Two other families and a man juggling eels

Read Marko Attilo Hoare on the Left and class:

Readers of this blog will probably already know of two excellent, recently published books that raise the question of where the Left has gone wrong, and why it has reached its current state of moral degeneracy: Nick Cohen’s What’s Left and Andrew Anthony’s The Fallout. For anyone who hasn’t already, I’d strongly recommend reading them both as an introduction to the subject. Although they have produced many replies from among the ranks of those whom they target – the Guardianista soft-left and the harder, ‘anti-imperialist’ left – these replies have tended to be along the lines of ‘whatabout Iraq’, and without exception have failed to address Cohen’s and Anthony’s central accusation: that moral relativism, obsessive anti-Westernism and a fundamental lack of interest in the struggle of foreigners against oppression at the hands of other foreigners have led leftists in the West to abandon those they should be supporting (such as democrats and trade unionists in Iraq, or Muslim women abused at the hands of their families and communities) and lining up with those who should be their mortal enemies (Baathists, Islamists, etc.).

Cohen and Anthony field a range of arguments to explain what is going wrong, most of which I agree with. But the one argument that both of them make, and that fails to convince me, is their claim that the degeneration of the Left is related to its abandonment of the working class.  For Anthony, guilty white-liberal idolisation of non-white and non-Christian minorities has led to a readiness to denigrate the white working-class; this is a theme to which he has recently returned, and which a new BBC 2 programme is apparently also addressing.

Hoare is wrong to give Cohen’s and Anthony’s books the same recognition. While the two books share similar concerns, the difference is that Cohen’s book is a serious investigation into the reactionary nature of contemporary leftwing thought, whereas Anthony’s is a piece of shit.

The Fallout is a long, incoherent, solipsistic whinge from a kind that we hear all too much from – the comfortably-off man with a chip on his shoulder. Anthony simply repeats Cohen’s arguments, and adds a lot of unsupported statements (there are no endnotes or citations) about crime, immigration and multiculturalism that do indeed border on conservative prejudice.

Anthony rants about lawless thugs and complains that his mother can’t get a decent council house because immigrants are jumping the queue. He deplores what he calls a hierarchy of victimhood – but then participates in this hierarchy by saying that the white working class of a developed country are more deserving victims than refugees running from torture and civil war and Christ knows what else. His is the voice of a wealthy individual who for some reason has a bizarre jealousy of the poor and needy. While Cohen writes about the world, Anthony can write only about himself.

The Fallout doesn’t deserve the praise it has earned – and I say that as a Eustonite.

Hoare is on stronger ground when he criticises the current sentimental fetishisation of the white working class.

Anthony is right to condemn moral relativists for their grovelling before Muslim fundamentalists and homophobic black rappers. But in his defence of ‘white working-class’ Jade Goody from the charge of racism, on the grounds that her critics are anti-white-working-class, he falls into the same moral relativist trap.

Bang on: we shouldn’t ignore bigotry and domestic violence when it happens in working class cultures, any more than we should ignore honour killings just because they happen in Muslim cultures. 

And why ‘white’ anyway? As Chris Bertram adds:

There’s an oddity about the addition of the modifier “white” to “working class”, in the British context. Historically, Britain has been a country where class has trumped ethnicity as the key dimension of social stratification for politics. Class solidarity, and Labour politics, appealed across ethnic and national divisions. Of course ethnicity mattered, but, in the end it was class that structured the institutions in an through which political compromise and conflict happened.

Yes – and you would think that liberals would avoid playing up divisions that simply turn working class people against each other.

I’d also take issue with Anthony’s assertion that ‘the image of the white working class has gone from hero to less than zero.’ In my view it’s the opposite, that middle-class ideas of white working-class culture have been sentimentalised and mainstreamed. Talentless ‘comedians’ like Peter Kay, and talentless ‘musicians’ like the Arctic Monkeys are revered because they appear to have come from the gutter, and because they conform to metropolitan ideas of what the Northern working class is like. As Irvine Welsh (a genuine working-class writer) said: ‘That’s the thing about middle class leisure time: it’s to play at being working class. I wrote for Loaded where middle class men play at being working class.’

There is a perceived glamour about poverty – glamour, and a kind of noble-savage romanticism. When I was at university, there was a kind of conversational parlour-game called ‘Who’s The Most Working Class’ in which various students, most of them privately educated, would make more and more extravagant claims about the poverty of their childhoods. People like to pretend they grew up in poverty, because having escaped it implies great strength of character. (This tendency was brilliantly satirised in the Monty Python sketch: ‘You grew up in the gutter? We thought people from the gutter were ponces!‘)

Bertrand Russell identified this, long ago, as ‘the fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed’. If poverty is supposed to be character-building or ennobling in some way, then logically we need much more poverty, not less.

The fallacy gets more sinister when we come to political debate. If we accept that the white working class should be supported whatever it says and does, then the government can turn round and say: look, if the working class have a problem with immigration and black people, then so should you. If the working class wants the return of the death penalty then so should you. As the working class is presumed (wrongly) to have all sorts of reactionary prejudices, then you can justify pretty much everything on behalf of the Voice of the People.

Although there is massive inequality, cultural class differences are increasingly irrelevant because greater numbers of middle-class graduates are falling into poverty. This has led to a ridiculous situation where the road labourer sneers at the council temp for being a ponce in a suit, when there is little or no difference in their incomes.

There are great and ugly aspects of both middle class and working class culture. Both the middle and working class have made great contributions to society.

But class is about income, not culture. Liberals and socialists should support trade union rights, progressive taxation and redistribution of wealth. We should fight for better pay and conditions. We should support the working man and the poor. But not because there is anything inherently virtuous about the poor – but because poverty is terrible, and needs to be eradicated.