Essential workers should be essential voices: how can we ensure working class people are as integral to the recovery as they are to getting us through the crisis?
The coronavirus has illuminated who is truly indispensable in modern Britain.
While some are confident this will bring about new-found respect and reward for working class people, I’m sceptical. The financial crash also brought the sense that things wouldn’t be the same again, and they weren’t, but not for the reasons we hoped. Working class people rarely fare well during or after economic turmoil and, with the financial crash in the rear-view mirror, many of us know it.
I worry an anger is building in many working class communities about how inequitably the current costs and risks are being shared. Just like the idea ‘we’re all in it together’ after the crash, the idea this crisis is the same for all of us just isn’t ringing true. The disconnect presents fertile ground for polarisation, pessimism and populism to grow.
The pain in communities is raw and real – and it risks being deepened by middle class activists and commentators too readily racing to talk about the ‘opportunities’ this time presents. Working class movements can, however, start to think – carefully, cautiously, compassionately – about the things we can win together if we stick together. The young people at RECLAIM kicked this off with a rapid response campaign to thank #TheIndispensables but we will need to have a medium and long term plan if we’re to make sure Britain’s working class comes out of this time stronger and more united.
Right now, YouGov polling for the Times Red Box suggests that there’s a reasonable degree of togetherness but in a recent report the Collective Psychology Project highlighted that there’s a fairly consistent progression in collective emotional responses to major events. The initial ‘heroic’ phase is met with high altruism and is then followed by a ‘honeymoon’ phase of great togetherness and optimism. However, this relatively quickly gives way to a long ‘disillusionment’ phase marked by increased polarisation, feelings of abandonment and concerns about the limits of the response.
It is hard to say whether we have reached a disillusionment phase of this crisis, but the toll on people’s mental health is already clear. Ipsos Mori polling for Kings College London finds that half of us feel more anxious and depressed and 29% are finding lockdown extremely difficult (or expect to) in the next four weeks (notably rising to 42% for 16-24 year olds).
Working class people are already experiencing greater threats to their jobs (as reported by the Resolution Foundation), living in more densely populated areas (as covered here by the FT), not having enough space at home (as reported by the JRF), not having as much access to decent green spaces (as reported by CABE), having poorer lung health due to being more likely be exposed to air pollution (as reported by Asthma UK), being more likely to have underlying health conditions (as reported by the King’s Fund), finding it harder to get online or have enough devices for everyone at home (as reported by the Sutton Trust), having less ability to home school (also reported by the Sutton Trust), having less access to affordable food (as reported by the Food Foundation), being less able to access cheap credit (as reported by the Centre for Social Justice) and low paid workers are disproportionally represented in the key worker jobs that expose them and families to increased risk (as reported by the IFS).
Put even more starkly, Office of National Statistics data shows that living in the poorest neighbourhoods means you're twice as likely to die from the coronavirus as people living in the richest ones.
Strangely, I’m not sure that horrific reality is the thing likely to generate the most anger. Having a shorter life due to your postcode was already the pre-coronavirus reality. Instead it’s often the subtle, more visible things that anger people more.
Who is (not) in the room always shows in a crisis
Being working class often makes you acutely aware of the little ways people unconsciously reveal they’re better off. Despite us now being physically separate, social media, video calls and simply how we talk about our lockdown experience is giving people greater insight into ‘how the other half lives’. People won’t easily forget their sneak-peek into the bigger, nicer, greener space of others doing less essential work or making fewer sacrifices.
This moment also tells us a lot about who makes decisions and what informs them. There’s one example that features frequently in discussions at RECLAIM. In early March, during the government’s new daily press conference, ministers and scientists provided guidance on what to do if you suspect someone in your home has the virus. It encouraged those self-isolating ‘to use a separate bathroom’ if possible. This obviously isn’t bad guidance, but the assumption this was more important to cover than how, for example, you deal with isolating in an already-overcrowded home, is telling. I similarly doubt the need for guidance – then flouted in at least one notable case – on whether you can use your second home will be forgotten either.
Some working class people will also be asking themselves why it is that old unemployment and housing benefit rates (the improvements noted in Ashwin Kumar’s essay) aren’t good enough now that it isn’t just them who need to claim them.
This sore created by the coronavirus is only likely to increase when our divides are further exposed by the lockdown easing. People will spot that middle class professionals are more able to continue to work from home and that middle class young people are benefiting from more home-schooling and tutoring (as reported by the Sutton Trust). The young people we support at RECLAIM already often flagged the state of their high street and related areas as top of their list of local economic concerns. Boarded up shops and ever-decreasing visitors are visible signs of something not being right, and sadly many high streets will look a lot worse when the lockdown ends.
