Still loathed - but getting ever angrier

Five years after the publication of my book, 'Despised', the working class has the elites on the run

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

Five years ago last Thursday, my book Despised: why the modern left loathes the working class was published.

In the book, which was written from my vantage point as a longstanding labour movement activist, I argue that the left political establishment’s decision to imbibe a toxic brew of economic liberalism and cultural progressivism had caused it to forfeit the support of millions of voters across working-class Britain.

In particular, the Labour party, which so many of the working classes had historically voted for to improve their lot in life, had transmuted into a vehicle for social activists, student radicals and middle-class graduates living in our fashionable cities and university towns.

Having embraced globalisation, mass immigration and hard multiculturalism – all things that caused disorientation and resentment in traditional working-class communities – the party found that many of its once-loyal voters had abandoned it and now found solace in right-wing populist parties. Labour had only itself to blame, and it would take near-revolutionary reform inside the party for the situation to be remedied.

Despised was reviewed widely when it hit the shelves, including in several national newspapers. Even the Wall Street Journal in the US had something to say about it. Many of the reviews were favourable but, as I expected, parts of the left went nuts over the book. To them, I was a ‘bigot’ and ‘nativist’ who had an outdated view of the working class. My publisher was even threatened with a boycott by a stablemate author who accused it of mainstreaming ‘far-right ideas’.

Five years later, what has changed? Well, there was Labour’s thumping victory in last year’s general election. But as I counselled at the time, the landslide was a loveless one – most voters just wanted rid of the Tories, whatever the alternative – and certainly did not signal a reconciliation between the party and the working class. In fact, post-election data showed that, when compared to the 2019 election, Labour did not increase its share of the vote among the occupational working class at all. And one has only to spend a few minutes in any post-industrial constituency in the north or Midlands to understand that the deep antipathy felt towards the party in such places hasn’t dissipated.

So notwithstanding the general election success, the chasm still exists. If anything, it has grown wider. The cultural divide between, on the one hand, the party’s hyper-progressive representatives and activist base and, on the other, large numbers of working-class voters still imbued with small ‘c’ conservative instincts remains stark.

Shabana Mahmood’s proposals on asylum and immigration are a step in the right direction and will be welcomed by many discontented Britons. But with minimal progress having been made by the government in other crucial areas – such as economic growth, NHS waiting lists and the housing crisis – there seems little incentive for lost working-class voters to return to the Labour fold.

I wrote Despised because it pained me to see how these voters were becoming alienated from my own movement – a movement that was once proud to speak for them – and I knew where things might end up if we continued to ignore them. In fact, I viewed these events in microcosm in my home borough of Barking and Dagenham in east London two decades ago. Back then, the area - which was a Labour stronghold - was subjected to massive economic and social disruption in the form of deindustrialisation and rapid demographic change. Globalisation was doing its very worst, and local people felt trapped in the eye of the storm.

As they saw everything about them deteriorating, they looked to the Labour government – a government many saw as their own – for respite. But all they found were politicians who looked down their noses at them for being unwilling to embrace the new wonders of global capitalism and cosmopolitan liberalism.

And so those citizens turned to the British National party in significant number and, at a local election, put a dozen of that organisation’s representatives on the local council. That’s what happens when voters find that their legitimate concerns are ignored by the establishment; they turn to radical – and sometimes unsavoury – alternatives.

The type of polarisation that broke out in Barking and Dagenham now exists across large parts of Britain. Communities subjected to profound and detrimental change are stirring. We see it in the asylum hotel protests, the ‘Raise the Colours’ campaign and the big political realignment in the polls.

People in these communities want economic security – but they are crying out for cultural security, too. So they want higher living standards, cheaper bills, a smaller gap between rich and poor, and an interventionist state which backs British industry and strives for full employment. But they also want the political and cultural elites - which they know are populated in large part by those who identify with the modern left - to stop sneering at their proud patriotic and communitarian instincts. They see their nation as a home, not as a shop or outpost of the United Nations. And they get angry when they see the country’s history and traditions repeatedly trashed by those elites.

The traditional working class is as angry today as it was five years ago when Despised was published. And there is more to come from it. Of that, I am certain.

---

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

---

An edited version of the above piece first appeared behind the paywall on the GB News website.