The funniest kids at my school had the least to laugh about: the white boys from desolate north-east London estates who dined on meal vouchers and had a preternatural facility with swear words and easily the best jokes. The school clown was one Gary Stevenson – expelled for his pranks – now a superstar of class-conscious economics commentary. They had entertaining families, populated with shoplifting grannies and betting-shop wits.
My family, the first of many Bangladeshis to come, lived just off a little estate where the council tenants were exclusively white. My father, in his secret second job, served its residents at the pub on their doorstep. Glimpsing behind the frolicsome facade, we could see the truth, and it was this: people who live in tragedy have no time for it; Britain’s working class always preferred comedy. They cultivated wit and levity. They invented music hall and stand-up. The greatest comedians, from Chaplin onwards, were working class. But this achievement was its own tragedy, the multigenerational catharsis of the exploited proletariat.
As Labour supporters, we sympathised with them. We assumed it was mutual. But one day, while I was away at university, our mosque, which my father administered, was smashed up by an EDL gang, all of whom were locals. I didn’t have the heart to share with my father a disconcerting discovery. They were my pals from primary. My mother had even fed them in our house, when they were scrawny little boys. They had their social adversities, their personal tribulations – I know two of the assailants are heroin addicts now – but what did they have against us? What went wrong? What created the fork in the road that sent us down our separate paths?
It is as a primer to these questions that I turned to Underdogs, in which the journalist Joel Budd travels around the country, like a latter-day William Cobbett, promising “the truth about Britain’s white working class”. Since the Brexit vote there have been many such condition-of-England books, their authors invariably journalists taken aback in 2016 by the result – a rare instance of history being penned not by the victors, but by the people who got it wrong. Budd happens to be a veteran correspondent for the Economist, that herald of neoliberalism – and a publication closely tied to the political order responsible for his subjects’ disaffection.
Such prejudices do the book a disservice. Underdogs is outstanding journalism, the definitive survey of the people behind a label, by a brilliant investigator who enquires not just into who the white working class are and where they live, but in what kinds of houses, with what kind of tenure, even what cars they drive and what songs their village choirs sing. The macro is there, but the micro draws out the best writing from this gifted reporter, who possesses an especially sensitive ear, remarking on the “percussive” quality of multicultural London English that makes it better for rapping, and the “sandpaper” voices of a dying breed of cockney gent.
Underdogs sets out from a common-sense definition of class, based on circumstances: the jobs you do, or perhaps didn’t do (eg the long-term unemployed). It is not, in Budd’s view, what many politicians claim: some immutable status conferred upon birth. This makes 40 per cent of England and Wales working class. A little less – about three in ten – constitute the white working class. That’s a lot of people. But it’s not most people, a misconception often propagated during elections. Even as the country becomes less white and more middle class, politicians jostle for white working-class votes, through such strategies as “levelling up”, which, to Budd, looked “suspiciously like a scheme for funnelling money to largely white working-class parts of the country”.
Even so, Underdogs shows that only some white working-class people matter. Those who don’t vote, no less white in skin or blue in collar than the exemplary “Red Wall voter”, are ignored, including the young and the most hard-up. Benefits for the single mum raising her kids in poverty are eroded, while the pension of a home-owning retired steelworker is shielded. To their self-proclaimed champions, not all white working-class people are equal.
Perhaps it’s futile to be invoking equality in a discussion about the white working class. Why make racial distinctions in the first place? Budd finds himself in the middle of a rhetorical minefield: on his left, denial that any disadvantage could be specific to the white working class; on his right, an increasingly deranged belief in a conspiracy against this uniquely oppressed group. Conciliating both, Budd stresses the pan-racial common ground of class-based disadvantage – Underdogs is, to a surprising degree, about the black and Asian working class too – while accepting the white working class’s distinctive qualities and challenges.
Neither side will be satisfied. But that shouldn’t concern Budd. Few participants in this culture war still have credibility. Liberals who, ignoring material factors, maintained that every racial disparity evidenced discrimination now clutch at economics to explain away inequality experienced by the “wrong” race. Meanwhile, Conservatives embrace, with alarming haste, the identity politics and victim complex they once claimed to oppose.
