My husband and I were walking in circles around Regent's park the day after the May local elections, having the same conversation we have when we're walking, drinking in the pub, or having dinner at home: the one about the workers. About how we hold such high hopes for the people we grew up among, and how they always, ultimately, disappoint us. About how we both feel a tangled mix of shame and pride in our origins, combined with guilt and pleasure at having escaped them.
That day, the BNP had won its first Midlands council seat outside the Black Country, in the ward that comprised the council estate where I spent 17 of the first 18 years of my life. To say I was disappointed is like saying I was "disappointed" to see Birmingham City get relegated from the Premiership. I was hysterical: despite the fact that I left the estate 12 years ago, it has cast a long shadow over my adult life. I felt soiled and humiliated and, for some reason, implicated in a result that was decided by just over 700 people among several thousands (the desire to exercise one's vote on this estate has never been particularly strong), in a place where I no longer lived.
"It's not your fault," said my husband, clearly feeling the need to state the obvious.
"But it is, it is! I didn't see it coming! I didn't campaign against them! I didn't do anything about it!"
"What you mean is that you shouldn't have left."
"But I had to leave! I had to!"
I had to leave, but I felt terrible for having done so, I felt like someone who didn't care whether or not a few hundred paranoid and hemmed-in people—some of whom I probably had shared crisps with at school lunch break—felt sufficiently forgotten to vote for modern-day fascists. I had known that the BNP was standing in the ward, but had never dreamed it would win. Shortly before the elections, my mother recalled watching a potential local BNP supporter being interviewed on the news: "She said that if you looked past the racist bits they had some good policies."
I wondered which of the BNP's policies looked good from the point of view of the people I used to know on the estate: the kids I went to school with, who thought I was prissy for refusing to say "Paki," and their parents, some of whom thought it was amusing to speed up their car when a black person was crossing the road. It was interesting how the interviewee had mentioned the necessity of "looking past" the party's racism, as though she knew it was racist, but, also, that racism was reviled in the wider society. I grew up seeing "NF" scrawled on every lamppost and bus shelter. At school, it felt as though all parents except my own had taught their children that the vocabulary of racism was a way in which they could get back at the world for its unfairness. To the kids who stayed up late watching Bernard Manning videos with their dads, it was also very funny.
The racism has a source and a cause which I think is primarily to do with the origins of the estate's population and the very nature of its physical landscape. The estate, a visitor would notice, is far "whiter" than much of the rest of Birmingham; one result of a vast slum clearance project that siphoned the city's mostly white working class of the 1950s and 1960s from the inner city out, in our case, to a new township of 18,000 council houses on the city's eastern edges.
A different population took its place within the city boundaries, including families from the West Indies, India and Pakistan. The population of Birmingham is now as ethnically diverse as London's, and ranges from solidly middle class to barely-hanging-in-there working class. My estate, meanwhile, remains 97 per cent white working class.
It is as though a wall exists between the city and the estate: an impression reinforced by its submersion into a neighbouring metropolitan borough council, suburban Solihull, during the 1970s. Sixty thousand people had been moved from Birmingham into a strange land that was neither the city nor the country. Buses into the city, ten miles away, were hard to come by in an era when few working-class people had cars, creating a sense of being marooned on an island tantalisingly close to the mainland, but not quite near enough to the heart of things to keep up with the changes that were taking place there.
The prospective voter, for all her protests of "looking past" the BNP's racism, may have been holding two conflicting thoughts simultaneously in her head. First, the thought that the city of Birmingham, from which her family moved some 40 years ago, was prospering and showering the fruits of its renaissance on people she regarded as foreigners while the whites were cast out on its outskirts and left to suffer. Second, the thought that the estate was all the better for being "white" and should stay that way.
One of the promises made by the BNP before the May election was that all social housing should return directly to council control and that its councillors would lobby for more council housing to be built. The estate's council homes had just been transferred to an "arm's length management organisation," after tenants voted against continuing to have their homes maintained by the council. It is about to undergo a 15-year programme of rebuilding and regeneration that will include the construction of 8,000 privately owned houses in an attempt to create a mix of housing tenures that has, until now, been lacking.
Yet this promise of regeneration, plus the building of a new city academy on the site of my old sink school, wasn't enough to prevent people voting in May for a political party that is, at best, marginal to the political process and considers desirable the kind of society in which conformity and sameness are valued over every other attribute.
Last year, in the process of researching a book about council housing based in part on my own experiences, I went back to my old estate. Long before I found myself howling "why?" at the election result (which unseated an effective and sympathetic Labour councillor of 23 years' standing), I experienced the opposite of nostalgia: a desire to forget, a sense of repulsion at all the things I associated with these giant peripheral estates—unending walkways, scattered system-built tower blocks and thousands of uniform terraces. I didn't enjoy growing up on mine, but did its very existence prevent me from having a childhood worthy of fond remembrance?
