Five years ago this week, my book Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class was published.
In my book, which I wrote from the vantage point of a longstanding Labour movement activist, I argue that the Left political establishment’s decision to imbibe a toxic brew of economic liberalism and cultural progressivism had caused it to forfeit the support of millions of voters across working-class Britain.
In particular, the Labour Party, which so many of the working classes had historically voted for to improve their lot in life, had transmuted into a vehicle for social activists, student radicals and middle-class graduates living in our fashionable cities and university towns.
Having embraced globalisation, mass immigration and hard multiculturalism – all things that caused disorientation and resentment in traditional working-class communities – the party found that many of its once-loyal voters had abandoned it and now found solace in Right-wing populist parties. Labour had only itself to blame, and it would take near-revolutionary reform inside the party for the situation to be remedied.
Despised was widely reviewed when it hit the shelves. Even the Wall Street Journal had something to say about it. Many of the reviews were favourable, but, as I expected, parts of the Left went nuts over the book.
To them, I was a “bigot” and “nativist” who had an old-fashioned view of the working class. My publisher was even threatened with a boycott by a stablemate author who accused it of mainstreaming “far-right ideas”.
Five years later, what has changed? Well, there was Labour’s thumping victory in last year’s general election. But as I counselled at the time, the landslide was a loveless one and certainly did not signal a reconciliation between the party and the working class.
In fact, post-election data showed that, when compared to the 2019 election, Labour did not increase its share of the vote among the occupational working class at all.
My polemic against the Left's loathing of the working class has renewed urgency five years on - Paul Embery | GB/XI wrote Despised because it pained me to see how these voters were becoming alienated from my own movement – a movement that was once proud to speak for them – and I knew where things might end up if we continued to ignore them.
In fact, I viewed these events in microcosm in my home borough of Barking and Dagenham in east London two decades ago.
Back then, the area was subjected to massive economic and social disruption in the form of deindustrialisation and rapid demographic change. Globalisation was doing its very worst, and local people felt trapped in the eye of the storm.
As they saw everything about them deteriorating, they looked to the Labour government – a government many saw as their own – for respite. But all they found were politicians who looked down their noses at them for being unwilling to embrace the new religion of cosmopolitan liberalism.
And so those citizens turned to the British National Party in significant numbers and, at a local election, put a dozen of that party’s representatives on the local council.
That’s what happens when voters find that their legitimate concerns are ignored by the establishment. They turn to radical – and sometimes deeply unsavoury – alternatives.
The type of polarisation that broke out in Barking and Dagenham now exists across large parts of Britain. Communities subjected to profound and detrimental change are stirring. We see it in the asylum hotel protests, the “Raise the Colours” campaign and the big political realignment in the polls.
People in these communities want economic security – but they are crying out for cultural security too. So they want higher living standards, cheaper bills, a smaller gap between rich and poor, and an interventionist State which backs British industry and strives for full employment.
But they also want the political and cultural elites to stop sneering at their proud patriotic and communitarian instincts.
They see their nation as a home, not as a shop or outpost of the United Nations. And they get angry when they see the country’s history and traditions repeatedly trashed by those same elites.
The traditional working class is as angry today as it was five years ago when Despised was published. And there is more to come from them. Of that, I am certain.
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