This essay, on race and class in contemporary Britain, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the politics of human fossil finds.) It was published on 7 July 2019, under the headline ‘Working class versus minorities? That’s looking at it the wrong way’.
Officials eyeing you with contempt. Police treating you as scum. A sense of being constantly watched and judged by professionals. Living in fear of benefit sanctions. A lack of community facilities.
Such is likely to be your experience if you are working class. Such is also likely to be your experience if you are of black or minority ethnic origin.
But here’s the odd thing: people from the working class and minorities are rarely seen as facing the same kinds of issues. Instead, in political debates from Brexit to welfare benefits, minorities and the working class are seen as having conflicting interests and often set against each other. We are Ghosts: Race, Class and Institutional Prejudice, a report published last week by the thinktanks Class and the Runnymede Trust, attempts to address this this issue of common experiences yet conflicting perceived interests. Based on interviews and focus groups, almost entirely in London, the sample may not be statistically valid but the subjective experiences of the interviewees are revealing.
For many people on low incomes, whether white or of minority background, encounters with the state – police, local council, social services, jobcentres – are experienced as punitive and disempowering; a sense of being policed rather than supported. As one interviewee put it: ‘You just feel like you’re constantly being watched, and you’re always being judged by what you’re doing or what you’re saying, but I just don’t feel that there’s a lot of support.’ For minority groups, this has been compounded by ‘hostile environment‘ migration policies that effectively turn doctors, teachers and public officials into border guards and spies.
Many also feel priced out of the neighbourhoods in which they grew up, observing how a combination of gentrification and austerity has helped shut down community organisations and the social networks that sustained them.
But while experiences are often shared, the sense of being bound together in a common class rarely is. What it means to be working class has become blurred. Work was always the anchor for working-class identity. But the character of work has changed enormously. Traditional industrial workers now make up less than a third of the working class. Four out of 10 of these workers are in the service industry, while 30% form the ‘precariat‘ – lacking security, often shifting from one short-term job to another. Today’s working class is more precarious, less organised and comprises more women, migrants and minorities – and is less conscious of itself as a working class. In a fragmented labour market in which unions have lost much of their power, there are fewer opportunities to share physical space, build a collective sense of identity or create a common ground for mobilisation.
White people are far more likely to identify as working class than those from minorities. Partly this may be because minorities are more likely to be in casualised jobs. Many, the report suggests, may also have internalised anti-working class sentiments. ‘When you say working class,’ observed a black interviewee, ‘you think of people on council estates, drinking that cheap Ace cider.’
And then there’s a question the report does not address: the impact of identity categories on self-perception. Minorities have come to be identified, and to identify themselves, in terms of race, ethnicity or ‘community’. Class categories, these days, are applied primarily to the white population. Class distinctions have become racialised – few now question the use of the term ‘white working class’. Meanwhile, class divisions within minority groups are often ignored.
Consider for instance, another report published last week, an Office for National Statistics (ONS) study of the ‘ethnic pay gap’. It showed that those of Chinese and Indian origin have a higher median hourly pay than White British. Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Blacks have lower pay, with Bangladeshi people doing worst.
The differences are not simply ethnic. Age matters. Among Bangladeshis, for instance, those over 30 earn 27.9% less than White Britons, while for those aged 16 to 30 the difference is just 3.1%.
What of class? Indian and Chinese migrants to Britain tend to be more middle class than African Caribbeans, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Studies have shown that class structure of minority groups plays an important role in employment prospects but also that racial disparities persist even when class differences are taken into account. Unfortunately, the ONS study does not look at the issue of class. Hence, for all the debate about the study, the significance of the ethnic pay gap is not easy to pin down.
Race and class shape people’s lives in complex, sometimes contradictory, ways. What these reports reveal is that too often we stress the wrong differences and ignore the commonalities that matter.
The image is from Diego Rivera’s ‘Detroit Industry murals’.
Pandaemonium 
“Such is likely to be your experience if you are working class. Such is also likely to be your experience if you are of black or minority ethnic origin.”
This allegation needs to be stood up and explained in great detail. Otherwise it sounds just like another of the almost daily complaining Guardian opinion pieces on race.
As it is, it just sounds like something from the extreme left. From Antifa for example.
Most of the country is working class and most police and people working in official rolls are too.
There can certainly be a harshness in many systems of providing benefits and services.
Why that is so, would also need looking into. But we’re a country that can’t even afford enough police or decent prisons, so we don’t have abundant resources.
Why people of colour face a different kind of policing to everyone else also needs to be looked at very closely.
I’d ask Kenan, does he face discriminatory policing today and find the police treating him very badly.
Because if not, then the suggestion that the police are targeting people just because they’re BAME, falls down.
I’ve tried to say this several times now, but what the problem with this seemingly discriminatory policing is, is that it’s not the police’s fault. It’s the difficulty of the job they’re asked to do – and even a sign that Britain as a whole, still struggles with having become a diverse society. Something that they don’t have to deal with in many of the places I’ve been recently in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Becoming a diverse country through mass immigration is really really difficult. There’s no country that wouldn’t struggle with it. It’s not bad white people in England that’s the problem, it’s just that humans aren’t perfect.
As for why black people are seemingly singled out by the police – it’s to do with crime figures and experience of every day policing. I’m pretty sure that the head of the Met Police in London isn’t encouraging her officers to be racists. She seems to have the modern politically correct world view.
The problem there is a cultural one. One mostly of “self-alienation” by an alluring street culture, which black boys find it particularly hard to resist. Just listen to Stormzy talking about what it was like growing up and being obsessed with this street and rapping culture. That street culture and criminality are really close to each other.
It doesn’t mean that all the boys wearing hoodies and hanging on the estate or in town centres are criminals, but it makes it very hard for the police when they have to do their job.
