I’m white and working class. I’m sick of Brexiters saying they speak for me

Phil McDuff in The Guardian


Ordinary hard-working people have genuine concerns about immigration, and to ignore immigration is to undemocratically ignore their needs.” Other than the resurgent importance of jam, this is the clearest message we are supposed to take out of Brexit.

So concerned are we that the government’s hands are tied that it must send all the doctors back where they came from. It must crack down on students coming here to get educated in our universities in exchange for money. It must check teenagers’ teeth lest we accidentally extend compassion to a Syrian adult.

Who are “ordinary hard-working people” though? It seems the consensus following Brexit is that they’re the marginalised white working class; the people who have been left behind by modernity, who feel alienated by the “liberal metropolitan elite”. I’m a white man from the north-east, living in strongly Brexit-voting Middlesbrough, so you might expect me to tell you all off for looking down on us from your ivory towers. But the truth is that this outbreak of “the poor proles can’t help it” is both incorrect and patronising.

The working class mostly lack our own voices in the media. Instead, we are reported on. This reporting seems, even now, to believe that the true working-class identity is, as Kelvin MacKenzie put it in the 1980s, “a right old fascist”. Culturally insular, not interested in or smart enough to understand real news, generally afraid of people not like him (it’s always a him).

Migrants and native people of colour are stripped of their right to a working-class identity, and even cast as the enemy of the “real” (ie white) working class. I spoke to Marsha Garratt, a working-class, mixed-race woman who heads up the All In Youth Project, and she was cutting about the “underreporting of positive stories of solidarity between all members of the working class, including ethnic minorities”. Working-class history is migrant history, but we ignore that because it does not match what we believe to be authentic.

Likewise any of us who are white and born here, but refuse to blame migrants for the result of government policies, are cast as the “metropolitan elite” even if we’re earning the same amounts and living in the same towns. Working-class identity becomes necessarily and by definition anti-migrant.


We’re not the only people with concerns. It’s just that everyone else seems to have them on our behalf

Once everyone who doesn’t fit is excluded, those who remain are transformed from real people into weaponised stereotypes to be turned against those who resist the advance of jam-obsessed fascism. Even the complexity within people is stripped out as individuals are merged into a howling mass whom you must “understand” or risk losing your tolerant, liberal credentials.

We’re not the only people with concerns. It’s just that everyone else seems to have them on our behalf, out of the charity of their hearts. The white middle classes are just as likely to be disturbed by brown faces or foreign accents as the white working classes are, but they are generally educated enough to realise they can’t just come out and say it. Working-class poverty, framed as the result of the strains these new arrivals place on our generous social safety net, provides the cover for them to object to immigration even though they are unharmed by it. 

But our other “genuine concerns” – such as school and hospital funding, benefits and disability payments, the crushing of industries that formed the backbones of our local economies – are ignored or dismissed out of hand. They are cast as luxuries, an irresponsible “tax and spend” approach, or they are turned back on us as evidence of our own fecklessness and lack of ambition. When we say “we need benefits to live because you hollowed out our towns in pursuit of a flawed economic doctrine,” we are castigated for being workshy, and told we only have ourselves to blame. If we alter our complaints to blame foreign people it’s a different story. “I can’t get a council house because they’ve all been sold to private landlords,” gets nothing. “I can’t get a council house because they’ve all gone to bloody Muslims,” gets on the front page of the tabloids.

Just as we are given identities as good or bad working-class people based on whether we adequately perform our roles as good little workers or whether we insolently insist on being disabled, unemployed or unionised, so our authenticity as working-class people depends on our use for political ends. Are we salt of the earth yeomen, or skiving thickos milking the system, or drains on the already stretched infrastructure? That all depends: are we kicking out immigrants or privatising a clinic today?

If we only matter to politicians when we can be used as to defend old bigotries about hordes of eastern Europeans stealing our women and poisoning our jam, then we don’t matter at all.

Three-day working week 'optimal for over-40s'

• 18 April 2016
 
• From the sectionBBC Business

Image copyrightAP

Workers aged over 40 perform at their best if they work three days a week, according to economic researchers.

Their research analysed the work habits and brain test results of about 3,000 men and 3,500 women aged over 40 in Australia.

Their calculations suggest a part-time job keeps the brain stimulated, while avoiding exhaustion and stress.

The researchers said this needed to be taken into consideration as many countries raise their retirement age.

Double-edged sword

Data for the study was drawn from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, which is conducted by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economics and Social Research at the University of Melbourne.

It looks at people's economic and subjective well-being, family structures, and employment.

Those taking part were asked to read words aloud, to recite lists of numbers backwards and to match letters and numbers under time pressure.

In general terms, those participants who worked about 25 hours a week tended to achieve the best scores.

"Work can be a double-edged sword, in that it can stimulate brain activity, but at the same time, long working hours and certain types of tasks can cause fatigue and stress which potentially damage cognitive functions," the report said.