Education, above all, is the issue that compels special attention to the white working class. Everyone now knows their schoolboys are the biggest underachievers, and this isn’t only a function of socio-economic disadvantages. When these are controlled for – by free-school-meal eligibility, or neighbourhood deprivation, or parental income – the disparity mysteriously refuses to fall away. “It is as though,” Budd writes, groping for a metaphor to fill the lacuna in our comprehension, “poverty is a virus that harms all children, but white Britons run an exceptionally high fever.” Why?
For Budd, comparison with ethnic minority children may be key, especially British-Bangladeshis. While my white friends got criminal convictions or drug addictions, I got a degree, as did an entire generation of my extended family, the children of waiters, petrol-pump attendants, cleaners and carers raised in overcrowded houses. We made it, Budd argues, not in spite, but because of our backgrounds. For the white working class, it’s all too easy to do the same old jobs for much better wages than ethnic minorities would get for them. This inequity at the bottom of the labour market gave us no choice but to seek better prospects through education.
The white working class is far more heterogeneous than the media suggests. They don’t, for instance, all live by the seaside. In what will be its lasting theoretical contribution, Underdogs classifies the geography of the white working class into three types, each with their own distinctive atmosphere. “Heartlands” are towns in still overwhelmingly white tracts of Britain, such as East Marsh in Lincolnshire – one of the country’s most white working-class wards. “Colonies” are where the white working class have relocated from elsewhere, such as Norfolk’s Thetford. These are places rarely heard from, with few tensions. Colony residents, notably, have “a consciousness of themselves as transplants and outsiders”. It’s in “enclaves”, the immiserated, white outskirts of rapidly diversifying cities, that one finds that stereotyped hostility and nascent far-right ideology. My classmates were from enclaves.
Budd is optimistic. He concludes that an ever more multi-ethnic Britain – three in every ten newborn babies have foreign-born mothers – will just accept that “there will be no return to a more homogenous society”, since these demographic changes “are, in fact, irreversible”. But, strictly speaking, that isn’t so. Demographic reversals are eminently feasible. Israel and the US are showing us some of the tactics even today’s Western democracies can use to remove unwanted populations. Most European countries have at some point tailored their territories with ethnic alterations. Am I being melodramatic? Maybe. When, during last summer’s racist uprising in the UK, footage emerged of whites-only checkpoints in Middlesbrough, I recalled watching similar scenes broadcast from Bosnia in the 1990s.
I’m not saying this will happen; only that it could. Budd demonstrates a rhetorical frailty typical of liberals: believing their desired future is the only conceivable one. To normalise mass immigration, for instance, it’s commonly argued that ours is an age of migration; it simply has to be accepted. In fact, given how many of those migrants are refugees, we may as well say that ours is an age of deportation, and historical inevitability could thus as easily be invoked to kick migrants out. Ultimately, inevitability is rarely a persuasive argument. Telling a society “it cannot opt out of change”, as Budd does, convinces no one. People need to believe the change is good. Or they will opt out.
Budd’s non-argument that there’s “no going back” is increasingly common, though, as it becomes harder to demonstrate, categorically, that immigration is for the better. The housing crisis hasn’t helped. Budd loves visiting “heartlands” and “colonies”, admiring their decent and surprisingly unprejudiced people. But the toleration of people in areas defined by their limited exposure to immigration hardly inspires confidence. If we were to apply his model nationally, what Britain resembles is no heartland or colony, but an enclave: a place in demographic transition where “ethnic identities sit closer to the surface.”
In The Making of the English Working Class (1963) – a great book about the white working class, which was already white yet still unaware of it – EP Thompson argued, unusually for a Marxist: “Class is a cultural as much as an economic formation.” Now, increasingly, Britain’s white working class recognise their race as their culture. Why else is it that, where Thompson could speak of the English working class, it’s now the white working class at issue? With their counterparts advancing right-wing populism all over the West, this seems to be a global tide that nothing might stem. Have a little faith, Budd says. But for me, that was smashed years ago, by the bricks my former friends hurled through our mosque window.
Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class
Joel Budd
Pan Macmillan, 336pp, £19
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[See also: Capitalism (Taylor’s Version)]
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This article appears in the 23 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Divide and Conquer