The battle over England’s multi-racial working class:
- Karima Shah
- May 28
- 3 min read
By Ben Rogaly
There is a battle underway in England. It is being fought over what the nation stands for and
to whom it belongs. Coming to a head at the time of the 2016 referendum and in its
aftermath, the battle has been amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pivots are race
and immigration: rather than promoting hierarchies of difference and racialized entitlement
to national belonging, the need to work together against the causes of exploitation and
oppression has never been greater.
‘Sometimes we have to do the preparatory work’, Angela Davis reminds us, to be
organised when the chance comes to push to change the agenda, ‘even though we don’t yet
see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s going to be possible. These words speak to a
position that wishes to see all humans as human, even in the face of powerful racial
nationalist perspectives emerging from corporate-owned media and many
parliamentarians.
Recent expressions of racial nationalism range from high level
government threats to bring in the navy to prevent people from trying to cross the English
Channel in dinghies to seek asylum, to Blue Labour-influenced criticisms of
immigration and ethnic diversity.
The former, humanizing approach holds that people with different individual histories of
movement or staying put, different skin colours, different degrees of affiliation to one or
other established religious tradition (or none) can coexist peacefully and with equal rights
and representation in a particular territory.
But proponents of racial nationalism argue that such an approach emerges from rich,
comfortable people, a ‘cosmopolitan elite’ and should therefore be dismissed. This elite, so
the racial nationalists’ argument goes, is based in metropolitan cities, especially certain
parts of London, and is comfortable with everyday multi-culture and immigration.
Meanwhile, England’s ‘indigenous white working class’ has been ignored or dismissed. Their
‘legitimate grievances’ need to be addressed.
Though portrayed as having been silenced by the powerful, racial nationalism has a home in
the best-selling newspapers and in the current leadership of the two main political parties.
It is often scripted by highly paid London-based journalists. An outside observer attempting
an assessment based on a sweep of British mainstream media would be hard-pressed not to
conclude that, as Britain moves towards ‘taking back control of its borders at the end of the
Brexit transition period on 31st December 2020, racial nationalism is the mood of the nation.
Look a little deeper though and a non-elite cosmopolitanism is alive and kicking. It exists
alongside and in interaction with ongoing violent and more subtle racism. As sociologist Les
Back has shown through the example of the monthly silent walk by survivors and bereaved
relatives following the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, hope can emerge from anger. It is
significant that since the brutal murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Black Lives
Matter demonstrations in the UK, as in the US, have been multiracial. In my new book,
Stories from a Migrant City: Living and Working Together in the Shadow of Brexit, I draw on
eight years of research in a small, Leave-voting, English city to remind people about
England’s multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-nationality working-class, and offer vignettes of everyday urban multi-culture – among them moments when workers came together to push
back against the excesses of ‘management through algorithms’.
This research unsettles the categorisation of people as either ‘migrant’ or ‘local’. It
acknowledges the racially differentiated ways in which national borders operate and the
ongoing racist violence of the ‘hostile environment’, including immigration detention and
deportation. But through listening to over a hundred people’s stories it also draws attention
to the common experience of displacement in many people’s lives, whether through moving
between places, or staying in a place unable to leave while the place itself changes.
It quickly became known during the pandemic that disproportionate numbers of people
racialised as black and brown were dying from coronavirus. As with international migrants,
many racialised people are ‘key workers’ in historically low-paid, low-status occupations and
were endangered by having to continue to work in unsafe workplaces when others were
locked down at home. As my research shows, sharing stories helps us to see each other as
people rather than categories, and thus, rather than succumbing to divisive narratives, can
equip us to work together to contest the depredations of contemporary capitalism.
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