I’ve asked it before, but what’s with the “separatist” alienated black youth culture?
Is it genuine, or is it something fake and wilfully adopted?
That’s the issue the Guardian opinion writers can’t analyse properly.
Or perhaps it sounds like that I, unlike you, have actually read the report and the experiences of the interviewees. But how odd is it that, in response to an article, and a report, that argues that the experiences of the working class and of low-paid minorities are similar, and that ‘For many people on low incomes, whether white or of minority background, encounters with the state – police, local council, social services, job centres – are experienced as punitive and disempowering’, you should spend so much space arguing against the ‘suggestion that the police are targeting people just because they’re BAME’ (before justifying the idea that it’s OK for the police to single out black people because ‘crime figures and experience of every day policing’). As I suggested in the conclusion of the article, ‘too often we stress the wrong differences and ignore the commonalities that matter’.
OK, fair point on the first bit. I didn’t read the whole thing before I posted. But it’s the Runnymede Trust.
They’ve been awful for years (I think). I just looked at their blog – and it looks like any other radical left organisation.
https://www.runnymedetrust.org/blog.html
The problem I have with long reports like that one, which runs to 56 pages, is that it can spend all that amount of space, building up a narrative that has big flaws buried within it. And there is no place to challenge them. I will pick through it, but I have little faith in their integrity.
Of course I know that black and minority ethnic people are working class. Us people who do working class jobs often have more BAME and migrant colleagues than white ones. I just don’t accept this idea that most of the institutions are racist though. Like local councils for example.
Why would job centres be racist? In areas with minority ethnic populations, half the staff are usually minorities themselves. The public sector is a huge employer of minority people.
As for the police and their disproportionate interest in young black youths. Don’t blame the police for that.
Or it can end up sounding like Black Lives Matter, who use terribly flawed arguments and data.
I’m sure the police don’t unfairly hassle you Kenan. Or treat you with contempt because of your race.
People who say such things are just being overly sectarian.
The cultural and political divide between left wing and more centre and conservative people, is being played out in the US really sharply right now. With Trump of course, and the left wing Congress members who are making the strongest accusations about the border and wider American racism.
I flick back and forth between reading left and liberal arguments and those to the right.
It’s particularly stark comparing CNN coverage with that of Fox.
Both raise very solid points regularly – and both make really terrible points and analysis also.
I think it’s best for people to just jump right in and watch a lot of it.
The gulf is so big, that most people only take one side or the other though.
All these accusations of racism get tiresome …. but there is of course real racism out there too.
My point is usually to ask – “why wouldn’t there be?”
People are often pretty flawed and shallow. They can’t always join up the complicated dots to have a good clear sighted perspective. I was just looking through the Daily Mail yesterday and there was a story about Albanians now making up the single biggest minority group in British prisons.
With 802 of them serving sentences in the U.K.
When I read things like that, I understand the logic of the “racist Daily Mail reader”.
The first thing they could ask is, how do any Albanian people get to be living in Britain in the first place?
It’s not in the EU, and they have no rights to just come here because they want to. But there’s thousands of them in the country, and Albanian criminal gangs have taken over some areas of the drugs import and distribution economy.
I’m sure the Runnymede Trust could explain how it was all to do with terrible poverty and people fleeing violence in Albania and that we needed to give most of them asylum, but the argument doesn’t work with “conservative” people. It only works with the woke left.
I keep thinking about how those kind of arguments only work with a proportion of the population in western countries. Right now here in Turkey, there’s this July 15th nationalist rally going on outside my hotel room and the noise of it is really loud. They’ve got a stage and a big patriotic crowd and are spinning some story in a sound and light show. It’s about the failed coup attempt from a few years ago.
There’s no way that people here would get arguments like that in the Runnymede Trust’s report (if it was about Turkey). Most people don’t follow such difficult arguments and are more likely to fall back on tradition and history.
As for class – who even defines it these days? I see the working class and middle class being more a class of “ordinary people”. The rich and the upper class might be different, but the the working class and middle class aren’t so different. Or there’s no need for them to be so different.
They often go to the same schools and have similar opportunities.
The fact that they have different outcomes from similar opportunities isn’t always anyone else’s fault.
So, you think the Runnymede Trust is a ‘radical left organization’. It’s your right to think that. I happen not to agree with the editorial stance of the Telegraph or the Daily Mail or Fox News. But that doesn’t mean that I would dismiss any report on these outlets merely on the grounds that it was in the Daily Mail or on Fox News rather than on the basis of what was actually reported or argued. And if I did, you’d be the first to shout ‘Typical lefty’. Apparently, the rules are different for you. You don’t like an organization, so you’re happy to a report without first reading it.
As it happens, I have many times been critical of the Runnymede Trust. But it’s an organization open enough to allow me to challenge it in its own report. I’m not sure that many other organization, especially the ones that you seem to favour, would be so open.
Actually, Turks have been having a very engaged debate about religion, secularism, democracy, etc. It’s at the heart of the debate over the AKP and its policies, and it was at the heart of the success of the anti-Erdogan candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu in the recent Istanbul mayoral election. I’ve pointed out all this out when you tried to make the same point in another post last week, but, of course, you just ignore all that and make the same point again.
I’m only making opinions on the Runnymede Trust from what I’m reading about them on their own blog. It does sound a bit like 1980s RCP and the other various left groups back then.
I used to support that kind of world view, but just don’t anymore.
I have directly asked you “what’s up with the separatist black youth culture” which leaves the police floundering around and not handling interactions with young black people correctly?
It’s much more than a simple case of racist police.
No one gets it right because they can’t analyse what’s going on with it.
It’s a cultural and psychological issue. John McWhorter gets closest to describing it.
