’s infamous anti-immigration ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968.
Media coverage went out of its way to confirm this interpretation. In one BBC bulletin, a worker was filmed saying: ‘These Portuguese and Eyeties—we can’t work alongside of them.’ But this turned out to be a gross distortion, and the BBC was forced to apologize for missing out the next sentence: ‘We’re segregated from them.’ The worker meant that they physically could not work with foreign workers, because they were prevented from doing so.
The real reasons for the strike, carefully obscured by the mainstream media, shed light on some of the complexities underlying the working-class anti-immigration backlash in modern Britain. The Lindsey refinery’s employer, IREM, had hired cheap, non-unionized workers from abroad. Not only did this threaten to break the workers’ union, it also meant everyone else’s wages and conditions would be pushed down in a ‘race to the bottom’.
‘We’ve got more in common with people around this world than with the employers who are doing this to us,’ said Keith Gibson, one of the leaders of the strike and a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Party. BNP figures who tried to jump on the bandwagon were barred from the picket line. The demands of the strike committee included the unionization of immigrant labour, trade union assistance for immigrant workers and the building of links with construction workers on the continent. This was the opposite of a racist strike.1
However, the Lindsey strike was the exception rather than the norm. In an age of weak unions, the resentments behind the working-class backlash against immigration have lacked this sort of commendable leadership. The fear among large numbers of working-class people is that British jobs are being lost and wages are being forced down because of mass immigration.
A glance at the figures might seem to support the conclusion that a majority of jobs are indeed going to immigrants. Between New Labour’s victory in 1997 and its defeat in 2010, the number of jobs went up by 2.12 million. While the number of employed UK-born people has increased by 385,000, the number of workers born abroad has risen by 1.72 million. That means that more than four out of every five jobs created in Britain since 1997 have gone to foreign-born workers.
But this fails to take into account the fact that the British population is actually growing very slowly. There are problems with the figures available, not least because some foreign-born workers will now be British citizens, but they do give us a general picture. The British-born population of working age has only gone up by 348,000 since 1997, while the non-British born working-age population has risen by 2.4 million. Nearly a million Britons have left the country since then, and there are a staggering 5.6 million Britons living abroad: it is often forgotten that migration is a two-way process. The bottom line is that the number of jobs going to British-born workers has gone up more than the British-born working population has increased. Less than three quarters of non-Britons have had any luck getting a job—at least, a job that found its way into the official statistics.2 It is, statistically, not true that immigrants are taking people’s jobs.
In any case, many of our essential services depend on foreign workers. The National Health Service would have collapsed long ago were it not for the thousands of doctors and nurses from other countries who have sustained it almost since its creation. Nearly a third of health professionals such as doctors and dentists are immigrants. However unfounded the fear of immigrants taking scarce jobs from natives, it has been allowed to take root in the popular imagination because of the continued decline of traditional, skilled jobs. There has been no mainstream political voice to put this in the context of globalization and a lack of government support for manufacturing. Instead we are bombarded on a daily basis by distorted propaganda from right-wing journalists and politicians. When Gordon Brown made the spectacular misjudgement of pledging ‘British jobs for British workers’, he only seemed to confirm the view that the jobs had hitherto been going elsewhere.
When it comes to wages, the impact of immigration gets a lot more complicated. It might be expected that because immigrants would be willing to work for less, other workers would be forced to compete with them, thereby pushing everybody’s pay down. A 2009 study by a leading Oxford economist and a senior Bank of England economist, Stephen Nickell and Jumana Saleheen, found that wages were, overall, only slightly depressed by immigration. Their key finding was that the impact was not the same for everyone. It was those workers in the semiskilled and unskilled service sector who suffered most. A 10 per cent rise in the proportion of immigrants would cause a 5 per cent reduction in pay for these groups.3
Another paper, for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), also found that the overall impact of immigration on wages was small. Ironically, it discovered that those most affected were likely to be former immigrants, because they would be competing for jobs that did not require ‘language fluency, cultural knowledge or local experience’. Even so, it found that all workers in manual jobs could see their wages reduced because an employer could easily replace them with a foreign worker willing to accept less. The same was true for workers who were ‘marginal to the labour market’, those ‘most likely to drop out or become discouraged workers’, those ‘who work in part-time, low-skilled jobs (such as single mothers and young people)’, and those who faced barriers to finding work, such as an inability to travel.
Clearly, then, attitudes towards immigration are liable to depend on the class of the person who holds them. Indeed, prospective employers stand to gain from cheaper foreign workers. ‘The effect of immigration at the bottom of the labour market is different than it is on the people who are so pleased they can get a nice cheap nanny, or someone cheap to do the plumbing,’ observes former Labour secretary of state for international development Clare Short.
