Dan Dare
02-13-2006, 07:21 PM
It’s hard not to enjoy a delicious frisson of pleasure at the discomfiture of the liberal-left intelligentsia over the current plight of the white urban poor in Britain, even more so given that they have become fully cognizant that the problem is largely down to the perverted application of the welfare state largely engineered by the cosmopolitan liberal elites.
Liberal hand-wringing over the dichotomy implicit in the attempt by successive governments to extend the generous provisions of the welfare state to newcomers in a multiracial society was brought to the forefront of public attention by the publication of David Goodhart’s 2004 essay The Discomfort of Strangers (http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1154650,00.html).
It continues with the publication of a new book by The Young Foundation, a progressive think-tank, that examines specifically the attitudes of the white working class that used to form the bulk of the population of the East End of London prior to recent the recent influx of African and Asian immigrants. The authors affect to be shocked and surprised at the endemic racism they encounter among the white working class.
The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict ( http://www.youngfoundation.org.uk/index.php?cat=73)
Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young revisits Michael Young’s classic 1950s study Family and Kinship in East London, (with Peter Willmott). It focuses on the relations between the ‘old’ white, working-class population, the British-Bangladeshi population and the young white newcomers: in particular, what has caused the white hostility to the British-Bangladeshis. The book draws surprising, often alarming conclusions that raise urgent questions about race, about housing and education policies, and the very basis of the welfare state.
Here is part of the review that appears in today’s Guardian.
Ignored, angry and anxious: the world of the white working class ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1708253,00.html
)
A social study from the heart of the left could be a blueprint for a Tory take on communities, family and the welfare state
Madeleine Bunting
Monday February 13, 2006
The Guardian
Here is a book that will infuriate and bewilder the progressive left. It is also a book that David Cameron's Conservatives need to study closely. All the more ironic then that this study of family and race in Tower Hamlets, The New East End, comes out of the heart of the left - from the foundation set up by the social pioneer Michael Young and recently relaunched by the former Blair adviser Geoff Mulgan.
The study is the result of hundreds of interviews over 12 years with the residents of Tower Hamlets. ....
The nub of the argument put forward by the authors, Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young, is that the well-intentioned policies of a rights-based welfare state in which benefits and housing were awarded on the basis of need, not past contributions, directly contributed to the ratcheting up of racial tension as poor incoming Bangladeshis were given priority for council housing. The white working-class extended families were broken up as their offspring were moved to Essex for housing. The ones who suffered most were women, left bereft of their social status as the arbiters of family and neighbourhood life. The latter both fragmented. And the blame is pinned on the welfare state (not helped by the economic decline of the docklands in the 60s and 70s).
The problem, claim the authors, was the betrayal of the working class's vision of the welfare state as a system of mutual insurance - to tide one over a tough patch - and its transformation into a welfare state of entitlement and rights based on need. It had moral force, but to many interviewees it was unfair: anyone can live off the system, they complained.
A sense of loss and betrayal among white working-class East Enders underpins many of the interviews. A heroic second world war history, suffering the Luftwaffe's depredations on the docklands, entitled them and their children to something better. Their world "was snatched from them - by bombs and housing policies, other people's notions of progress and the pressures of consumerism".
To compound the sense of injury, the dogged white racism that provides a convincing rationale to many of what has happened is treated with contempt by the "do-gooders" of the welfare state - the social workers and housing officers. Not for the first time, the professional middle classes find grounds for moral superiority over the working class.
All of this is true not just of Tower Hamlets but perhaps of other urban working-class areas of Britain, from Birmingham to Bradford. A few years ago I spent an uncomfortable few hours in the sitting room of a delightful elderly couple near where I live in Hackney. They plied me with tea and cakes while they described their wartime deprivations, and how the brand-new estate they moved into 50 years ago with such hope had become a place of lawlessness and vandalism. The racism was unapologetic, as was the deep sense of nostalgia for the strong networks of mutual support and good neighbourliness of the past.
...
Liberal hand-wringing over the dichotomy implicit in the attempt by successive governments to extend the generous provisions of the welfare state to newcomers in a multiracial society was brought to the forefront of public attention by the publication of David Goodhart’s 2004 essay The Discomfort of Strangers (http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1154650,00.html).
It continues with the publication of a new book by The Young Foundation, a progressive think-tank, that examines specifically the attitudes of the white working class that used to form the bulk of the population of the East End of London prior to recent the recent influx of African and Asian immigrants. The authors affect to be shocked and surprised at the endemic racism they encounter among the white working class.
The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict ( http://www.youngfoundation.org.uk/index.php?cat=73)
Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young revisits Michael Young’s classic 1950s study Family and Kinship in East London, (with Peter Willmott). It focuses on the relations between the ‘old’ white, working-class population, the British-Bangladeshi population and the young white newcomers: in particular, what has caused the white hostility to the British-Bangladeshis. The book draws surprising, often alarming conclusions that raise urgent questions about race, about housing and education policies, and the very basis of the welfare state.
Here is part of the review that appears in today’s Guardian.
Ignored, angry and anxious: the world of the white working class ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1708253,00.html
)
A social study from the heart of the left could be a blueprint for a Tory take on communities, family and the welfare state
Madeleine Bunting
Monday February 13, 2006
The Guardian
Here is a book that will infuriate and bewilder the progressive left. It is also a book that David Cameron's Conservatives need to study closely. All the more ironic then that this study of family and race in Tower Hamlets, The New East End, comes out of the heart of the left - from the foundation set up by the social pioneer Michael Young and recently relaunched by the former Blair adviser Geoff Mulgan.
The study is the result of hundreds of interviews over 12 years with the residents of Tower Hamlets. ....
The nub of the argument put forward by the authors, Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young, is that the well-intentioned policies of a rights-based welfare state in which benefits and housing were awarded on the basis of need, not past contributions, directly contributed to the ratcheting up of racial tension as poor incoming Bangladeshis were given priority for council housing. The white working-class extended families were broken up as their offspring were moved to Essex for housing. The ones who suffered most were women, left bereft of their social status as the arbiters of family and neighbourhood life. The latter both fragmented. And the blame is pinned on the welfare state (not helped by the economic decline of the docklands in the 60s and 70s).
The problem, claim the authors, was the betrayal of the working class's vision of the welfare state as a system of mutual insurance - to tide one over a tough patch - and its transformation into a welfare state of entitlement and rights based on need. It had moral force, but to many interviewees it was unfair: anyone can live off the system, they complained.
A sense of loss and betrayal among white working-class East Enders underpins many of the interviews. A heroic second world war history, suffering the Luftwaffe's depredations on the docklands, entitled them and their children to something better. Their world "was snatched from them - by bombs and housing policies, other people's notions of progress and the pressures of consumerism".
To compound the sense of injury, the dogged white racism that provides a convincing rationale to many of what has happened is treated with contempt by the "do-gooders" of the welfare state - the social workers and housing officers. Not for the first time, the professional middle classes find grounds for moral superiority over the working class.
All of this is true not just of Tower Hamlets but perhaps of other urban working-class areas of Britain, from Birmingham to Bradford. A few years ago I spent an uncomfortable few hours in the sitting room of a delightful elderly couple near where I live in Hackney. They plied me with tea and cakes while they described their wartime deprivations, and how the brand-new estate they moved into 50 years ago with such hope had become a place of lawlessness and vandalism. The racism was unapologetic, as was the deep sense of nostalgia for the strong networks of mutual support and good neighbourliness of the past.
...