But if things are really like the report and yourself have suggested, then it’s no wonder that I pick up such bad vibes when I’m living in London. With that amount of prejudice, scorn and hatred going on, it’s bound to effect those like myself who aren’t even the direct recipients of it.
Like some kind of “blow back”. That would be bound to happen.
That half of it is probably in people’s heads doesn’t really matter. It’s what people feel.
And everyone of all races, gets to live with some of the consequences.
And THAT’S the only reason why I’ve been banging on about Turkey and Eastern Europe.
Not to talk about the Kurds or football hooligans. But the fact that those countries haven’t experienced mass immigration like Western Europe has. I know Turkey has taken in millions of refugees, but I can’t see them. So it “feels” homogeneous – and I think that’s one of the reasons it feels so relaxed at street level. I’m sure there’s all kinds of politics going on in the background, but when I walk down the street or travel on the Metro in Istanbul, I only get the feeling of a people relaxed about who they are. They are the Turks – and very proud of it.
Everyone else is either a guest or a visitor. And they treat you as such. Very nicely.
But never misbehave here, or they would probably get quite cross.
That’s quite a normal, traditional nationalist way of feeling. You get it everywhere.
Certainly in some places in Africa, where you get reminded you are a “muzungu” or a “farangi” every day.
Some Europeans I think, don’t like it when multiculturalism and mass immigration seems to take this feeling the Turks seem to value so much, away from them. Or it’s diluted.
One area where you show oversight I think Kenan, was your reaction to fans of the Algerian football team causing trouble in France the other day. A couple of motorbike shops were looted in Paris and some things got smashed up. But it’s not just “the same” as something similar happening in Turkey or at other football matches. And it wasn’t just some people failing Norman Tebbit’s cricket test. The reason it was more serious is because it was sectarian in nature.
This was French youth of Algerian decent showing contempt for France, and completely “othering themselves” – publicly letting France know that they don’t like it.
If anyone ever tried that sort of thing in Turkey, I think people would be killed over it.
It’s the kind of issue I’d like to see the Runnymede Trust delving into, but from what I’ve read of them so far, they wouldn’t be interested in getting into that.
No, in your original comment you rejected a report that you hadn’t read, because it came from the Runnymede Trust, an organization that you don’t like. And when I pointed that out, you accepted that was the case: ‘OK, fair point on the first bit. I didn’t read the whole thing before I posted.’
If you were to explain what exactly you mean, I might be able to respond. But, then again, you must know that I have long argued against identity politics and separatist politics:
https://kenanmalik.com/2017/07/23/not-all-politics-is-identity-politics/
https://kenanmalik.com/2019/03/16/the-history-and-politics-of-white-identity/
https://kenanmalik.com/2019/04/08/the-politics-of-identity-left-and-right/
https://kenanmalik.com/2013/04/07/from-the-vaults-a-debate-on-who-speaks-for-me/
https://kenanmalik.com/2015/11/18/identity-and-diversity-three-interviews/
https://kenanmalik.com/2016/09/22/against-the-cultural-turn/
https://kenanmalik.com/2015/02/17/the-failure-of-multiculturalism/
https://kenanmalik.com/2012/05/21/conflicting-credos-but-the-same-vision-of-the-world/
https://kenanmalik.com/2018/09/24/from-equal-rights-to-staying-in-your-lane/
You’ve made this point about Turkey ‘being at ease with itself’ half a dozen times in recent comments. And every time I’ve pointed out that it can only be said by someone who doesn’t know Turkey or who is so obsessed with the question of immigration and racial difference that he refuses to see what’s actually in front of him. Turkey revealss the opposite of what you think it does. It’s a nation torn down the middle over issues of religion, secularism, democracy, culture and national identity. And a nation in which over the past three years, almost 100,000 people have been arrested, 150,000, including 6000 academics and 4000 members of the judicial system, dismissed, almost 200 media outlets shut down, and over 300 journalists arrested. A country at ‘ease with itself? What Turkey actually shows is that social tensions, far greater than those in Britain or France, exist even in countries you see as ‘homogenous’.
For six months the real focus of violence in France has been around the gilets jaunes protests. But because they don’t involve migrants, you ignore it. Violence for you is only something that migrants bring – but that’s because you refuse to see any other violence.
I’m going to forget talking about Turkey. It’s not going anywhere. I was just trying to say how I don’t think Turkey would handle becoming multicultural like Western Europe has. With new people from completely outside the region. It would complicate things greatly.
“If you were to explain what exactly you mean, I might be able to respond.”
It’s the very issue of black youth separating themselves off from the mainstream society.
It starts to happen for many, when they go to their new secondary school.
It’s pretty darn obvious, so I don’t know why you don’t understand what I mean.
Just listen to any of the rappers or grime artists talking about growing up and what their influences were. I already linked to a three year old interview by Stormzy. He emphasised how crucial it was to be seen as “being the real deal” and not a fake.
I’ve also mentioned one of John McWhorter’s early books from 2003 called “Authentically Black”. It’s about America, but much of it applies to Britain too.
But it’s more than identity politics. It’s living an identity. And why people feel a need to conform to certain ideas of how they present themselves. Even the way they talk.
It’s because we can’t get to the bottom of it in Britain, that the likes of the police struggle with race so much. They don’t know how to deal with the complexity.
The easiest way out has always to claim racism.
And just one point, I read in that Runnymede Trust report of the early 1980s riots being referred to as “the uprisings”. It’s for precisely that kind of reason that I’ve always had a problem with people like that.
On the trouble caused by French Algerian youth – I think French people will find it more disturbing than I do, because I don’t live there. Many parts of France that have big Arab populations have quite a tension about “the situation” …… since Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo particularly. I felt it myself when I was in France a couple of years ago.