When looking at the impact of immigration on jobs and wages, it has been increasingly fashionable among politicians and the media to contrast the hard-working immigrant to the layabout Brit. But it’s not, of course, a fair comparison. After all, immigrants will have travelled hundreds or thousands of miles from poorer countries with the express intention of finding work. It is this that endows them with the qualities that employers find so desirable. As the EHRC report put it:
Immigrants are willing to work hard in jobs with no clear potential for upward mobility (such as most seasonal agricultural work): because they see this ‘low-status’ work as temporary; because they are gaining non-financial benefits such as learning English; or because their wage does not seem low in comparison with earnings in their home country. To a certain extent, therefore, it is inevitable that immigrants will be more productive than native workers in certain roles.4
The impact of immigration has led the prominent Labour backbencher Jon Cruddas to describe it as a ‘wages policy’—that is, a device used to control the levels of pay. Crucially, former New Labour Cabinet minister Hazel Blears says: ‘There was actually an economic driver to keep the numbers coming because that kept wages down, in a way, and made us more competitive as an economy, and I think what wasn’t fully appreciated was the human impact on families of doing that.’ Was immigration deliberately used as a ‘wages policy’, I asked? ‘No, I don’t think it was a deliberate instrument of social policy. I don’t. But I think that some of the effects were of that kind. But I don’t think people sat in a room and said: “Ha ha, let’s let millions of people in and then we can grind the faces of the poor, of the working class!” I don’t think Labour Government is about that.’
When a number of Eastern European countries joined the European Union in 2004, Britain allowed their workers to immediately enter and freely seek work. None of New Labour’s immigration policies caused as much controversy, especially when only Ireland followed suit. Critics claimed that the decision led to a wave of cheap labour entering Britain, particularly from Poland. ‘It clearly was madness for the government to allow the situation where Britain and Ireland were the only countries that allowed the accession states in before the two-year gap,’ says Ken Livingstone. ‘So they all came here. Now, it didn’t have an impact in London because we’re used to absorbing waves of immigrants. But in a whole range of the country where they never had to absorb immigrants, in rural areas, a load of people turn up from Eastern Europe. The wages are depressed, they work harder, they get the jobs. It was devastating.’
To the extent that immigration does have an impact on wages, the tabloid-driven campaign has aimed at the wrong targets. If employers have used immigration as a means to push down people’s pay, then it is they who should face public opprobrium. ‘My take on it is that you can’t blame workers who’ve come over here to better their standard of living,’ reasons miners’ leader Chris Kitchen. ‘Blame the employers who prefer to pay them, because they can pay them less—these firms and agencies that specialize in bringing them over. It’s not the migrant workers at fault for coming here to better themselves.’
Following Labour’s defeat at the 2010 general election and Gordon Brown’s resignation as party leader, the candidates to replace him fell over one another to deplore the effects of immigration. As Ed Balls, an erstwhile close ally of Gordon Brown, argued, immigration had had ‘a direct impact on the wages, terms and conditions of too many people across our country—in communities ill-prepared to deal with the reality of globalization, including the one I represent.’ His stance inspired Tory leader David Cameron to compare him to the racist comic caricature, Alf Garnett. But the reality is that the scrutiny has been directed at immigration, precisely in order to avoid dealing with issues that have a far greater impact on jobs and wages. We have seen that the effect on wages is small—and indeed it can be corrected without clamping down on immigration by, for example, increasing the minimum wage and preventing foreign workers being hired on lower wages or in worse conditions than other workers.
Wages have been stagnating or declining for millions of workers, even before the recession hit. Immigration is a long way down the list of reasons why. The huge pool of cheap labour available in the Majority World and the crippled state of British trade unions are far more important factors. After all, company profits are booming: but employers are hoarding these billions, and there is no pressure on them to share. But the ‘race to the bottom’ at the heart of modern globalization and the lack of trade union rights are not issues that politicians have any interest in addressing. Jobs are being lost because of an economic crisis caused by bankers’ greed and the subsequent disastrous policies of the political establishment. Yet today’s mainstream politicians do not want to ask any questions that would challenge some of the most basic assumptions of the modern economic system. Instead, they have focused attention on a secondary issue that enjoys the advantage of appealing to people’s prejudices, as well as the vociferous backing of the right-wing media.
This backlash against immigration has led many to conclude that the ‘white working class’ is racist. In reality, the working class is far more ethnically mixed than the rest of the population. This is a point that can be overstated: after all, nine-tenths of Britons are white. Once you leave big urban areas like London, Manchester and Birmingham, you could easily travel for miles without coming across a single non-white face.
Nonetheless, as trade union leader Billy Hayes puts it: ‘As ethnic minorities almost invariably suffer more social disadvantage, we can assume that over 10 per cent of the working class are not white.’ Ethnic minorities are disproportionately engaged in working-class jobs—and, in many urban areas, they are far more likely to dominate the most low-status, low-paid jobs. Take the retail sector in London. Ethnic minorities make up 35 per cent of its workforce, and yet they represent a far lower 27 per cent of the capital’s population.5 Fourteen per cent of English bus and coach drivers are from an ethnic minority group, and non-whites are also disproportionately represented in catering, security and hotels and restaurants. Half of Bangladeshi and Pakistani workers in the country are in jobs that pay less than £7 an hour, compared to less than 30 per cent of whites.6
At the top of the social hierarchy, the contrast could not be greater. Only 3.5 per cent of partners in the UK’s top one hundred law firms come from an ethnic minority background.7 There is just one ethnic minority CEO among Britain’s top one hundred companies. In the financial sector, just 5 per cent of men working in insurance pensions are from an ethnic minority.8 If you are working class, you are far more likely to rub shoulders with people from different backgrounds than those in elite professions or the corporate world.
