So, long story short: someone read this, recommended I pitch a shorter version to a real newspaper, and then this happened. I wouldn’t have played up the Brexit angle in the headline, personally (writers don’t write their own headlines), but the thing did some numbers, probably as a result of it, so there we are.
I’m quite proud of having it out there. I am not sure whether it’s something I’m noticing more because I’m writing on it, or if this is a genuine phenomenon, but it certainly feels as if there’s an uptick in the vocal pushback against the idea that “ordinary people” are exclusively defined by the holding of regressive opinions, in opposition to illegitimate elitists whose opinions are suspect. It feels good to contribute to the discourse with this point of view.
What’s interesting is that so much of the pushback on it (those comments, man) focuses around my authenticity, and therefore whether I should just shut up. In a sense, the commenters have provided a snapshot of the way authenticity as a member of the working class or one of these “ordinary hard working people” is doled out in order to support a particular point of view.
CiF commenters told me that I was an out of touch lefty because class is such an outdated notion so there’s no such thing as working class any more. And they also listed all the reasons I couldn’t be it. Which raises the question, if it’s so outdated and unimportant that nobody cares why did people spend 5,000 comments trying to prove that I wasn’t it?
It comes down to who gets to speak, or who gets to be believed. The reason I used working class in the article was specifically because the concept comes with a number of emotional and cultural markers attached to it, which play out throughout our whole society. Working class is hard working, no nonsense, common sense, hard, tough, resilient. Middle class is soft, out of touch, removed, not living in the real world.People do not want to be poor, but they do aspire to the cultural virtues of the working class, because it gives them that authenticity.
However, class is more complicated than it used to be. It’s not the 19th century, we don’t have easy categories of workers, capitalists and bourgeoisie to rely on any more (to the extent we ever did). There are cultural and geographic and other factors to bear in mind. Is someone who was born in a council house in Chilton, started his own painting and decorating company out of the back of a van, and now owns three stores, “working class” or “middle class”? It’s not an easy question and we rely on those cultural markers to do so, and this is where we start to see the right wing bait and switch.
I filed on Sunday and therefore missed it, but if I hadn’t I’d probably have made note of Kelvin MacKenzie’s Sun leader demanding that more people speak for “us”. Not for the luvvies, the targets of the tabloid 10 minutes hate this week, represented by Gary Lineker and Lilly Allen. For us, mate. The ones with common sense views about immigration.
“Us” includes the man who got the Sun banned from Liverpool because his editorial position was so utterly toxic towards the working class people of that city, apparently. “Us” includes everyone who is worried about immigration. Everyone who isn’t worried isn’t included, isn’t authentic, isn’t worth listening to.
See how it works?
- Only those with an authentic, working class, decent, hard working, common sense identity get to comment.
- Holding certain opinions automatically makes you a left wing hippy luvvie and thus disqualifies you from authenticity.
This circularity means that once you set what the “authentic” opinions are — and papers like the Sun have been working very hard to carefully cultivate what can be considered authentic and what cannot — you have removed the need to engage in actual discussion about these opinions.
This is important not because discussion is a great way to change people’s minds (it isn’t), but because it does necessitate the introduction of and acknowledgement of a plurality of opinions and nuances. If you got MacKenzie and his target audience off their bromides and started getting into the nitty gritty about what they believe, you’d start to see the breakdown of that particular alliance very quickly indeed. It’s only by continuing to assert that they are on the same side without ever having to back it up with more than slogans that the fragile alliance of “common sense” continues.
The entire point of this strategy of policing authenticity and appeals to common sense, no matter what aspect of the status quo it is mobilised in defense of, is to shut down discussion not just between “sides” in the debate but within them.
That’s the point of “Brexit means Brexit” and “We won, you lost, end of story,” and why that’s the totality of government policy up to this time. Because once you get beyond the “common sense” you actually have to start implementing things. Brexit is a big tangled ball of string and simply saying “we have decided this string is going to be untangled!” won’t actually substitute for the hard work of sitting there and unpicking every knot. But the hope is that by sticking to the idea that it is simple, rather than complicated, that they can also mask the fact that “Vote Leave” was a coalition of people whose common ground begins and ends at “leave the EU.” One of the reasons for the confused, disjointed, endlessly revised ideas coming out of government over the whole sorry mess is that nobody had actually considered the possibility that “EU Bad” might move from being a general catch-all excuse for government failure to the actual basis of policy. They want to keep it vague and cloudy for as long as possible because as soon as it crystallises from vague grievance to actual decision a lot of people are going to start saying “hang the fuck about mate, what’s this?”
There’s very little common ground between those who want to see a return to a rose-tinted 1960s where wages actually meant you could afford a house, and those who long for the removal of all barriers to the wholesale asset stripping of the UK. The longer the conversation can be limited to “honest working people, brexit means brexit, common sense, get over it, genuine concerns,” the longer that absence of solidarity can be hidden.
I don’t merely object to “Brexiters speaking for me.” That’s a simplification. I object to the extent to which we have allowed Dacre and his ilk to pretend they aren’t just as much a part of the political and media elite as any “champagne socialist” they rail against in their sweaty little rags. I object to them hollowing out working class people and wearing them like a skin suit to hide their contempt for us. That’s what I’m really sick of.
