males as standard.
And so they just got on with it. The blue-collar vocations laid out for them did not require higher education, focusing much more on practical and skills-based learning. Back then, the economy had a clear place for this group of men – there would be a job at a local factory where many of their mates worked, and there they would stay until retirement. A lack of social mobility was not a deal-breaker for white working-class men as long as they had employment and their way of life remained unchanged.
But change was in the air, whether they liked it or not. As soon as the elites in Europe and America came to realize that the movement of industry and people was required to maintain their margins as the rest of the world started to develop, the argument that the indigenous population should be entitled to work for a fair day’s pay became worthless. The need to meet the demand for labour after the war ushered in immigration, nearly always in working-class communities. Some working-class men did resent the newcomers, fearing change as many people do, but most welcomed migrants into their homes, local pubs, and families. Some even marched in solidarity with these new immigrants against far-right groups. It’s fair to say that the response to Windrush, the ship that brought one of the first groups of post-Second World War immigrants to the UK, and the subsequent waves of immigration that followed, was mixed across the country. But unlike in America, the overarching moral response was always ‘live and let live’, enabling Britain to claim the mantle of being a bastion of tolerance and diversity. However, this was based on the expectation that the ‘agreement’ between the working class and the elites would be upheld.
But as infrastructure in other parts of the world developed, it was no longer necessary to import labour and skills to the West, since we could just as easily export the working-class jobs to the rest of the world where costs (wages) were cheaper. Great for bosses and those with capital to invest; not so great for the white working-class male.
Fast-forward a few decades to the twenty-first century, and working-class neighbourhoods have experienced yet more dramatic change. The Thatcherite revolution in the UK, and Reaganomics in the US, oversaw deindustrialization of their respective industrial bases, resulting in the erosion of traditional white working-class jobs. Economically, the decline in manufacturing has hit the working-class male the hardest, demoting him in many cases from full-time breadwinner for his family and household. His jobs have been replaced by less well-paid and often part-time service sector jobs that (from a traditional male perspective) require skills aligned more with female workers. Many of these jobs are paid as zero hours contracts intended to supplement the family income, as opposed to replacing a bread-winner’s salary, yet in many cases this is exactly what has happened. The result is quite a come-down for the white working-class man: as a factory worker he took pride in the goods he made, which were shipped across the globe, but somehow making and serving lattes for a minimum wage doesn’t quite match up.
If white working-class males wanted to maintain their standard of living they would need to do what ‘foreign’ parents were demanding of their kids – work hard at school. But by now, white working-class males had the lowest levels of educational attainment and parents without a traditional reverence for higher education, and this trend continued.
A white working-class boy is less than half as likely to get five good GCSEs, including the core subjects, as the average student in England.*
At present, white working-class boys have the lowest literacy levels in British schools and are the least likely group to attend university. Throw in the free movement of higher-educated and skilled multilingual migrants from former communist Eastern Europe, with a couple of colourful demagogues who can spice up discontent with provocative statements, and we have ourselves a working-class populist revolt seasoned with an unfortunate taste of resentment. As an ardent pro-EU campaigner, I am disheartened to see the results of this shift to the right in Western democracies – but I also understand the legitimate concerns of those communities that have been failed by globalization. I have no criticism for the victims – they are the symptom, not the cause – and until we treat the cause, the symptoms will just get worse.
Toxic masculinity
A key exacerbating factor in the populist revolt we are now witnessing is the disenfranchised white working-class male’s notion of traditional masculinity. Within this subculture, authority tends to be spurned, and violence – often in the form of hooliganism – is deemed acceptable. Males in academia and office jobs are not viewed as ‘proper men’: they have soft hands, never break a sweat, and don’t build or make anything. They put on ‘airs and graces’ and work in offices where political correctness wins the day. The white working-class male prefers blunt straight-talking.
But what happens when the world moves on from this version of masculinity? Professor Michael Kimmel, a sociologist at Stony Brook University in New York, is one of the world’s leading authorities on masculinity. He examines the parallel phenomenon happening in the US in his book Angry White Men, and writes that many of the white working-class men from forgotten Rust Belt communities feel ‘betrayed by the country they love, discarded like trash on the side of the information superhighway’. In many ways the plight of the white working-class male may perhaps be the easiest to dissect in terms of understanding where the growing dissent comes from. According to Kimmel, the men he studied see positions that were once their birthright disappearing, and are no longer sure where they fit in the societal pecking order. They are white and male in a society that values those two attributes above all others – yet being white and male no longer has the same guarantees, at least not for white men who look and sound like them.
In adult men this state of confusion can lead to what Michael Kimmel describes as ‘aggrieved entitlement’, and the need for scapegoats in the form of ‘feminazis’ like Hillary Clinton or Mexican immigrants, who need to be ‘walled’ out of America in order to make the country ‘Great Again’.
This is not a new phenomenon: Kimmel’s book was written in 2013, long before the 2016 US election, and documentary filmmaker Michael Moore also tried to alert Liberals and Democrats about the anger that was building in rural communities up and down the country,* even predicting in his 2016 film, Michael Moore in Trumpland, that Trump would win. But it’s only now that the real scale of the problem is making itself apparent. Aside from the obvious political ramifications, in America it has also resulted in an alarming increase in early death rates among the middle-aged. This growing pandemic has been termed ‘deaths of despair’ by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.† They argue that there is a direct correlation between the economic decline of this group and a sharp rise in deaths caused by drugs, alcohol poisoning, and suicide.*
In part, the growing pushback against patriarchy and ‘toxic masculinity’ has made politicians reluctant to address the issues of white working-class boys in our education system. In a warped kind of way it’s easier to acknowledge inequality where women or people of colour are concerned, and harder to have that same level of concern for white males in a society that was designed to promote their dominance and progress. What we mustn’t forget is that not all white males have been beneficiaries of this system.
Daily Telegraph reporter Martin Daubney has been a passionate advocate for tackling this emergency. He believes the problem is in part due to a breakdown in the family structure in many of these communities, with high numbers of absent fathers and a serious lack of positive male role models.† Daubney also thinks that we need a larger number of male teachers from this background who can fill the void – currently 85 per cent of teachers are female. The general consensus is that ‘boisterous’ masculine energy is often viewed as ‘disruptive or destructive’ in the classroom, and cuts to physical activities in our schools mean we no longer have an adequate outlet for this energy. Daubney advocates a similar programme to the ‘Young Men’s Initiative’ in New York, designed to train and promote more black male teachers in New York schools. He believes it is vital that we encourage more white working-class men into teaching.
Indeed, had a concerted effort been made by governments through education and training to ensure that white working-class men (and in fact all ‘other’ groups) were adequately equipped and able to benefit from globalization rather than becoming