The Pride of Working Class Defeatism
The burden of class in British society through one man’s lens
Social class is so deeply ingrained in British society, it’s our very culture. It colours our every thought, our actions, our behaviour.
Class is British culture, built from what biscuits you eat to what car you drive, to the names you give your kids and pets, it is class that is embedded in all these decisions and our judgement of others is through a class lens also.
Britain; we’re an island obsessed – nay, possessed – by class. Despite years of so-called social mobility, class divide is alive and well. We, the different classes, still don’t understand each other. Or much want to.
And because of this, every class; upper, middle and working, is boiled down to stereotypes that are often used to mock and belittle, effigies of fear and resentment.
I’m middle class. Now.
I like being middle class. I don’t think you’re allowed to say that. This is a British hang up. Most of us are middle class but we play it down, we mock and deny it. We are ashamed of having money, even if “having money” simply means enough to pay the mortgage on a semi-detached house in the suburbs with a Ford Focus in the driveway.
But I wasn’t always middle class. I grew up working class and the families who owned semi-detached houses with Ford Focuses seemed like ballers.
We were poor. Though, through sheer coincidence, lived in a middle class area.
We moved from a council house to a tiny rented cottage on the outskirts of north London. It was a leafy area and the local comprehensive school I attended was leafy too, considering it was a state school.
My father was a labourer, my mother a jobbing hairdresser slash beautician and we had fuck all cash. Fuck all.
But the point I want to make clear is that being working class isn’t about money, it’s about mentality.
In the green and roaming towns of Essex there are plenty of “working class done good” builders and tradesmen who are cash rich, with 4x4s and Mercs, and pillars outside their spacious new build family homes, but they still talk and act working class. Some “real” middle class folk might suggest they have no class at all.
No, working class isn’t about money. We were poor, sure, but it’s about more than that.
It’s about attitude.
It’s about ambition, or lack thereof, it’s about knowing your place, being ignorant about money, savings, investments, job markets, it’s about having no network or opportunity, or at least not knowing how to find it, and a misplaced pride in being defeatist.
My father was working class through and through. It wasn’t his fault, it was his upbringing. He grew up in a working class family in Glasgow, the rough part of a rough 1950’s city, only to flee to England so his father, my grandfather, could avoid the heavy feet of gangster debt collectors (at least, this is the clearest picture I have managed to put together of their journey to England in the dead of night). When he was 9, he was living in a caravan. When he was 15, he wanted to go to art college but his mother said no, you work in the local factory to bring money in.
Once, when he asked his parents “How do you buy a house?” he was told “People like us don’t buy houses.”
And so his defeatism was born and raised, alongside him.
There’s a Pulp song called Common People. If you don’t know, “common” in British vernacular used as a put down, an insult, to represent people with no taste or class. It’s always aimed at working class people.
Pulp’s song is about a rich girl pretending to be poor to fit in with her impoverished university clique. In the chorus, Jarvis Cocker sings;
“You’ll never live like common people, Never do what common people do, Never fail like common people, You’ll never watch your life slide out of view, And then dance and drink and screw, Because there’s nothing else to do”
That last like always stuck with me. You fuck it all off because there’s no other option. You live and die in these towns. You drink in your local pubs into oblivion. There is nothing else to do. No one is coming to save you, least of all yourself. You’ve been taught that from day one.
Failure and defeatism is built into the working classes. It’s baked in just like class is baked into British culture. Bona fide working class is indeed about watching your life slide out of view. People like us don’t buy houses.
I watched my father drink himself to death. And his pub friends who stood buy him for decades, do the same thing. Working class men, with working class jobs, who were scared of their own ambition and dreams but would readily punch you in the nose on a Friday night if the occasion demanded it.
My father was a man who never managed to claw his way out of the working classes. And I would have been the same, if it were not for him marrying a middle class woman. If it were not for us moving to a middle class area. If it were not for me meeting a middle class girl who forced me to go to university. No one in my dad’s family had ever gone to university. Some of them thought it exotic. I just went because everyone else was. That’s the power of environment.