There were Army patrols walking through the streets of Nice.
Of course it’s going to look like sectarian provocation if Arab youths come out and start behaving aggressively in the streets.
If I ask you explain what you mean and your response is ‘it’s so obvious I don’t know why you don’t understand what I mean’, it suggests that it’s anything but obvious and you’re unable to explain what you mean.
Let’s pose this issue a different way. Ten years ago the panic about gangs and knife crime was not in London but in Glasgow, which was then referred to as the ‘murder capital of Europe’. Many of those leading the fight against knife crime in London have taken on board much of what Glasgow did to reduce rates in the city. But here’s the thing: In Glasgow, the perpetrators were primarily white. So, perhaps you can explain how ‘black separatist culture’ was responsible for gang violence and knife crime in Glasgow, and how tackling such a culture helped reduce knife crime rates in the city? And if it was not responsible in Glasgow, perhaps the issue is far more complex than you suggest, in London too.
Both Glasgow and the London knife crime situations are very complex and nuanced.
And I don’t claim to be able to explain them all easily and succinctly.
They require a lot of detail and analysis – and here I don’t think there’s the space for it.
However, I do think that loose comparisons between Glasgow and London, (which has been talked about a lot in a lazy way in the media) are going to equate two very different situations.
Glasgow violence goes back decades and has a particular history. I don’t claim to know that in detail, but it was often quite localised, particularly in edge of the city housing estates. It was (I presume) something that young people got drawn into, just because they were living there. Once you have a history of this estate being the enemies of people on that estate, it can just rumble on for years and years. Scotland had its “Ned” culture, and I saw it close up myself a few times when I lived there for a while.
There would be of course some parallels with what goes on with the London knife culture, but they’re not as strong as some people have been making out. And I think Scotland’s were easier to treat and deal with than London’s will ever be.
For a start, it’s a different degree of alienation. The Glasgow youths were white.
They didn’t face that extra complexity that being young and black in Britain can bring.
I’ve heard lots of talk about the way they tackled the problem in Scotland – and I think it would have been easier to get through to the young people just by talking to them and mentoring them.
With the London knife culture problems, talking and mentoring is a whole lot harder. The street culture is so strong, and it’s hard for establishment people to communicate with youths who are heavily into the street culture.
At the same time, you’ve got loads of ex-gang members and ex-criminals who want to be paid to be mentors to the younger guys still involved. I don’t know how much attention you pay to this Kenan, but it’s people like ex-criminal Sheldon Thomas the media always seem to be turning to for answers. But I really don’t trust these guys, even if some of them seem to be genuine now.
Others I’ve heard speaking, seem to regard it as a post-criminal life career move.
They talk about having all this experience and more crucially the “credibility” with the young gang youths still involved. And they talk about how it’s only people like them who can turn these boys around. Which actually might have some truth in it, but I still find it quite distasteful.
That black boys have invented their own little world of the street sub-culture is what I meant by it being “pretty obvious”. But I can’t now go into seventeen paragraphs trying to describe it all.
But just remember that John McWhorter phrase “Therapeutic Alienation”.
That’s a key to much of it. (Googling the term brings up a few articles on it).
One powerful Guardian article I still remember, is this one about Mark Duggan’s friend Marcus Knox-Hooke. The man who was said to have started the 2011 riots after Duggan was killed.
He’s painting himself as a victim in this article, but he’s made his choices all along the way.
He sounds like a very selfish and narcissistic person.
Probably typical of the kind of people he formed friendships and alliances with.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jun/26/man-accused-of-starting-2011-london-riots-mark-duggan
I’m glad you accept that the ‘knife crime situations are very complex and nuanced’. Unfortunately it’s not what you’ve been arguing till now (not just in this post, but in a whole series of responses to various posts of mine). And in these comments, you’ve made two basic points about knife crime. First, that it is the product of mass immigration (that’s why, according to you, ‘homogenous’ Turkey doesn’t have knife crime.) And second, that it is the product of ‘black separatist culture’. You haven’t until now suggested that anything else might be responsible (if you have, please show me). This is hardly a ‘complex and nuanced’ argument. Nor indeed is the claim that it’s much harder ‘for establishment people to communicate with [black] youths who are heavily into the street culture’ than with white youth’. Any evidence for that, or is that this another of your ‘It’s so obvious I don’t have to justify it’ arguments?
I’m quite aware that I’ve written far too much on here already, so it’s difficult to know how to get into subjects that are so involved and take time to unwind.
You keep throwing it back on me to explain everything, but I’d ask you, where did “The Woolwich Boys” phenomenon come from? I’ve posted their YouTubes before, and there’s hundreds of others like them. All black guys in nearly all black environments.
The easiest way to cut straight to some of the things I’m trying to get at, would be to just watch videos like this. A picture paints a thousand words they say – and a video can do that too.
Which I suppose someone can come back with: “Yes, and what’s your point?”
And insist that’s got nothing to do with race or immigration.
As there are white guys like that too, and that chap is probably born in London.
But even if he’s as English as the next person, that’s a new street culture in Waltham Forest.
And it’s based on some convoluted and made up black street identity nonsense.
I’ve asked what’s up with it and why does it exist. I’ve got my own ideas, but they’re not fit for being put into words on here right now.
This is another video on the same channel – this time from my home borough of Croydon.
I used to catch the bus to school from right where this video is shot, outside West Croydon train station. It wasn’t an “endz” back then. But you seem to insist that immigration has got nothing to do with it.
And do I have to say it? I’m not anti immigration. I just like to be honest about it though.
You mentioned that arc of poverty, which runs through the northern part of Croydon.
It didn’t used to be so poor. My parents bought their first house there in the 1960s.
