Class | Pandaemonium

WHITE IDENTITY AND WORKING CLASS POLITICS

July 27, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Swedish newspaper Göteborgs-Posten on 21 July 2019. The shift has been dramatic. Even a decade ago, discussion of ‘white rights’ and ‘white identity’ belonged to the fringes of politics. It was Nazi-speak. Today it has become a major political issue on both sides of the Atlantic. Not just the far-right but many mainstream commentators now argue that whites should be able to assert what the political scientist Eric Kaufmann calls their ‘racial self-interest’. Why […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: alain benoist, Class, eric kaufmann, identity politics, nouvelle droite, race, racism, white identity, working class

CLASS REALITIES AND CULTURAL DIVIDES

June 3, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the importance of class as a political issue, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on Boris Johnson and lies.) It was published on 2 June 2019, under the headline ‘Forget culture wars. Class is still the defining force shaping British lives’. If you are a woman living in working-class Middlesbrough, you are likely to die seven years earlier than if you were living in affluent Hart in Hampshire. If you are a […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Politics • Tags: brexit, british politics, Class, conservatives, john cleese, labour party, working class

POSH MAY BE PASSÉ BUT CONTEMPT IS NOT

December 31, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on changing attitudes to class, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on cookery books.) It was published in the Observer, 30 December 2018, under the headline ‘Posh is so passé – today’s elite prefers the myth of the meritocracy’. I’m not posh,’ an irate David Dimbleby told the Today presenter John Humphrys. ‘I come from Wales, as you do.’ Dimbleby, who this month stepped down as host of BBC’s Question Time, was being interviewed by Humphrys, […]

Categories: Britain, Class • Tags: brexit, Class, david dimbleby, david runciman, democracy, donald trump, education, elite, elitism, meritocracy, michael young, populism, poshness, privilege, richard dawkins, technocracy, upper class, working class

BLOOD, SOIL AND CITIZENSHIP

November 5, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on notions of citizenship, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on bootlegging and Bob Dylan). It was published in the Observer, 4 November 2018, under the headline ‘Myths about shared culture have no place in the citizenship debate’. What links Mike Leigh’s new film, Peterloo, to Donald Trump’s threat to deprive children born to undocumented migrants of the right to US citizenship? It might seem an odd question, best left to Only Connect fans. But answering […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: 14th amendment, birthright citizenship, britain, citizenship, Class, donald trump, eric kaufmann, france, jus sanguinis, jus soli, michael walzer, mike leigh, peterloo, usa

BACK TO SCHOOL ON RACE AND CLASS

January 7, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer, 7 January 2018, under the headline ‘In British education, the central issue is class, not ethnicity’. The white working class. It’s a phrase that has become so commonplace that few recognise the sheer oddness, and indeed odiousness, of the concept. It denotes both pity and contempt. On the one hand, it is a description of the ‘left behind’, sections of the population that have lost out through globalisation and deindustrialisation. On the other, […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Race & Immigration • Tags: angela rayner, british politics, Class, education, race, racism, white culture, white working class, working class

GRASPING DIVERSITY, EMBRACING DEMOCRACY

March 5, 2017 by Kenan Malik

© Art Projects International; Courtesy of artist and Art Projects International, New York . This is the keynote talk I gave at the 2017 Karlsruhe Dialogues on ‘The Pluralistic Society and its Enemies’ on 4 March 2017. It was entitled entitled ‘Can Diversity Embrace Democracy? Can Democracy Acknowledge Diversity?’ If there are two issues that define contemporary political debate, they are those of diversity and democracy. From the migration crisis to radical Islam to multiculturalism, fears about the consequences of […]

Categories: Multiculturalism, Politics • Tags: Class, cultural diversity, democracy, diversity, edmund burke, europe, identity politics, left, working class

WHY BRITAIN FAILS IN CLASS

October 1, 2016 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on the grammar schools debate in Britain: The fact that neither selective nor nonselective school systems have improved social mobility in Britain might suggest that the problem lies in the very idea of using schools to engineer a more equal society. A decent education system can help a few individuals progress beyond the circumstances of their birth, but it is unlikely to change fundamentally the social and economic […]

Categories: Britain • Tags: british politics, Class, education, grammar schools, social mobility

BEHIND THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR

August 2, 2014 by Kenan Malik

David Papineau is Professor of Philosophy of Science at King’s College, London. He also publishes More Important Than That, a blog about sport (and about ‘How philosophy can illuminate sport and vice versa’). I am delighted to republish on Pandaemonium his latest post, on the social function of amateur values in sport. My thanks to David for contributing here, and do check out his blog. David Papineau Give Me a Defender of Amateur Values, And I’ll Show You a Hypocrite […]

Categories: Sport • Tags: alf tupper, amateur, Class, cricket

IMMIGRATION AND LOSS

April 26, 2013 by Kenan Malik

On Saturday I reviewed David Goodhart’s book The British Dream which explores, in the words of its subtitle, the ‘successes and failures of post-war immigration’. Goodhart, I suggested, ‘touches on some of the critical issues that we face today’. But ‘his insistence on seeing contemporary problems primarily through the lens of immigration only obscures those issues and makes it more difficult to formulate adequate responses’. Goodhart responded to that review, suggesting that my attempt to marry a critique of multiculturalism […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: british politics, Class, david goodhart, debates, immigration, labour party, multiculturalism, working class