I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but I got out. I have two working class university friends who did the same, and there are some hushed whispers of identifying with each other. Both of them were rescued by university too, and then by good women who helped them up the last social step. Now the three of us have disposable income and talk awkwardly about posh biscuits and children’s names.
Recently, when one of these friends was getting married in Greece (we’re middle class now, remember?), another university friend was explaining to a stranger how we all knew each other.
He said “We’re all middle class kids who met at uni.”
I interjected. I said no. That’s not me. I’m working class. At least, I was. I was very annoyed.
You probably wonder why I care. Perhaps you think I doth protest too much, but it matters. Class identity is strong and important in British society and I’m not having a very posh and privileged friend explain to someone else how we’re all one and the same.
We’re not. He was showered with money, apartments, cars and jobs when he left university, I lived in my sister’s old room working a temp job in Barnet council for £7 an hour with my alcoholic father who kicked me out of the house 3 times in one year.
We are not the same.
“But I’ve seen your house, you’re not working class” he said.
And here is the crux of the issue referenced at the beginning of this article. Britons are obsessed with class but they hold no understanding of the other classes.
My friend’s only experience of the working class was Eastenders (a TV soap opera set in East London) and Guy Richie gangster movies, or perhaps Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. I don’t know. But I do know he couldn’t understand how anyone who lived in a small rented cottage next to some fields could be working class.
In his ignorance, working class to him meant crime, prison and cockney accents, it meant council estates, tower blocks and drug dealers.
Crucially, to him, it didn’t mean an insidious lack of ambition and learned helplessness. That’s the working class he couldn’t see, couldn’t touch, and could never understand. He would never have to watch his life slide out of view, because, as Jarvis Cocker sings,
“If you called your dad he could stop it all.”
I’m not sure why I’m writing this article. Though I sense a truth, a point, a purpose, to what I’m writing, I’m digging for treasure, though I’m yet to strike gold.
I am (once again) revisiting the nature of being working class as it haunts me. The nature and tragedy of defeatism and how it runs deep in the psyche of forgotten generations and millions of unseen people: The poor. Everyone’s favourite group to champion, everyone’s favourite group to forget.
The poor are more maligned than ever. Brexit became a huge cultural issue (and therefore driven by the omnipresent class divide) that still ripples through day-to-day British life.
The persistent narrative is that if you voted Leave, you were an uneducated and uncultured racist thicko, but if you voted Remain, you were part of the enlightened chattering classes and metropolitan elites who were forward thinking and educated.
This narrative persists. I say this a leave voter.
My father died before the EU referendum took place, but I have no doubt he too would have voted leave. Perhaps for different reasons to me.
Though to this day, I’m still conflicted about the working class brainwashing my father was subjected to as, like me, he too married a middle class woman, he too lived in a middle class area (eventually), and he too was exposed to the aspirational middle class mindset of my friends’ parents, just like I was. But he chose to rebuff them all. Perhaps it was too late for him. His addiction sure did a lot of his thinking for him.
There is also the insidious misplaced pride, another spoke in the working class wheel. A pride in poverty, the “salt-of-the-earth” myth that does the rounds. The belief that rich people were crooks and the only decent folk were poor and underfoot, like him. Like us.
That’s what I was taught.
I think he, my father, held onto this pride out of fear. It’s easy to pretend you don’t want to climb the social ladder and get uncomfortable if your poverty is noble and righteous.
In his eyes he was, I’m sorry to say, always the victim, never the victor. The jackboot of society kept him down, it wasn’t his fault, it was everyone else’s.
And so it goes on. The working class mantra. His defeatism, a fait accompli. A closed circle.
I’m sure some working class people, more working class than me (whatever that might mean), will disagree with my assessment, they may even be offended. But this is my lens, my opinion, and truth as I saw evident.
There are many exceptions. There are many rules. Everyone is an individual but as Voltaire wrote;
“Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.”
Perhaps time should be replace with “class” here. Or perhaps I’m just another Briton seeing class in everything, when it isn’t really there.
