Breaking Britain’s Working Class: the Left Out

Abstract

This chapter draws upon ethnographic research within working-class communities in Nottingham and East London, families which rely upon public services, welfare benefits, and social housing. Since 2010 they are being subject to harsh cuts in their welfare benefits and also social goods through austerity policy linked to the banking crash of 2008. Rather than focus upon the economic situation of the poorest, this chapter addresses the key argument that there has been a significant change in the representation of working-class people, who have been negatively re-branded and stigmatised over the last 30 years. Successive governments have connected economic poverty with cultural and aspirational poverty. Austerity has been a constructed narrative that centres upon removing poverty by removing the practices, and the culture of the poor. The chapter argues that this rhetoric does the work that is needed in order to push through and justify inequalities. Those inequalities have taken the working class from positions of relative stability into serious precarity and undermined their ability to exert agency.