Liberal elites' warped view of the English working class is tearing Britain apart

Metropolitan commentators and politicians used to idolise the provincial English working class. Now these same people are ashamed of them. The working class were once the inspiration for literary classics, from DH Lawrence to Alan Sillitoe. They were voters Labour courted, and their decency and hard work were considered the backbone of this country. Now they are blamed not only for Brexit and Boris Johnson, but for something more fundamental: the creation of a nationalistic, intolerant, and illiberal nation. Who would want to write the equivalent of Sillitoe’s Nottingham classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning today?

This is wrong on substance: the working class of England are highly liberal. It is also rooted in misdiagnosis: the fundamental value that motivates working class people is not nationalism, but an obsession with fairness. Working class people in this country are uninterested in group identities, but cannot bear the idea of people being unfairly treated. That, in turn, means they treat people as individuals in their own right.

Working class voters are highly positive about gay marriage; why should two people who love each other be unable to marry? Ninety per cent would be happy for their child to marry someone from a different ethnic group. They think immigrants who do important work should be welcomed and treated with respect. They were appalled by the Windrush scandal. They loathe bullying in schools. They still revere Churchill as someone who stood up to Nazi bullies.

All of these are tied together by the view that individuals should be treated with decency, respect, and on their own merits. It is why they simultaneously want to see more contributory welfare – where those who have worked harder get better treatment – but more support for those with serious illness and disabilities.

In the hundreds of focus groups I have run in working class towns like Walsall, Rotherham, Preston, Crewe, Oldham, Darlington and Whitehaven, I can think of only a tiny handful of people who expressed a desire for an end to all immigration. I have never heard anyone reminisce about the Empire. And I have also never heard working class people spew bile about middle-class Left-wingers in London; thankfully, because they are essentially apolitical, they do not know how much they are despised by these elites.

To be clear: the English working class will neither support nor sustain a populist political party (they talk fondly of David Cameron, for goodness sake). This supposed threat is all in the minds of middle class Left-wingers; people who equate “Brexit and Trump” are delusional.

This warped vision of the jingoism of the English has led to bizarre political contortions which could have dangerous consequences. The biggest threat is Scottish independence. The SNP attracts moral support among the English Left, who deem Scottish nationalism progressive in comparison to the aggressive nationalism of England. We can hardly be surprised that support for independence is growing, when increasing numbers of influential English people openly suggest swathes of their own people are not worthy of respect.

Hostility towards the English working class is also behind the BBC’s recent pivot Left, most obviously in its temporary decision to ban the singing of Rule, Britannia. At one level, who cares? But it reflected a fear in the corporation that they might be aligned, somehow, with the lunatics they assume frequent Northern towns.

Labour has done its best to distance itself from the English working class in the last decade – not just on issues, but in its tone and attitude towards these voters too. Labour sneered at working class England and got rejected across England in return. Keir Starmer is not an idiot and will surely seek to reverse this trend; he knows Labour can never take power if it is not competitive once again in the towns and small cities of the Midlands and North. This means the Tories need to rapidly embrace the opportunity they now have to become an authentically working class party.

Coronavirus got in the way of the Government’s practical plans to improve life in working class towns; they were washed away as the virus took hold. But there was something holding them back, in any case. This was the residual fear among middle class Southern Tories that, just maybe, the English working class might drag them to the cultural Right – a place they do not want to be. They need to get over this fear. The English working class are not conventionally politically correct, but they provide a liberal bulwark against extremism of all kinds; they are not the facilitators of it.

James Frayne is founding partner of Public First and author of Meet the People, a guide to public opinion