It was nearly all white and had a Conservative MP.
There’s enough of an African community there now, for one of the old pubs to have changed it’s name from “The Spread Eagle” to “The Gold Coast” and now it’s a pub for the Ghanaian community. Packed out when Ghana plays a football match. Which is all great. But you can’t say that the changing demographics have nothing to do with immigration.
And that must include the “arc of poverty” too. And from where this rap culture in the Croydon video is getting its people from.
And I haven’t said that Turkey doesn’t have a knife culture. I just can’t see any evidence of it is all I’ve said. I’m sure there are some tough suburbs of places that I just haven’t been to. But there’s nothing obvious like you get in England ….. or France for that matter.
There the gang culture can be right in your face too. You just see it if you’re in a French city.
As for the argument that it’s harder for established mentors to get through to black kids who are heavily into the “on road” culture …. I can only offer you the evidence of what people like Stafford Scott (and all the other people who want funding to be mentors) say.
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/stafford-scott
There’s a lot in those two videos, and if you can’t pick it out, then I can’t begin to try to explain it to you. It’s pretty obvious, but it would take a couple of chapters to spell it all out in words.
I’m not asking you to ‘explain everything’, just to justify your arguments rather than insisting that ‘It’s pretty darn obvious, so I don’t know why you don’t understand what I mean’ as a way of avoiding having to explain what you mean. And without also constantly ignoring what you’ve previously written and changing your argument as you see fit. Earlier in the thread, when I asked you how immigration and black separatist culture was responsible for gang violence and knife crime in Glasgow, you responded that ‘Both Glasgow and the London knife crime situations are very complex and nuanced’. Now you seem to have forgotten complexity and nuance and gone back to explaining everything by immigration and black separatist culture. However, since this discussion is going nowhere, I’ll just leave it at that.
Quote: “Officials eyeing you with contempt. Police treating you as scum. A sense of being constantly watched and judged by professionals.”
That’s how you started the piece. Like all the blame for these social problems lies with the authorities. It reminds me of this other newspaper article by a former black policeman.
“Why police don’t understand how to stop young black men stabbing each other”
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/knife-crime-london-gangs-black-youth-police-stop-and-search-a8763956.html
I don’t agree with him either. I’m not surprised he ended up having problems in his job as a police officer. He’s too ideological and has that kind of “Black Lives Matter” world view which is almost impossible to argue with.
Glasgow and black London gang and knife crime have got very little in common.
Or more accurately maybe – they’ve got a lot that makes them very different to each other.
So I don’t know why it’s up to me to make a big analysis about them. Both sets of people are young men without much direction. I was only talking about the situation with the London black street culture. Glasgow has nothing to do with it.
You will have heard today about Feltham young offenders prison being in a terrible state due to (probably) both staff resources, but also the fact that they find it difficult to deal with the London gang structure and culture. Half the inmates there are black.
There’s no need to bring Glasgow or anything else into it.
The videos I did clearly show up a really appalling situation.
One that nearly everyone on the left just hides from because they can’t face the implications.
My own sister is a “white flight” statistic because she was living in the middle of the north Croydon “arc of poverty”. In one of those “hood zones”. Her husband was second generation Indian, so it can’t have been traditional “pure racism” that got them to move further out of London.
I think one of the biggest drivers of modern racism amongst white people, is this feeling that what they witness with their own eyes just gets buried and never spoken about properly.
And it’s so much easier to fall back on accusations of racism and the usual useless analysis.
No wonder the right wing love it when stories like Jussie Smollett and that case from Georgia at the weekend break. I’m sure you saw that one. The black Georgia Democrat woman who had that viral video of her crying after being told to go back where she came from at a supermarket checkout. Just like Trump did to the congresswomen.
But it looks like he never said those words. Oh dear, slightly embarrassing for all those who backed her.
These accusations of racism all the time are tiresome and fuel actual racism I think.
It’s probably why some of those Trump supporters at his rally were chanting “send her back”.
People get fed up with the way the anti-racist momentum in society is headed by zealots.
There is racism too of course, but the definition of it is being perverted.
That’s why I back Jeremy Hunt for not even wanting to “go there” when he was invited to denounce Trump as a racist. Telling people to “go back” is wrong, but modern diversity is struggling to find harmony. Wherever it is there are difficult problems.
Just joining in with “Trump’s a racist” bandwagons, is pointless.
What good does it do?
The two videos I posted above are powerful examples of something out of control.
It’s only going to get worse (or at least continue) because we are so far away from knowing how to even describe it.
To elderly members of my extended Irish family who came to London in the 1950s and 60s, you might hear now and again quite innocent statements like: “Didn’t Croydon get very rough?”
An uncle of mine who lived in Thornton Heath in the 60s and 70s, but then went back to Ireland, couldn’t believe it when I drove him around the area a couple of years ago when he was over. And we didn’t even come across any of these hoodie gang boys, but it was just the demographic transformation that amazed him. And not amazed in a particularly good way.
That would make him “a racist” I suppose, but it’s pretty normal for people to be like that.
There’s a lot of Africans down here in Izmir Turkey, and I’d love to know how they get on here.
The Muslim ones go to mosque and African people sit out at the tea shops down in one area near where I’m staying. But I do wonder how many Africans the regular Turks would tolerate before they started to think things were changing too much.
I’m aware every day I’ve been here, that this used to be a Greek majority city and Turkish nationalism couldn’t tolerate them and drove them out.
So would it be any different for any other minority coming in today?
It’s racism, but it’s also just flawed human nature.
Shall we complete the quote from my article by adding the next two sentences that you omitted? Here they are:
‘Such is likely to be your experience if you are working class. Such is also likely to be your experience if you are of black or minority ethnic origin.’