Colin McKenzie, professor of economics at Keio University who took part in the research, said it would appear that working extremely long hours was more damaging than not working at all on brain function.

The figures suggest that the cognitive ability of those working about 60 hours a week can be lower than those who are not employed.

However, Geraint Johnes, professor of economics at Lancaster University Management School, said: "The research looks only at over-40s, and so cannot make the claim that over-40s are different from any other workers.

"What the authors find is that cognitive functioning improves up to the point at which workers work 25 hours a week and declines thereafter."

He added: "Actually, at first the decline is very marginal, and there is not much of an effect as working hours rise to 35 hours per week. Beyond 40 hours per week, the decline is much more rapid."

Do stay-at-home mothers upset you? You may be a motherist

Women who choose to remain at home to look after their children face a torrent of prejudice. Here are four of the worst examples

 

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • theguardian.com, Monday 21 October 2013 13.15 BST

'If you were pushing anyone who couldn’t walk but wasn’t a baby, people would happily put themselves out a bit.' Photograph: Rex Features/J.Norden/IBL

Dr Aric Sigman, at a conference convened by Mothers At Home Matter (if you want a clue, as to its agenda, I refer you to the name), warned of the rise of "motherism"; a prejudice against stay-at-home mothers. Sigman is well known for his re-traditionalising intentions, to which end he has been accused of misrepresenting behavioural and neurological evidence, a charge he has denied. So, he says "motherism" is dangerous because it puts women off being stay-at-home mothers, which is the developmental ideal. I'd reject the second part of the argument, but not the first – there is a prejudice against stay-at-home mothers. There is a presentation of women who look after their own children full time as air-headed, spoilt and dowdy. However, there is also a prejudice against women who look after their children but aren't dowdy (yummy mummies); women who go back to work after having had children; women who stay out of work but also employ nannies; women who work part-time and look after their children the rest of the time.

I think the only way you could gain approval for your time-management, as a mother, would be to look after your children all the time as well as working full-time but for some socially useful enterprise (ideally voluntary work), while never relying on a man for money, yet never claiming benefits either, but God forbid that you should have a private income. Mothers in society act as whipping boys for almost all other social fissures; oh, the irony of there being no female equivalent for the phrase "whipping boy", when it is almost always a female. Oh the side-spitting irony. Here are four examples of "motherisms" at work:

1) What they say: "I don't see why mothers need these enormous buggies"

If you were pushing anyone who couldn't walk but wasn't a baby, people would happily put themselves out a bit. The act of pushing a baby, however, confers an aura of smugness about you ("look at you, so in love, with your baby") that makes it unthinkable to just help you out. There's an element of sense in this; mothers are in love with their babies, for the most part. And they would see you step into a puddle just to avoid the smallest jolt to their airsprung sleeping chariot. But it's not the end of the sodding world, is it, mothers temporarily losing their social etiquette while they fall in love with their babies?

2. What they say (at the school gates, whispered): "You never see the mother"

Even if the child is dropped off by the father, there is very little quarter given to the mother who isn't visible to the child's social circle, and not much consideration of the possibility that maybe her work starts at 9am precisely so she can get home by 6pm. I personally think this is a Freudian throwback, the resentment of children of the 70s and 80s, who were the first generation having to contend with bloody maternal no-shows at the harvest festival. It's the only rationale I can think of for why a person would think it was any of their business how a mother organised her time.

3. What they say (going in to a cafe, during the hours of standard economic activity): 'Look at all these women who don't work. I wish I could afford not to work'

I personally think the greatest misconception around childcare, shared by a huge proportion of the adult population, the people who've never done it, plus people who've done it but can't remember it, is that it is easy. It is by far the most demanding job conceived by society, wringing you out like a blood-drenched bedsheet, each day leaving you physically drained and mentally poleaxed, without even the energy to close your own mouth or hold your head upright, often making an involuntary gargling noise. Some of it's quite fun. But anyway, that's an aside. There's no economic sense to this question; if the women drinking coffee weren't looking after their children, someone else would have to, which would in most cases cost as much as their wages. So what people are really objecting to is not that mothers can afford not to work, but that they can still afford coffee.

4. What they say: 'I never have anything to say to these yummy mummies'

Dressed up as a deficiency of the speaker (I never have anything to say) it is actually a charge levelled at the mother, that she has no interests; why? Because, being "yummy", she is narcissistic and can't see beyond pilates and Brazilian hot waxing. The true resentment is of her wealth – that her life isn't one of drudgery and servitude, but spa treatments and interiors. Well, that's fine – it's possible to make a good case for objecting to wealth, since so much of it is unjustly come by. But at least object to the people unjustly coming by it. It seems a little tangential to make the wife the object of the opprobrium. All she's done is have a kid and fancy up her pubic area.