Gots dem white man's working class blues

Madeline Bunting has read New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict by Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young, and says that the white working class are victims of the post-war welfare state settlement:

The nub of the argument put forward by the authors, Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young, is that the well-intentioned policies of a rights-based welfare state in which benefits and housing were awarded on the basis of need, not past contributions, directly contributed to the ratcheting up of racial tension as poor incoming Bangladeshis were given priority for council housing. The white working-class extended families were broken up as their offspring were moved to Essex for housing. The ones who suffered most were women, left bereft of their social status as the arbiters of family and neighbourhood life. The latter both fragmented. And the blame is pinned on the welfare state (not helped by the economic decline of the docklands in the 60s and 70s).

The problem, claim the authors, was the betrayal of the working class's vision of the welfare state as a system of mutual insurance - to tide one over a tough patch - and its transformation into a welfare state of entitlement and rights based on need. It had moral force, but to many interviewees it was unfair: anyone can live off the system, they complained.

But what's the option? A social insurance-based system more like that of France and Germany? And what of this sense of privilege and obligation? Are today's street chavs supposed to be rewarded for their great-grandfathers' efforts in the war, while second and even third generation non-whites are left hanging in the wind?

And perhaps more to the point, what do we really expect to happen in post-industrial wastelands? The East End is poor not because of the welfare state, but for the same reasons that Bolton and Merseyside are: they were dependent on industry, and industry is dead. And so those who had the capacity to move out did, and those who moved in have been those who need to be close to the service jobs they can get, but who can't afford to live anywhere nicer than Newham or wherever. Repeat: traditional jobs disappeared, most whites quite sensibly moved out in pursuit of replacement jobs, and poor immigrants who had nowhere else they could afford moved in. And the whites who've remained all this time are the ones who were, in social policy terms, the hardest to help. They're the ones who haven't climbed up and out like so many of their neighbours did before them in the Eighties.

For more on this, I'll be reading Mumford and Power's East Enders over the next few days - have just dipped into it and one problem area it rightly flags up is the effect of need-based social housing policies on neighbourhood cohesion and race relations. And I would like to see the Dench et al book when I get some time.

Over at Harry's Place, the commenters and indeed the poster have seen fit to use this as an occasion to bash perfidious lefties and social engineering types. Whodda thunk it? Amidst the bile (it's all the fault of posh lefties in Islington who never asked these poor downtrodden agency-less people what they wanted), one commenter has a bit of perspective, and the capacity to realise that answers aren't always simple and it ain't always your favourite target's fault:

With the proviso of obviously not having read it (I have ordered it!), I wonder how much blame can be laid at the door of the welfare state for movement out of the East End and into Essex, and the break up of large family groupings, and the decline of social networks. The former would surely have happened anyway, particularly with the decline of large employers, such as the docks, plus the need to replace very poor housing, and the latter two seem to me to be partly a universal phenomenon, not just a working-class one (though this was the thesis of "Bowling Alone", and that didn't really prove it all that well).

Furthermore I think using terms such as 'working class' can be highly misleading. What does it mean? If it means the social class below the middle class then that group is not the same group as it was in the 1950s. It is far smaller, it is far less white, it is relatively less successful (by definition). If we look at only those who are white it is far, far smaller than it was in the 1950s. In reality, what is now seen as the lower middle class, is in many cases what would formerly be considered part of the working class. I suspect this grouping has been the main beneficiary of the welfare state, but perhaps in Essex not the East End.