The whole point of the article was that minorities suffer many of the same problems as working class people, and for much the same reasons (most are part of the working class). It’s striking, and telling, that you should ignore that point completely, and produce comment after comment criticising those who claim that everything is about racism and insisting, too, that the real problem is immigration, black people and black culture.
Far from saying ‘it’s all about racism’, I’m saying something very different. Hence ‘Such is likely to be your experience if you are working class. Such is also likely to be your experience if you are of black or minority ethnic origin.’ But you have to ignore it because it doesn’t fit in with your narrative that it’s all about black people, or black culture or immigration or diversity. You don’t read what someone actually writes but rather imagine what is written to fit in with your one-eyed perspective. I have a certain strand of critics who accuse me of wanting to ‘reduce everything to class’. You are the mirror image of such critics. You often accuse the ‘left’ of being ‘obsessed’ by race. Actually, you’re the one who’s obsessed by race, and can only see the world, and social problems, through racial eyes.
I can see why you don’t want to ‘bring Glasgow or anything else into it’, because to do so would demolish your argument. You’d like to look at London in isolation because you imagine that to do is more helpful for your ‘black culture’ argument. The trouble is, you can never understand anything in isolation, only in context. And part of the context of understanding knife crime in London is knife crime in other British cities, including Glasgow. And looking at the issue in context suggests that it is far more complex than your ‘it’s black culture’ argument will allow for. I can only assume that when you wrote earlier in the thread that ‘Both Glasgow and the London knife crime situations are very complex and nuanced’, you were merely trying to deflect the question, before returning to your simplistic analysis.
Telling four non-white American citizens, three of whom were born in the USA, and all of whom are elected representatives, to ‘go home’ and ‘fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came’ because you don’t like their criticisms is as straightforwardly racist as it gets. The fact that you, like Hunt, refuse to call something racist ‘racist’ is the issue here. If you want to talk about ‘perverting the definition of racism’, that might be a good place to start. ‘What good does it do?’, you ask. When it comes to white people you claim that ‘what they witness with their own eyes just gets buried and never spoken about properly’ and that’s a problem. When it comes to black people, however, you think it does not do any good to ‘speak properly’ about what they witness or face or have to endure, and you’d rather it was buried. I wonder why?
In an ideal world, the article would be correct.
But we’re not in an ideal world, but in a turbo-capitalist one, where everyone is at war with everyone else. Few want to be, but hey have no choice in the matter.
Thus as things stand, the born-here working-classes and migrants are forced to compete in a Britain that is becoming poorer and more insecure for most, even in the suburbs.
Too many liberals have wanted the best of both worlds – a liberal, ethnically-diverse capitalism which will also preserve Western affluence; for them at least !
But Capitalism can’t be made kindlier and more enlightened – it leads sooner or later to the Third Reich or to Rwanda 1994.
Therefore getting rid of Capitalism is the practical and inescapable first step to a better world, not (as liberals hope) a vague, utopian aspiration for somewhere down the line. It is they who are muddled and utopian.
As Jesus of Nazareth put it: “You cannot serve both Goodness and Money” (Matthew 6:24)
In an ideal world, the article would be correct.
But we’re not in an ideal world, but in a turbo-capitalist one, where everyone is at war with everyone else. Few want to be, but hey have no choice in the matter.
Thus as things stand, the born-here working-classes and migrants are forced to compete in a Britain that is becoming poorer and more insecure for most, even in the suburbs
Too many liberals have wanted the best of both worlds – a liberal, ethnically-diverse capitalism which will also preserve Western affluence; for them at least !
But Capitalism can’t be made kindlier and more enlightened – it leads sooner or later to the Third Reich or to Rwanda 1994.
In an ideal world, the article would be correct.
But we’re not in an ideal world, but in a turbo-capitalist one, where everyone is at war with everyone else. Few want to be, but hey have no choice in the matter.
Thus as things stand, the born-here working-classes and migrants are forced to compete in a Britain that is becoming poorer and more insecure for most, even in the suburbs.
Too many liberals have wanted the best of both worlds – a liberal, ethnically-diverse capitalism which will also preserve Western affluence; for them at least !
But Capitalism can’t be made kindlier and more enlightened – it leads sooner or later to the Third Reich or to Rwanda 1994.
Therefore getting rid of Capitalism is the practical and inescapable first step to a better world, not (as liberals hope) a vague, utopian aspiration for somewhere down the line. It is they who are muddled and utopian.
As Jesus of Nazareth put it: “You cannot serve both Goodness and Money” (Matthew 6:24)
I’m reading the Runnymede Trust report now …. and so far, I’m deeply unimpressed.
From the very beginning, with the first chapter titled “Setting the scene: Structural challenges in the midst of social cleansing”. It’s terrible. It’s just a lot of working class and minority people being asked for their perceptions.
This is an example:
“I went to a primary school in Earl’s Court and it was very middle-, upper-class kind of children. A lot of them have American parents and they’re getting tutors from the age of three and four, they’re learning things way before their time so when they get into school, even if they’re not necessarily intelligent, they get a head start.
Dalaeja, 20s, Black Caribbean, Kensington”
And another:
“In Sacred Heart [Secondary School], I did notice [class segregation] but that’s because I wasn’t in my “ends” any more. I started identifying that, wow, people from Barnes and Roehampton were all white and they were in my school. Whereas all the people from Westbourne Park and Ladbroke Grove, they were all mixed. We were all ethnic. I was like, that’s weird, because even their interaction with us was
a bit like ‘Oh, the ghettos’, but it was like, we did the same tests to get into the school, you know?
Daniela, 30s, Hispanic, Kensington”
This can end up sounding like Robert Kilroy Silk’s low-brow television show.