I don't know how much of that repulsion came from knowing what I now know about the world outside the estate, which has consistently proved itself to be more accepting, more attractive and less bleak than the one I grew up in. Whatever the reason, I was winded by claustrophobia, and a simultaneous sense of being both desperate to get away from the estate—from the memories associated with it—and confused by the hold it retained over me.
It was the kind of place where you got invited to people's houses not to have tea, but to watch people having their tea, where joints of pork were microwaved and the bendy crackling served like a side order of rubber bands, and where the mums did jobs at Kwik Save so they could buy a car that would save them the 15-minute walk to their jobs at Kwik Save. But it was also the place where my mother and my grandparents got their first garden—and the place that shaped my view of society and the class system.
At my primary and secondary schools, both of which were on the estate (so you never had to leave), you weren't expected to progress beyond a council-estate kind of life. The sole "taster" college courses on offer to fifth formers were hairdressing for the girls and car mechanics for the boys. The idea that you might use your imagination to take flight beyond the estate depended on whether you felt there was any point in doing so. I was lucky: I did. My mum and dad both passed the 11-plus and went to grammar school (although neither of them stayed beyond the age of 16). There was a lot that they could teach me, which gave me a head start at school. What they couldn't teach me, but which I managed to grasp from out of the ether, was the knowledge that would enable me not only to progress to university but to a self-chosen, self-directed career, and a sense that I was entitled to take part in society.
My grandmother, who grew up in Dickensian poverty, on the other hand, has always appeared to lack any curiosity about the world. At the age of 88 her memory is failing, but even when it was intact, she had only the sketchiest idea that I had a job that didn't involve wearing kneecaps down on a scullery floor or getting my fingers caught in a factory machine. She couldn't grasp the idea that you could do anything else. She talked about books as though they were pieces of stale cheese: she knew they existed, but couldn't see what use they had and, as a result, never got round to picking them up. In fact, for her, just about everything in life was like stale cheese. Getting something interesting out of it was for other people to do. She is, of most things, quite literally ignorant, and although she is isolated and often complains of being bored, it's hard to tell just how unhappy this has made her. The world for her is so small that she simply has no idea that it is big.
I wonder whether she made her world small in order to better cope with it. She is an anxious person, and perhaps knowing too much would involve thinking too much. She and my grandfather could have bought their council house in the 1980s, along with many of the other elderly people in their road, but all they associated with the opportunity was stress and worry. What if the boiler broke? My nan still frets when reminded that she has the chance to buy the house she is sitting in.
Thanks to the council she acquired a garden at the age of 52, and in her eyes the council were the providers of all the milk and honey. Why would you want to free yourself from them? The neighbours are no richer or poorer than my grandparents were, but somehow most of them were able to take the idea of the boiler breaking in their stride. Something in the structure of their lives had given them the confidence to take on this responsibility without fearing that they might make a hash of it.
The sociologist Richard Sennett, author of many books on what he memorably calls "the hidden injuries of class," would argue that my grandparents' fears, and the fears of any working-class person who is offered, and yet turns down, the chance to take control over aspects of their life, relate to a terror of getting things wrong and further damaging their fragile sense of being a valid person while existing at the bottom of the class structure. Isolation and boredom come not from innate incuriosity, but from defensively trying to create a world that is familiar and cohesive, even if that means living a life that is repetitive and cut off from new experiences. He describes in one book how Greek-American bakers had a strong class solidarity based on their skills, which they preserved by being racist: "Racial hatred," he added, "thus betrayed a class consciousness of sorts."
The same thinking lies behind many working- class BNP voters. It goes something like this: we were put on council estates because we're working class, and if that's what they're going to do to us, we're going to bloody well stay working class.
But the idea that the world was once constant and unchanging neglects the fact that working-class people have always moved around in search of work. My family's history is littered with people who never stuck in one place for long. My paternal grandfather was Irish, my maternal grandmother Welsh. My mother's family were miners and menders, who moved from the south of England, near Salisbury, to Somerset, then to the south Wales valleys and then to Birmingham. The maternal side of my dad's family traces a similar line from the mines of south London, up to the mines of Newcastle, again down to the mines of south Wales, then across to Birmingham's industrial seat. My nan, my mother's mother, was the eldest of four daughters who lived in semi-starvation after their father died in a mining accident around the time of the general strike. She was sent into service in Surrey, having completed her education aged 13.
People have not remained static: it is, rather, their perception of things that has. Michael Collins's 2004 book The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class colluded in the idea that all working-class people lived the same lives, in the same places, for ever and ever until Johnny Foreigner, bankrolled by Jimmy "The Toff" Liberal, scattered them to the winds. As a one-sentence review, that is a little harsh. Collins makes a partially convincing case for the idea that working-class identity is strongly tied to a sense of place, and that close-knit communities of extended families were broken up by the building of large council estates both within and far from the Southwark neighbourhood in which he grew up, and which he now complains of barely recognising. But in his sentimental portrait of a stoical working-class culture that has now been destroyed, Collins unwittingly belittles the people he grew up with by implying that they only ever had things done to them.