The same goes for residential patterns. In London, the most diverse communities are overwhelmingly working class, like Tower Hamlets, Newham and Hackney. Middle-class suburbs like Richmond, Kingston and Bromley, on the other hand, have small ethnic minority populations. According to the last census, there were over 100,000 children of mixed Asian and white origin, and 158,000 who were mixed Caribbean and white. Nearly half of British-born black men, a third of British-born black women, and a fifth of Indian and African men, have white partners.9 Given that ethnic minorities are far more likely to be in working-class jobs and live in working-class communities, it is safe to presume that this mixing is disproportionately happening in the working class.
Clare Short used to represent the poor, working-class constituency of Birmingham Ladywood, where most people hail from minority backgrounds. She agrees that working-class people mix with people from different ethnic backgrounds more than those higher up the social scale. ‘You know, by and large in a place like Ladywood, it’s fabulous in the richness of the diversity of the people and the relationships they form, and the understanding of each other’s religions and histories. There’s something very rich that goes on there. The kids in school always say: “We’re very lucky because we have the festivals of everybody.” ’ The working class is still largely white; but less white, in reality, than everybody else.
It cannot be said that the privileged elite is always a bastion of tolerance. Middle-class or upper-class racism can often be more pernicious, while lacking the same economic drivers. Let us not forget Prince Harry, who was caught on camera describing an Asian soldier as a ‘Paki’. Anti-Semitism has long been the elite’s racism of choice. I know of a public schoolboy whose father refused to buy him an expensive gold watch from Harrods, ‘because it looked too Jewish’. A lecturer tells me that when he mentioned to a public school-educated student that working-class people were more likely to have a relationship with someone from an ethnic minority, the student paused for a moment before asking: ‘Because they can’t find anything better?’
We should beware of going along with a superficial reading of the great twenty-first-century backlash against immigration among working-class people. Anti-immigration rhetoric has gained traction for far more complex reasons than mere culture or race. Indeed, many ethnic minority working-class people share the popular hostility to immigration. But at a time of growing insecurity about jobs and wages, immigration has provided a convenient scapegoat as well as an excuse to dodge questions that are far more relevant—but far more threatening to the status quo. Those responsible are playing with fire.
Right-wing populism is on the rise—and it is shamelessly courting working-class people. The BNP is unlikely ever to establish itself as a credible party, but it is an ominous portent of what could come. The populist right can also boast the presence of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which came fourth in the 2010 general election with nearly a million votes, and second in the 2009 European elections. Opposition to immigration and its supposed impact on wages and jobs is at the heart of the UKIP programme. More recently, a new far-right formation named the English Defence League has been orchestrating aggressive anti-Muslim demonstrations in cities across England. More mainstream right-wing forces have also jumped on the bandwagon: the Conservative-backing Daily Telegraph has described the white working class as ‘Britain’s betrayed tribe’, allegedly marginalized by the advent of multiculturalism and mass immigration.
The danger is of a savvy new populist right emerging, one that is comfortable talking about class and that offers reactionary solutions to working-class problems. It could denounce the demonization of the working class and the trashing of its identity. It could claim that the traditional party of working-class people, the Labour Party, has turned its back on them. Rather than focusing on the deep-seated economic issues that really underpin the grievances of working-class people, it could train its populist guns on immigration and cultural issues. Immigrants could be blamed for economic woes; multiculturalism could be blasted for undermining ‘white’ working-class identity.
The reason this could happen—and why the populist right has already made inroads into working-class communities—is because the Labour Party ceased providing answers to a whole range of working-class problems, especially housing, low wages and job insecurity. It no longer offers an overarching narrative that working-class people can relate to. To many former natural Labour supporters, it seems to be on the side of the rich and big business. No wonder so many working-class people have concluded that Labour is no longer a party for ‘people like us’. To be fair, this phenomenon isn’t exclusive to Britain. The dramatic shift to the right of traditional left parties has opened the door to the far right across Western Europe, with groupings like the National Front in France’s former ‘Red Belt’ and the demagogic Northern Alliance in Italy.
The rise of the far right is a symptom of a larger crisis: the lack of representation of working-class people. Purged from politics, their identity trashed, their power in society curtailed and their concerns ignored, it is perhaps surprising that so few working-class people have opted for parties like the BNP. More have sat on their hands and refused to vote; others have voted for Labour with clothes pegs on their noses. A surge of right-wing populism, mass political alienation, cynicism and apathy could have devastating consequences for British democracy. It is not just the future of the working class at stake. It is the future of all of us.