And by the way, I’d really like to be able to live in Kensington, but there’s no way I ever could.
But Hispanic people of immigrant origin have managed it. Good for them. Things can’t be that bad.
I’d like to see this report get a much wider reading.
A Daily Mail serialisation of it would be great.
I wonder if many people who read Kenan’s piece in The Observer are bothering with it.
Yes, that’s what a qualitative survey is – asking people for their views, and using that as empirical data, rather inventing views as the basis for a study. Your problem seems to be that the people interviewed don’t say what you’d like them to say. Perhaps the Runnymede Trust should only have interviewed people of whom you approve? Or perhaps your perception of what people’s lives are like doesn’t actually match the reality of their lives?
And, no, they don’t live in your image of what Kensington is like. The Borough of Kensington & Chelsea may include some of the poshest areas in London, but it also includes some of the poorest. Grenfell Tower, for example, is in the borough. If you don’t recognize that, I wonder how much you really know of London, and of the lives of working class people living here?
I’m from London. I’ve been a van driver and courier all over it so I know what Kensington and Chelsea looks like. And a flat is a flat. It’s the location that’s so excellent. I’ll never get one though, as their system of council flat allocation favours only residents – or immigrants who manage to make Kensington and Chelsea their “home borough”.
There’s probably a scam somewhere with how you do that, but most regular Londoners don’t know what they are. Maybe you just move into an overcrowded flat there first, subletting someone else’s council flat maybe, then you apply for one of your own from there. And having no other home borough where they can send you. They’d tell me just to clear off back to my own borough.
And I’m reading the people’s interviews in the qualitative survey.
About how “the posh kids” from the middle class school down the road had a snooty attitude.
It’s stuff like that. And if you turn up at university talking about your ”endz” – then yes, some of the middle class people there will probably think you’re “ghetto”.
On page 15, there’s a chapter heading: “ ‘They see you as below them’: Navigating social stigma”
This report gives the impression that the British “diversity experiment” has been a total failure.
No wonder that London gives me a bad feeling. There’s seething resentment, race hate and jealousy running just under the surface. If it’s that bad now, why would people want open borders and make it even worse?
I also looked up the “About Us” sections of these two websites and the “Trust for London” charity. They sound like typical middle class charity “jobs for us” scams, like a lot of charities are.
https://www.trustforlondon.org.uk/about/
I’m sure they do some good work, but having worked for a charity myself once, I’m a bit cynical. The one I worked for had a boardroom and the portraits of all the leading people around the walls with all their titles and OBEs etc.
But I’m still going through the report. How many other people who read the piece on Sunday have? Hardly none probably. Only middle class people would read such a thing.
Again, since you claim to know the area so well, you’d also know that there are many parts of the borough that are far from being ‘excellent locations’. It has some of the most deprived areas in London, and is by far the most unequal borough in London.
The reason for the housing squeeze in the borough has little to do with migration. Rather it’s to do with lack of house building, the selling off of council flats, the affluent areas squeezing out the poorer residents and the Tory policy of social cleansing.
Unless there’s something wrong with the flats themselves, there are no bad locations in Kensington and Chelsea. Just compare those postcodes with crap places in rubbish locations.
Stuck out on the edge of London with only a really rubbish shopping parade to walk to.
Like the New Addington estate in Croydon for example.
As for unequal, well it may be, but that’s because it’s the richest borough in the U.K.
It can never be worse than some of the estates in south London.
As for you saying that the housing squeeze is little to do with migration. That’s just as bad as making false claims the other way. Yes the council housing has been sold off etc, but the demand would outstrip any possible supply – unless it was closely rationed. Which is why nearly all councils don’t help people who have stronger connections outside the borough.
The idea that you can just build more of everything doesn’t add up. You can’t double the number of homes in Kensington and Chelsea. Or hugely increase the number of semi detached houses with big gardens in Bromley. This idea of making London a mega-city, relies on plans to completely transform the place. You know that the populations of Westminster and Brent are majority foreign born. You couldn’t do large scale house building in Westminster so that all the people who used to live there could come back.
That suggests that you don’t know Kensington and Chelsea as well as you imagine you do. The north of the borough has some of the most deprived areas in London. Here, for instance, is the London data from the ‘English Indices of Deprivation’. Look at Map 2. And the description of the areas of greatest deprivation in London:
‘There is a crescent of deprivation from Enfield south through Haringey to Islington, Camden and Hackney and east through Tower Hamlets and Newham into Barking and Dagenham, weakly reflected from Croydon north and then across through Lambeth, Southwark, Lewisham and Greenwich. Another clear, though smaller, cluster flows from the centre of Brent through the northern parts of Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea into Westminster.’
Those hostile to immigration often make this point. A Migration Observatory study suggests that there is no conclusive evidence on this. There is, however, conclusive evidence of a lack of house building, of the selling off of social housing, and of social cleansing policies.
I shall certainly study those reports, though the first one won’t load, but I can find others from that “English Indices of Deprivation”. I think I’ll be pretty familiar with much of the geography of it. It’s been a perverse kind of interest of mine for a long time. I have even walked around the Broadwater Farm estate a couple of times in the past and that’s not a thing many people who don’t live there of have reason to go there would do.
But I do have to admit upfront, I have never been able to take these official kind of long reports as being as thorough as they might think they are. The kind of people who compile them are of a certain type. I looked at the people behind the Runnymede Trust and that other group who did that report you linked to earlier. There’s a page of them all standing for a portrait picture.
I said the other day, that I was in Bulgaria for a bit just before I came to Turkey and that I spent an hour one morning walking up through what I’ve seen called “the worst slum in Europe”.
It’s a Roma gypsy housing estate in the city of Plovdiv.
This is it, and this blog pretty much describes what I saw myself.
