Last weekend rioters tried to burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers in Wath upon Dearne, near Rotherham. One of the first blogs I ever wrote was about Wath upon Dearne, over 7 years ago: sadly I was too optimistic about it’s future.
40 years ago the biggest employer in Wath was Cortonwood colliery. It was here in 1984 the Miner’s Strike started. It was a place where men earned good money and got respect from doing jobs that were dirty, dangerous and dull.
It was a town to the left of Karl Marx on economics, but to the right of Bernard Manning on social policy; a man’s place was in the mines, a woman’s place was in the kitchen, a gay person’s place was in the closet, and an immigrant’s place was behind the counter of a takeaway if they had one at all. Not that different to where I grew up.
Today the biggest employer is Next; they have their back office and distribution centres nearby. There are no shortage of jobs in the local area, and plenty going on. I know because I once outsourced some call centre work down there, and accidentally ended up in the wrong meeting designing a new range of chinos.
But the shift from mining to business processing and warehousing had profound effects on the labour market.
Today a woman’s place is manager of the outbound calls team, LGBT are well represented in management, or product design, and the Asians who owned the takeaways sent their kids to Uni. If they work in Wath at all they run the IT Department and drive BMWs.
And a mans place is? Working in the warehouse if they are lucky. Maybe driving an Uber or Deliveroo. If their male kids don’t want to go to Uni they face the same miserable choices.
The whole social order has changed, and with it a lot of the social cohesion, but most of all unskilled men wanting manual labour have gone from top of the heap to the bottom in a generation.
I am confident that Labour can bring investment to “left behind” places – it was investment from the Blair Government and the EU which transformed Wath into a massive logistics and business support hub.
But what they can’t do is turn back the clock to put unskilled male workers back on top of the pile again. No investment can do that. It is a fundamental economic change. No-one is going to pay premium wages to people with no skills or qualifications.
When workers started to organise they didn’t just establish unions, they set up places like mechanic’s institutes so people could better themselves. My grandad was like that, he learned a trade at night while working down the pits. He was also in some mad book club which sent him improving texts; a mix of left wing politics and swashbuckling adventures. I still have his copy of the Scarlet Pimpernel.
Lots of the immigrant workers I see have the same attitude, they are always on the look out to learn a new skill, get something new on their CV. Anything to get a few bob. They want their kids to go to Uni.
But in place like Wath, and plenty like it, there has developed a deep hatred and mistrust of anyone who wants to get on in life, wants to better themselves, and at the same time a bitter resentment that by not bettering themselves they are being over taken in life.
When riots happen it is common to blame a lack of moral guidance, that the rioters were’t taught right from wrong. I am sceptical of that explanation.
The people who were rioting in Wath were absolutely morally certain that they were right. Their parents had given them moral guidance, and they had given their children in turn the same moral guidance. Every Reform/Farage/Pro-Riot forum and social media group are full of people full of absolute moral certainty; sure in the moral values handed down generation by generation.
They were so full of moral certitude that they felt justified in setting fire to a hotel full of people, so certain that they were morally righteous in taking their country back that they were happy to help themselves with some crocs or a tray of pasties along the way
When they smashed things, or attacked the police the feeling was all the more intoxicating for being moral and righteous. Justified. It was only when they were up in front of the magistrate that they started to realise the error of their ways.
The problem isn’t a lack of morality.
It is that socially conservative values, contempt for education and getting on, and a lack of hope for a better life ahead has curdled into bitterness and resentment: toxic and hostile. Whipped up by the press and politicians into a deep seated hatred of foreigners, and anyone else different from them, anyone rising up and doing well for themselves while they struggle. Clinging to their own sense of victimhood while victimising anyone not like them.
Alon Levy noted in 2018 that fossil fuel extraction provides opportunities (not just coal mining but also oil rig working for example) for poorly-educated but risk-tolerant men to earn big money, and suggests that such men will be among the biggest losers from the greening of the global economy.
Specific regions that depended on fossil fuel extraction (such as the English Red Wall historically) or to a lesser extent on polluting heavy industry more generally (such as the US Rust Belt) have also been losers.
It’s a good point. There used to be industries which paid a premium for men (it was always men) to do manual jobs that were dangerous, dirty, difficult and dull. Towns built on those industries had a particular social order that reflected those premiums. It is not just the greening of the economy which took that away, decades of economic change have removed those jobs, and they will never come back no matter how much people wish for it. The anger towards those who got on and moved on is palpable
Your point about how (presumably white) working-class people in the early days of trade unions were constantly seeking to better themselves (and immigrants how today still are) made me ponder the origins of anti-intellectualism in the British white working class!
In your White privilege and schools post, you appeared to blame grammar schools (and presumably the whole of England would have been affected back in the era when the Tripartite System was generally in force). And on that post I also commented that anti-intellectualism in Kent and Essex specifically may have been a product of incomers enjoying windfall profits from the sale of their former homes in London.
In places like the North East, I wonder if the tight-knit families you brought up (which were likely a product of how dangerous employment such as coal mining reinforced patriarchy) along with the lack of local job opportunities for the highly-educated may also have been a factor? Perhaps parents didn’t their kids to do too well at school for fear that said kids would move away and abandon them just when they needed care in their old age, or perhaps the kids themselves weren’t motivated to study hard if they saw no local application for academic qualifications?
(This also makes me wonder if Muslim immigrant communities — who of course also have very tight-knit families — could offer useful lessons for the white working class?)
Where I grew up in East Durham there was a real resentment towards people who wanted to better themselves – get ideas above their station
I also saw this kind of anti-intellectual attitude first hand (when at primary school I remember bullies mocking me by shouting maths questions at me in the school playground): my question is why people would denigrate those who want to do better for themselves.
A man’s biological investment in human reproduction is only a matter of minutes while a woman’s is 9 months, so it makes sense for a society’s dangerous activities to be done by men: this is also why combat soldiers are overwhelmingly male even though a woman could shoot a gun just as effectively as a man. It only really makes sense for women to serve in combat in a defensive war against a genocidal enemy (eg World War II Red Army, or the IDF or *ZSU today).
* I remember watching a YouTube video for the song “March of the New Army” (I subsequently learned how to sing that, in spite of never having studied any Slavic languages!) which showed Ukrainian military parades, at one point featuring female soldiers: I initially thought that was a post-Soviet affectation, not realizing at the time that the song in question was of a completely opposing origin: it’s a slight modification of the anthem of Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists!