BBC2: All white on the night
I realise I’m in an ever dwindling group, but this idea that white people in this country are somehow oppressed is a load of old crap. It’s pure perception created by the right-wing media and vote-grabbing politicians. And BBC 2’s White season looks like shaping up to do the same.
If you ask me, a venture that advertises itself using tasteful, epic photos of Enoch Powell and promotes wife-beating drunk George Best as a ‘working class hero’ is automatically suspect. Even the name ‘White’ is gratuitously provocative, gratuitously divisive.
Going by the website, the season reduces working class people to exhibits in a zoo, to reality television show freaks, to anthropological curiosities in National Geographic. Here’s some knobbly-faced salts of the earth in a Bradford working men’s club. Here’s every little-brained, little Englanders’ worst nightmare, a white girl in a hijab.
Here come the Poles to steal our jobs, women and dignity. Let’s take a trip to putative BNP launchpad, Barking. If the programmes don’t feature some wildlife footage of scantily-clad honkys puking in a gutter outside a nightclub, I’ll run round the town with my trousers round my ankles.
Not only that, what’s the appeal to working class viewers? Where are the stories of working class boys and girls done good? Where’s the message of ‘you can do it too, if you pick up a book or go to a night school class or join the Open University or whatever’. Where’s the tales of ‘if you don’t like it, do something about it’.
Where’s the aspiration? Not the woolly, fuzzy, meaningless kind as espoused by Gordon Brown or David Cameron but the proper, concrete ways for working-class people to escape their so-called oppression.
I don’t want to play the prolier-than-thou card but I was the first person in my family to go to university from generations of steelworkers, coal miners and farmers. It’s doable. Forget the academic side of it. The independence, the social skills, the new outlooks and ways of thinking you get are beyond price. And that’s before we mention making friends who teach you how to hold your drink. Why further and higher education isn’t sold like that is a mystery to me.
Whatever happened to ‘God helps those who help themselves’ or ‘I’m a lucky person and the harder I work, the luckier I get’? The notion of the dignity of the poor is repugnant, but this wallowing in a perceived victimhood is equally difficult to watch and the BBC should be ashamed for fuelling it.
There are escapes, if you feel you need to escape, even small ones like the public library or BBC4 or having Wikipedia’s daily article emailed to you (thanks, Chris). Night classes are cheap, and cheaper if you’re on some kind of benefit. We need broader horizons not narrower views.
(Christ, that last line was terrible but I hope you get the gist.)
Posted on March 6th, 2008 at 8:43 am
Blimey, April 1st’s come early this year.
Hasn’t it?
Where’s the tales of ‘if you don’t like it, do something about it’.
Without doubting that this is possible (many people do it, after all) it’s worth bearing in mind that despite much comment about a classless society, the UK is a place with widening gaps in income and in social mobility. So if we simply concentrate on the “get off your arse and read a book” aspect of the problem (and I’m a librarian, a bookseller and an author, I’m very much in favour of people reading books) then while we’re saying something valid, we’re also missing out a lot that’s valid too.
What I think about this “white working-class” business is that it’s almost nothing to do with politics: it’s to do with resentment. Some people might think they’re the same thing: I think that resentment is what fills the gap when politics disappears. And working-class politics has, very largely, all but disappeared from British life over the course of my adult life. It’s pretty much the background against which everything else needs to be understood. The collapse of widespread belief in socialist projects, the loss of interest in trades unionism, what you will.
Now there are reasons why this has happened and I don’t have any proposals for bringing that movement back. But it does bring us to the present pass in which very few people towards the bottom of society are attracted by any political project other than that of moaning about their lot and blaming it on immigrants. Or, for that matter, on white people. It’s what happens if you lose the left, if you have no representation for organised labour. The politics of the trade-union meeting is replaced by the politics of the saloon bar. It’s not a progressive liberalism that fills the void: it’s the void.
Aspiration - it’s a good thing, but are we to think only of aspiration and only of “escape”? What does happen to the people the escapee leaves behind? At the moment, politics largely concerns the attempt to remove the welfare safety net that protects working people, and to chase after scapegoats in an atempt to retain the votes that would otherwise be lost. Is it really too late for a politics that says neither of these processes should be happening?
