Posts Tagged ‘working class’

Campaign frontline: Despite its short term woes, UKIP hopes to bounce back

15/05/2017, 06:54:17 PM

In a series of reports from the campaign frontline, Uncut looks at what’s happening on the ground. Kevin Meagher was at Little Lever, in Bolton South East to take a look at UKIP’s local campaign

Reversing a coach into the narrow entrance of the car park of the Queens pub in Bradley Fold took some doing. Eventually, though, the driver managed it. Perseverance and a steady hand paying off. Given this was UKIP’s new campaign battle bus, emblazoned with the smiling face of its newish leader, Paul Nuttall, the moment served as a perfect metaphor.

Small steps. Incremental progress. Steady as she goes.

This was certainly the hope as Nuttall arrived in Little Lever, a village in the Bolton South East constituency and the closest thing UKIP has to Ground Zero. The party has all three council seats and intends to build out from here into neighbouring villages.

Amid its difficulties elsewhere, with losses of county council seats and plunging opinion poll levels, Little Lever, a Brexit-voting ‘upper working-class’ enclave, counts as safe ground for the kippers.

Owner occupiers with nice semis. Small business owners. Vans on the driveways. Satellite dishes. Nice gardens. Not Emily Thornberry territory, it is safe to say. This isn’t Middle England though. This is a small town full of classic aspirational Labour voters. Skilled manual workers, not middle class professionals.

It’s also a totem for how UKIP still hopes to replace Labour in its political backyard across the north of England, picking up on working-class disaffection with issues like immigration and the general drift under Jeremy Corbyn.

Defying the stereotype, Nuttall’s advance team are chatty and friendly. There are the obligatory burly security guys, replete with their CIA-style earpieces. A few local activists gather while a pasty young man paces around the car park, his plummy accent and Barbour jacket giving him away as a UKIP staffer.

(more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Uncut | 9 Comments »

Brexit and Trump: A disaster for liberalism caused by liberal elites

21/11/2016, 08:02:27 AM

by Robert Wragg

2016 has borne witness to perhaps the biggest rise in anti-establishment anger in a generation, but it hasn’t come from the usual suspects. No longer is it the radical left protesting the political elite, but rather it is regular working class voters, and they’re looking to the right. Culminating in the British public’s vote to leave the European Union, and the election of Donald Trump in the USA, liberal left parties are struggling to gather enough support from the electorate. The same is true on both sides of the pond, as in many others countries. So why is this happening?

In both the EU referendum and US presidential election, socially democratic and liberal parties failed to recognise that they had lost the support of the working-class voters, or where they did accept this, proclaimed those people to be simply ‘wrong’ in their growing dissatisfaction with liberal ideas, framing them as racists or bigots with neither the numbers nor the power to influence the vote. Proponents of liberalism refused to engage with them. Instead, they continued to provide more of the same moral superiority and neo-liberal economic, socially liberal package, with an ‘end of history’ style arrogance. In doing so they appealed only to those whose vote they had already won, their ideas bouncing around the echo chamber that is social media, reinforcing their feelings of righteousness.

Alienation of working class voters from the establishment in the UK, and alienation of white non-college educated individuals from the establishment in the USA – the story is the same; a political elite pushing a hegemonic ideology of social liberalism with such hubris that it either doesn’t notice, or chooses to ignore, the fact that huge swathes of the population simply no longer agree with the dominant position, largely because it hasn’t offered them anything. It is no surprise that the same individuals look elsewhere for opportunities to hit back at the establishment.

(more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Grassroots | 11 Comments »

For too many working and middle class voters, Labour doesn’t value aspiration. This needs to change.

