Last week, two leaked videos which first appeared on social media were picked up by newspapers, radio and TV channels.
The first showed Rishi Sunak, the richest MP in parliament, pitching to be Conservative party leader in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
Tie removed and casual, he brazenly told the crowd he’d diverted money away from the most deprived urban areas to the leafy suburbs.
Everyone there was white, except Sunak, who has recently made embarrassing jokes about his “tan”.
Meanwhile, over in Tilbury, Essex, we saw images of Amazon hands walking out after being offered an insulting 35p-per-hour wage rise.
These women and men, lifesavers during the Covid years, who work tirelessly to deliver parcels all over the land, are of every ethnicity and colour. The working classes, both in the public and private sectors, have always been multiracial.
This simple truth has been twisted and falsified by the right over the past decade. Tory influencers and politicians cynically used the British imperialist tactic of divide and rule. They faked concern for the ‘white working class’ about whom they don’t give a damn.
Sunak revealed his party’s true colours. (Both Liz Truss and Sunak have also accused those on benefits of scrounging. Most people on benefits are in work.)
The Tories won a massive majority in 2019 by convincing white victims of Thatcher’s revolution that they’d been betrayed and kept down by unpatriotic ‘liberal elites’ who favoured minorities, migrants and foreigners. The message is potent and effective. All populist governments blame the outsider to gain and retain power.
Let me say this again: the British working classes are far more ethnically varied than the middle and upper classes. My husband is white working class. His parents welcomed me and my son into their family without hesitation.
Mick, my late brother-in-law, also working class, took care of my severely mentally ill sister till he died.
Way back in the 17th century, poor white women in London and Liverpool were marrying black and Chinese sailors and creating mixed communities. Go to any social housing and you will find that rainbow nation. Go to verdant Tunbridge Wells, and you won’t.
A vital new report, They Look Down on Us, from Class, a union-funded think tank, upends many Tory fibs about the “left behind”. Yes, they are patriotic and royalists, but 54% think talking about racism is essential to make society fairer.
And importantly, they now understand how “diverse working-class people share everyday experiences of precarity, prejudice and a lack of power and place. They share values, hopes and desires for their families and their futures”.
Race resentment sown among these Britons is now producing a poor harvest.
With the cost of living crisis hitting millions and collective action gaining support, those divide-and-rule tricks will burn in the sun.
Hallelujah.