Great post and reply from ejh. I find the bad faith of the BBC in commissioning this quite staggering. “White” here signifies nothing at all; it’s just an attempt to replace a class designation with an entirely negatively defined (whatever you have left when you sift out other ethnic identities that are more “visible” to officialdom), empty category. If we want to understand what has happened to the working clas, we need an economic and social history of the period from the mid 70s to today. What we don’t need is this kind of public validation of a disingenuous and under-interrogated fiction.
Not only that, what’s the appeal to working class viewers? Where are the stories boys and girls done good? Where’s the message of ‘you can do it too, if you pick up a book or go to a night school class or join the Open University or whatever’. Where’s the tales of ‘if you don’t like it, do something about it’.
I think ejh and Rochenko have beaten me to most of the points I wanted to make. Besides which, this season is at least two decades too late: by the time Thatcher decimated heavy industry, and New Labour decided to chase after ’swing’ voters, ‘class’ pretty much dropped out of the vocabulary (as did the kind of places/constituencies likely to feature in the season). The narrative of ‘escape’ is one that often occurs in working-class fiction/drama, except that in (say) Educating Rita its more about gender and in Billy Elliott it pretty much boils down to ‘miners are losers - I’m off to ballet school’.
Yikes. I’d heard about this BBC ‘white’ thing, but thought at first glance that image was a BBDO satire. Perhaps they’ll do a ‘BNP Babes’ calender.
Interesting reply from EJH.
Stilll, the trailler is pretty cool, all those languages written on the guys face.
Night classes are now being slashed and burned by government funding cuts. The glory days when you could easily access a whole world of education at night is long gone.
Much of the adult education money is now going to attracting school-leavers to go to university, so a quarter of them can drop out and the others be saddled with debt up to their eyeballs.
Great post Justin.
I think it ought to be possible to make interesting and sensible television programmes about the white working class, but these particular programmes look like being a long way from that. But I only really say this because i think it ought to be possible to make interesting and sensible programmes about any social group - never mind the ‘white’ bit, it would be nice to see some good telly about class in general.
But in principle I wouldn’t object to a series of documentaries looking at the social, economic and cultural life of the white working class, just as I wouldn’t object to a similar series on any other ethnicity. My neighborhood (Avonmouth, Lawrence Western) is overwhelmingly white working class, and I’d like to see documentaries made about areas like this. Perhaps the white working class is neglected in terms of thoughtful media coverage*.
I think there’s even a sensible documentary or two to be made about idea that the white working class has become neglected and/or ‘discriminated’ against by the (white middle class) bureaucracy, in certain respects. I’d expect such a programme to conclude the idea is mainly racist paranoia and that what discrimination there is, is still predominantly against non-whites. I wouldn’t say for sure there are never any instances of what might be called neglect or discrimination against whites - (local) government sometimes does silly things. All I really mean is that the perception seems to exist, which makes the topic worthy of exploration, if only show that it’s bollocks.
have you looked at the BBC “have your say” on this? edifying, as usual
* “thoughtful media coverage”! arf .
Where’s the tales of ‘if you don’t like it, do something about it’.
Aha, ha ha ha. Stop, you’re killing me. Ha ha ha ha. No really….
Having been involved with various direct action political and environmental campaigns (not what we’re talking about here admittedly, but probably the purest expression of the ‘if you don’t like it, do something about it’ attitude) I can safely say there’s few things the mainstream media hates more than people who do exactly that. I have plenty of ideas as to why this should be (even a few that don’t sound like conspiracy theories!) but whatever the reason, if you want to be lambasted by the media simply act like you don’t know “your proper place”. It pisses them off no end.
Come to think of it, the absence of the white working class (at least as far as that grab from the White website goes) seems to have something to do with the bloated and decidedly un-working-class presence of Enoch Powell’s fizzog.
Night classes - do you not remember that story about the government saying that night classes are “too white and middle class” and so less deserving of funding?
[...] is the patronising attitude that underlies it all. Here, I can’t really do better than quote Justin McKeating: “Going by the website, the season reduces working class people to exhibits in a zoo, to [...]