In this context it’s not surprising that people hanker for the past. While activists on Twitter enjoy sharing slogans about how ‘we can’t return to normal, because normal was the problem’, much of the British public have been enjoying nostalgia. Recent research from Thinkbox, the TV marketing body, reveals a lockdown surge in the number of us watching old TV, with Last of the Summer Wine and Only Fools and Horses repeats doing especially well. Spotify has seen something similar, with increased subscriber use of ‘throwback’ playlists.
Part of why we get comfort from the past is that we see it through rose-tinted glasses. Comparisons (many unhelpful) are regularly drawn between this crisis and WW2. Our national mind’s eye view of the end of the war is the street celebrations of VE day. Many hope for something similar at the end of this period. What we don’t tend to reflect on is the disillusionment and anger many people felt soon after 1945.
While some people cautiously but thankfully dreamt of us building back better, many just wanted done with Britain. David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain notes that in spring 1948, just weeks before the creation of the NHS, a Gallup poll found that 42% of people wanted to emigrate (up from 19% in 1945). We also tend to ignore the post-war resurgence of antisemitism on the streets of our cities, showing that hatred and division can quickly re-emerge.
Turning anger into accountability
It’s hard to know what the exact dividing lines will be this time, but in crises there are always those who encourage working class people to fear one another. White people encouraged to fear people of colour, working people in towns and villages told to be wary of those in cities, southerners to suspect northerners and vice versa, and longer-standing residents urged to fear more recent arrivals. As Kitty Usher notes in her essay, one new split in this crisis might be those furloughed and those not.
We face a double threat here – populists on the right exploiting divisions and some on the left being parasitic on people’s pain. There are some who get excited by a crisis, despite all the human misery, because they see this as a necessary price for change. It’s often not even subtle: at one recent webinar for organisers I heard a left activist happily tell people ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m really excited by all this’. Those don’t feel likely to be the words of someone who spends a lot of time truly listening to working class people.
We need to get past the anger and turn it into a drive for real accountability. The list of policy, societal and business responses needed to do justice to those leaning into risk or having to get by with even less is huge. This collection covers a good number of starting points on wages, job security (see Andrew Pakes’ essay), the strength of our social security (see Ashwin Kumar’s essay), housing (see Rachael Orr’s essay), our approach to immigration (see Satbir Singh’s essay) and much more. This will all be vitally important to honouring the country’s other national debt, but so will ensuring working class people have a permanent seat around the country’s top tables, regardless of which party is in power and whether we are facing good times or bad.
We need much more direct involvement of working class people in the decisions that affect our lives, starting with specific youth assemblies as part of the national commission outlined in the introduction to this collection. At every layer of society – not just in the professions, business and politics but in charities and funders too – we need class inclusion to be a core equality concern.
There is a very real risk an unrepresentative charity sector becomes more distant from the country when the register of which organisations survive is taken (as noted on race by Charity So White). As work we supported young people on last year showed, the current approach of some charities inadvertently alienates young working class people. If organisations in any sector want to build back better they will need to look as much at their own practice as the changes they demand in others. At RECLAIM we’re reshaping our work and are pleased to see a growing number of organisations work with us and the young working class people we support to go on co-discovery processes to work out the specific changes needed in their field.
Finally, we all need to get better at explicitly calling out those that sow division amongst working class communities. Emerging research from the US shows this is the best framing approach to counter hateful populism. This approach means campaigners on economic issues getting more comfortable explicitly talking about race and immigration, rather than always hoping to pivot away from them. This also means helping everyone to feel included by being explicit about how policy ideas deliver for working class people whether white, black or brown, a more recent arrival or someone whose family has been here for generations. Most importantly, to be successful this requires campaigners getting as busy delivering better communication messages to the unconverted as they can be debating how best to fine tune them with the choir.
That we owe working class people is so beyond question it unites the Guardian, Telegraph and FT. This situation is also changing so quickly that it’s hard to know what exact prescription of proposals will do their contribution and sacrifice justice. The only way to know for sure is to have working class people round the table when it’s decided. This should be a central legacy of this crisis, the idea that essential workers are essential voices. Working class people more than have the talent, strength and ideas to finally steer the country they so obviously drive. It’s time for all of us to make it happen.