THE GUARDIAN: Enough of the patronising myths about the ‘white working-class’

Description

Gillian Evans at Manchester University argues that the economic and social conditions of working class community formation in the period around the second world war still has resonance today. Far from being a golden age, as it is often presented by professional nostalgists, workers in this period faced “appalling poverty and insecurity”, which could only really be mitigated via “social wealth” – the creation of tight networks of mutual dependency, which also acted as gatekeepers for jobs and housing.

Evans describes the result as “place-ism”, a fierce protection of territory that led to suspicion of “outsiders of all kinds”, be they immigrants from the commonwealth, bureaucrats telling them what to do, or even other working-class people from different areas.