There is a common argument that the white working class express racist sentiments because they are the people most directly affected by immigration. But this does not apply to my very white estate. And to allow working-class people to get away with casual racism on the grounds that they are the ones who have to live with the effects of immigration, is to infantilise a group of people who are already bound by a sense that they have little control over their own lives. It's fair to accept that there may be disagreements and tensions between different groups of people who are stuck in a life they don't want. But if working-class people blame immigrants for their misery then they will remain stuck where they are—a psychic place that is fearful, incurious and weak.
This is not the whole story, I know. My husband, a kind and intelligent man from a family of working-class Irish Catholic talkers, refused to believe that working-class people could be racist until he went to university and met other students from working-class backgrounds. He learned from them another story, so different to his world of self-improvement and an instinctive belief that all people are equal.
Because his family did not believe in self-imposed limits, my husband and his two brothers are all in the process of acquiring PhDs or Master's degrees. Their grandmother lived in a falling-down council house in Birkenhead's benighted north end, and their dad is a plumber. Yet they all devote themselves unabashedly to a life of the mind. It's never occurred to them to do anything else. I find them extraordinary. My husband's family seemed to buck a trend I had hoped my whole life to see not only bucked, but destroyed. The difference seems to be that, as an extended family, they were able to stick together, both geographically and in terms of shared values, and as a result make best use of the chances offered by the welfare state.
The postwar bounty offered to us in the form of the NHS, mass council housing and educational opportunity benefited those who were able to enter the middle class. For those who didn't, they were left with all the worst aspects of welfare statism: council estates that wrested them from familiar neighbourhoods; the dreggy ends of a nominally meritocratic system of schooling; and financial dependency. These are the people who feel loss and shame most intently in the society we have now: loss and shame that are manifest publicly in bitterness, disgust and loathing.
These days, unlike in the days of Oswald Mosley, it is not poverty that causes many working-class people's sense of bitterness and loathing. On their estate, my parents' road is filled with large shiny cars and people who go to Mexico and Florida on holiday. But there are other, existential, reasons for feeling that things are so bad that one must vote for a pariah-like party in order to get that feeling across to those remote people who, they believe, hold the real power.
The day after the BNP won 11 council seats in Barking in May, Abdul Garuba, a 38-year-old local resident, told the Guardian, "The problem is that some of the white people here do not have the knowledge to do the jobs at the top and they are not willing to do the jobs at the bottom that migrants do. But they are happy to blame them for everything and to claim that everyone is getting benefits."
They are, indeed, happy to blame "them" for everything, despite failing to encourage their children to educate themselves to a level whereby they could do those "jobs at the top." Britain has been a post-industrial nation for 25 years, and yet this fact has failed to filter through to an entire generation of working-class people, many of whom retain the same indifference to education that caused them no harm in the days when unskilled manual jobs were plentiful. What is more extraordinary is that, for many, the idea of becoming a pop star seems more attainable than getting a degree. The "knowledge economy" may as well not exist for this part of the population.
There is something in the very experience of being working class and living in an area where your contact with middle-class people is limited to doctors and teachers that makes the idea of making your living out of what you know seem ridiculous. It's so nebulous a way of making money that it may as well be scrounging off the state. Which, of course, is what you think asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants do. On estates like mine, money is made by using the resources you have rather than acquiring new ones.
The lingering sting of inequality is not lessened by having spare cash. With inequality and ignorance comes a lack of dignity that poisons the soul. We have a minimum wage that is among the highest in the EU (and well above that of the US) but we are still more unequal that most other European countries. Yet it was during the 1970s—when economic and social inequalities in Britain were at their narrowest—that working-class support for a racist party, then the National Front, was last mobilised.
So what does this mean? What do BNP-voting working-class people want, if not merely spending power and the right to be indulged in their racism? They want to be respected on their own terms, no matter how socially conservative or inimical to liberal values those terms are. Both Sennett, in his books, and the epidemiologist Michael Marmot in his book Status Syndrome, which details the findings of his "Whitehall studies" of mortality rates throughout the civil service hierarchy, argue that a sense of being respected and in control of one's life is essential to one's ability to function happily and healthily.
The class hierarchy in Britain as a whole is so internalised by each member of society that everything one says, thinks and does is informed by it. Members of the "left behind" working class, for their part, can choose hatred as the best way to deal with it, and this is why, in turn, the rest of us hate them. They have chosen to be hated rather than to stray beyond class lines: to eat themselves fat, to smoke themselves cancerous, to drive themselves mad with boredom.
I grew up with the feeling that we had been banished, when the intention had been the very opposite. The estate—so big, so far from the city, so full of people who were in the same boat but who didn't know each other—created a sense of being profoundly disconnected from the society that one was nominally a part of. As a result, many people turned in on themselves; perhaps because it seemed as though there was nowhere else to go. Such estates are class ghettos that discourage integration and encourage the idea that ignorance is to be clung to. And that, while beating my breast in impotent fury, is why I had to leave.
