British life-style: Welcome back to ‘white underclass’!

A group of men throwing objects towards police at the Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham.
Photo: The Telegraph

Britain has had a working class and an underclass. The metropolitan commentariat’s understanding of this basic distinction is fitful. George Osborne ruthlessly tapped into it during austerity when he empathised with the shift worker “who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits”. Tony Blair, too, when he tried to purge shopping centres of hoodies – to many as powerful an emblem of estrangement from the mainstream as the niqab, writes ‘The Telegraph’.

Since the Brexit wars, however, and the dichotomous struggle between the maligned masses and metropolitan middle class, our appreciation of such basic social nuances has faded.

Some were quick to dub last week’s riots as an upswell of “working-class anger” over immigration. Such a framing is quite insulting to working-class people who feel ignored, but abhor disorder and remain committed to peacefully pressuring politicians into change through the ballot box.

It is also inaccurate: it seems clear from court reports that many of those involved were textbook underclass – some with extensive criminal records, no fixed address and behavioural disorders.

It is true that the white underclass is angry about elite betrayal over immigration. However, their rage has a different, more disturbing timbre. Conservatives are exasperated by the failure of some immigrants to integrate and aghast at chaos at the border. The underclass, in contrast, is incandescent that the priority “ancestral claim” they believe indigenous Anglo Saxons have to the fruits of the land is being siphoned off by “scrounging immigrants”. For a group keenly aware of its “trash” status in the eyes of society, a tradition of fierce white pride that can spill over into white supremacism remains a vital source of self-esteem.

In the 1980s, the controversial American sociologist Charles Murray cautioned that, unless such trends abated, Britain would end up with a permanent societal underbelly very similar to America’s black urban “underclass” – a substratum of stick-em uppers, welfare queens, chain snatchers and near alcoholics that had exploded by the 1980s.

Catastrophically, the prophecies appear to have come true. A preoccupation with deprivation and criminality among ethnic minority groups has distracted from the bedding in – and possible expansion – of the white underclass. Worklessness among white young men has risen, as it has plummeted among other groups. Men of Bangladeshi heritage are less likely to be unemployed than white British men. Black African women are less likely to be unemployed than white British women. In the north, those convicted of drug dealing are often white.

Nobody has a clue how to put the genie back in the bottle. It may not be a simple case of reversing cataclysmic liberal policies. The underclass is held back not simply by its deprivation or welfarism but its own despairing belligerence – what is known as the “culture of poverty” by academics.

In short, the prognosis is dire. The crisis of the British white underclass is likely to become yet another super-wicked problem that politicians strenuously ignore. The recent riots may just be the start of a societal catastrophe that is only beginning to unfold.

… After several decades of decent living, the British are returning to the roots. To be white and poor = ‘white underclass’ is the fate of millions of the British Isles.

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