I didn’t hang around as long as this guy though.
https://yomadic.com/stolipinovo-gypsy-ghetto/
The reason I mention this, is because I can imagine how one of these dry reports into that estate and the plight of those gypsy people, would also be too academic for its own good.
It would miss calling some things out for what they were (or how I see they were).
In that Bulgarian estate, you could do a hundred pages on all the neglect and discrimination that those people have faced going back through to the 19th century, but it would still probably not want to describe some of the more difficult issues. About much of it being the difficulty of integrating the Roma people because of the negative aspects of their culture.
I’m pretty sure reports about “arcs of deprivation” will have similar problems.
London offers so much opportunity compared to other places in the world, that if you fail there, it might not just be because of other people keeping you down.
I was in Addis Ababa earlier this year, and there I saw real deprivation and inequality.
There, the boys who in London are all wondering around in their little “hoodie world” are out on the street offering to wash your shoes. No one gives you money, you have to earn it.
And when you don’t have it, you sleep on the streets.
Or just a couple of months ago in Ukraine, I saw loads of elderly women who sit out on the street trying to sell a few eggs or vegetables. That’s poverty. You see it here in Turkey too.
In London, it’s a poverty of attitude that’s the biggest problem.
And I’ve worked with loads of black guys who become hard working London delivery drivers in their 30s and 40s, who (once you get to know them a bit) will tell you about their “misspent youth” when they didn’t work and just got into trouble with the police. You can’t blame it all on institutional racism and white people.
Not wanting to sound like a Tory, I do think there is something in the idea that welfarism helped create these problems. John McWhorter goes into a lot of detail about this (although he’s become more liberal of late) but in some of his stuff from over ten years ago, he said that it was the welfare culture that helped form the African American ghettos.
And before that time, even as racism and oppression from the state were so much higher, black communities had been much more resilient and self-sustaining.
I think there’s definitely something in that, and that the complexities of culture and of being minorities in a seemingly racist country all play a big role in making these situations.
Talking about my country Germany statistics say that about 30% of the refugees from Africa or muslim countries who arrived since 2015 have found jobs. 70% are living on welfare, and they are definitely not part of the working vlass.
What is being perpetrated on refugees today — concentration camps in the EU and US — faces the working class tomorrow. These same attacks will be used against “illegal” strikes, exposures of war crimes like that of Assange/Manning and Wikileaks, climate and anti-war protestors … all to say the class divide is presenting itself more forcefully every day. AND in response, we now have Amazon workers protesting internationally on Prime Day and rallying to the defense of immigrants (See: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/07/16/amaz-j16.html), striking Matamoros autoworkers in Mexico appealing to their class brothers in the US, Uber workers protesting in many countries. “Gig” workers, temp workers and all workers–no matter the ethnicity–are facing the same international financial elite. That fact is becoming clearer, no matter the incessant “divide and conquer” noise of racism and identity politics.
What these reports reveal is that too often we stress the wrong differences and ignore the commonalities that matter.
The divergences between the indigenous working classes and the non-indigenous working classes will generally reveal differences rather than commonalities in a country where migration led population growth is reducing food security, reducing green infrastructure and reducing ecosystem services.
As such, this dynamic plays out in all other important spheres of national life which directly relate to security and wellbeing.
Ecologically, migration led population growth results in loss of green land and green infrastructure, wildlife and biodiversity and ecosystems which are all essential components of the ecological means of survival.
Environmentally, migration led population growth requires import dependancies which requires free trade which directly leads to dramatically increased co2 emissions, land grabbing and deforestation which similarly reduces the ecological means of survival as climatic, environmental and ecological disruptions intensify.
Similarly, migration led population growth increases pollution, increases waste, increases high impact consumption of materials and energy.
Economically, migration led population growth increases housing costs as rents and house prices rise through increased demand, public service provision per capita is scaled down especially in a fiscal environment of high budget deficits and low end working class wages are depreciated by either suppressing wages down to the minimum wage or cutting wages by £2 to £5 per hour. Whilst these depreciations are generally considered in significant by the liberal middle classes, they are significant in the lived experience of the working class.
Therefore it becomes clear that the differences between the indigenous working classes and the non indigenous working classes is acute with the ecological, economic and social security of the former being actively threatened by the liberty of the latter.
In terms of commonalities, both are being forced to eek out a quality of life with less which makes both vulnerable and desperate with increased likelihood of fraudulent behaviour, increased likelihood of criminal behaviour or increased likelihood of antisocial behaviour as what is being witnessed across large cities across the country.
A barely concealed hostility to the indigenous population which seeks to protect its ecological means of survival from human expansionism in the form of migration led population growth is anti-humanism.
Building more houses and expanding a national population into green infrastructure and thereby destroying a nation’s ecological means of survival is anti-humanism.
Human survival intersects with the ecological means of survival which requires healthy ecosystems and adequate land for ecosystems to thrive. Building houses to accommodate migration led population growth whilst UK food security is only 60% is anti-humanism.
Seeking to preserve a nation’s ecological means of survival by curbing housing growth will of course result in increased housing costs as per market price mechanisms. Empirically this is evidenced by landlords increasing rents as a result of the high demand created by mass immigration. Similarly, mass migration when it intersects with the destruction of a nation’s ecological means of survival puts demand pressures on public services, creates a highly competitive environment for jobs and wages leading to social and cultural conflicts. These are all symptoms of anti-humanism.
In the main, there is no empirical research because this sort of research is not funded or published. It is not funded or published because the results will clearly show that the active encouragement of migration led population growth is anti-humanism, an anti-humanism that is largely driven by anthropocentism which in itself is anti-ecological.
Anti-humanism and anthropocentism are paradoxically intertwined through a denialism of both.