30/12/2013, 12:57:12 PM

by Renie Anjeh

Various theories are doing the rounds at the moment about why Labour is not performing as well as it should.  On the left of the party, they bemoan the fact that Labour is not nearly as leftwing as they think it should be.  On the right of the party, there is much concern about the party’s lack of credibility on the economy.   The left-wing Labour Representation Committee would argue that nationalising everything from the energy companies to children’s Christmas presents will deliver a crucial victory in 2015.  Progress would think otherwise (and rightly so).  But I still think that we have not asked a very important question.  Are we really standing up for all working class and middle class people?

During the Mayoral election in 2012, I canvassed a middle aged couple in Ilford who were less than pleased when they saw my ‘vote Labour’ sticker.  They worked hard all their lives and played by the rules but they didn’t think that we were on their side.  They felt that the odds were stacked against them and that we had no answers.  To them, we were completely out of touch with their aspirations and their concerns.

Unfortunately, people like the couple in Ilford have become objects of incomprehension at best, or derision at worst, for too many in our movement.  The idea that we should give them as much focus to as we give to the bedroom tax, is an anathema to some on the Left.

Part of the reason why Labour lost power is that we were seen to be a party exclusively for special interest groups such as public sector workers, single parents, immigrants and benefit claimants not a party for the generality of working class and middle class people.

(more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Grassroots | 13 Comments »

Labour’s lost estates

02/12/2010, 02:34:47 PM

by Atul Hatwal

In the seven months since the general election one of the few areas for genuine consensus within the party is a re-discovered desire to reach out and listen.

But if the party is serious about getting to the parts other big conversations have failed to reach, then the bandwagon is going to have to roll through a couple of tough neighbourhoods.

On one side of town, is a place, let’s call it, “white town”. Generations of white working class, big estates, low incomes, traditional Labour vote bank, rife with all the problems that decades of deprivation bring.

As Labour’s straight-listening express trundles through this area, immigration will be the hot topic.  And what comes back won’t be pretty.

It was on Labour’s watch that the rightward drift in the debate on immigration happened. A succession of ministers were happy to bow to the Littlejohn platoons and show how ‘sound’ they were on immigration.

In the past few years, talk of “white working class” issues (you know, those special issues, that Asian or Afro-Caribbean working class families living in the same areas don’t have and can’t understand) with its relentless whistles have turned parts of the PLP into a Westminster version of one man and his dog.

And over the summer our leadership candidates fell over themselves to pay their respects at Mrs. Duffy’s doorstep. David Milliband even made it inside for a cup of tea.

She might be a nice old lady, a bit overwhelmed by the media scrum, but the substance of what she said is clear. Immigration is causing unemployment and the burden of immigrant claimants is preventing deserving Britons from getting their benefits.

This summer, not a single one of our princes standing for the leadership had the courage to simply say,

“No, Mrs. Duffy was wrong”.

Not one. (more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Uncut | 4 Comments »

Phil Woolas is our fall guy

05/11/2010, 09:00:44 AM

by Dan Hodges

JUDGMENT day for Phil Woolas. Though not for his accusers in the liberal mob – their verdict was passed long ago. “He is guilty. Those leaflets pandered to prejudice. They have no place in the new politics”.

Save your breath. Woolas was never anything more  than a patsy. The fall guy. Ritual sacrifice to our conscience.

His campaign was “toxic” according to the Telegraph. Made him “unfit to sit on the front bench” said Liberal Conspiracy. Even Trevor Philips found himself moved to describe the leaflets as “unhelpful”.

In the eyes of the law, Woolas stood charged with misrepresentation, not inflaming racial tensions. Sharp political practice. Not racism. But that was always a detail.

Yes, we can take our positions. Swap stories from Oldham with similar tales of electoral skulduggery in marginal seats the length and breadth of the land. Debate the constitutional implications of the judiciary imposing their judgment over that of the electorate.

It would be an exercise in irrelevance. This case was not about clumsy photo shopping mixed with a few equally crude allegations. It was about the politics of immigration, religion and race. Or more accurately, about the Labour party’s shameful failure to adopt a coherent, let alone moral, stance on any of these issues. (more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Uncut | 35 Comments »