Our leaders have betrayed the noble worker. Oh really?

Our leaders have betrayed the noble worker. Oh really?


Our leaders have betrayed the noble worker. Oh really?
A review of Selina Todd’s ‘The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010’.

The working class may disappoint radicals, says Alan Johnson, but that doesn't mean their best days are over
Alan Johnson
 Walking tall: a Covent Garden market porter, London, c. 1922

Alan Johnson
12 April 2014 9:00 AM
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The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010
Selina Todd
John Murray, pp.295, £20
In his essay on the ‘Peculiarities of the English’, E.P. Thompson gave his theoretical definition of class:

When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways. But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.
Selina Todd has a snappier and more prosaic definition of the working class (‘The People’) as ‘a class of workers who depended on earning a living and were in that way distinguished from the rich who lived on the labour of others’.

Whether it’s more of a thing or a happening, Todd sets out to record its history from 80 years after Thompson’s seminal work, The Making of the English Working Class, ends.

She seeks to describe the unmaking as well as the making, for her contention is that the working class is on the slide, its best days behind it. The period chosen for her study is not as random as it may seem. It revolves around servitude and the franchise. In 1910 there were almost two and a half million servants. Within ten years this had reduced by a million; strident voices from the bourgeoisie were already bemoaning the loss of deference.

In the 1910 election only the 7.7 million men with sufficient property were allowed to vote. By 1929 (the first election under universal suffrage) there were 32 million voters. The Daily Mail (that reliable foghorn against the dangers of social progress) was warning of ‘the flapper vote folly’, arguing that giving young women the vote would take the country backwards.

Todd is excellent in describing the effects that the Great War had on society and her use of servants as barometers of social change brings a fresh voice to this history. She also reminds us that ‘the persistent assumption made by the powerful and privileged that the wilful idleness of the poor caused poverty’ has a long pedigree.

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If the first world war brought emancipation, it was the second that heralded the New Jerusalem. Unfortunately, it’s at this stage that the author begins to indulge her Wolfie Smith theory of social history — the one where the noble worker is constantly betrayed by his leaders.

Attlee’s government may well have created the NHS, nationalised the mines and the railways, implemented Beveridge and begun a huge programme of house-building but its policies ‘constrained working-class people’s power in ways that provoked frustration’. Here’s what those bastards did. They ‘maintained private housing’ and ‘differential wage rates’. It’s a wonder anyone was foolish enough to vote for them.

As for the trade union movement, ‘Workers found that their union officials were granted a seat at the negotiating table, where they frequently became management’s spokesmen.’ We soon learn where Todd’s sympathies lie. Not with the poor sods who spent a lifetime in the service of their fellow workers, negotiating decent pension schemes, improving pay and conditions, constructing disciplinary codes that protected workers against arbitrary dismissal. No — these class traitors were actually sitting down with managers, disgracefully engaging in free collective bargaining.

The real heroes according to this account were those who didn’t bother with the tiresome process of being elected to represent anyone. Men like the self-confessed Beatnik Teddy Boy who Todd introduces us to in breathless admiration. Beatnik Boy wanted unions to fight for ‘the opportunities for creativity, self-expression and participation in everyday working lives’.

As I read this I could hear the rallying cry:

‘What do we want?’
‘The opportunities for creativity, self-expression and participation in everyday working lives.’
‘When do we want it?’
‘Now!’
Todd writes well on education, a subject she is more familiar with. She reminds readers that while the Butler reforms were a vast improvement on what went before, ‘norm referencing’ preserved higher education for a tiny elite. While around a quarter of students qualified for a university place, only 4 per cent actually went. She also points out that grammar schools meant that the majority of children, in the words of the 1959 government-commissioned Crowther Report, were ‘condemned to an abbreviated schooling’.

Constrained by her political prejudices, Todd speaks eloquently of the need for workers to have more control over their working lives but says nothing of the various attempts at industrial democracy in the 1970s or the failure of the British trade union movement to follow the same route as their European brothers and sisters.

She and her Dave Spart contributors bemoan the plight of the working class from 1966 onwards, describing them as ‘the dispossesed’. The legalisation of homosexuality, the decriminalisation of abortion, the race relations and equal pay acts are recognised as important advances, ‘but they indicated the government’s intention that economic and political rights should be attached to individuals rather than to groups’. No they didn’t. They indicated that it was wrong to discriminate against people because of their colour or their sexual orientation. They indicated that we should stop driving working-class girls into the embrace of the back-street abortionist.

There is much in this book’s analysis of where the worship of market forces has taken us, and the author is right to warn of the dangers of an unequal society. But Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s 2009 The Spirit Level said it better, and David Kynaston generally offers a more enlightening social history of the postwar years.

I don’t accept that the working classes have suffered a fall; but I do accept that they’ve been a huge disappointment to people like Selina Todd and her friends.

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The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Classes 1910-2010 by Selina Todd, book review
This excellent account charts the highs and lows of the working classes

Alistair Dawber @AlistairDawber Friday 11 April 20140 comments




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Social change: Women manufacturing munitions for the Great War in 1914 Getty Images
What an excellent book this is. For well over a century, Britain's working class has been celebrated, demonised, romanticised, despised and downtrodden, but rarely has this inhomogeneous yet huge sub-section of society been studied in such detail as afforded by Selina Todd.

Ms Todd, an academic herself of working class stock, approaches her task – to chart the fortunes of the working classes throughout the last 100 years – much as a journalist might.

She listens to and reports on the lives of ordinary people: we hear the story of Ms Todd's own parents – both working class people who attended the trade union college, Ruskin, in Oxford – a couple who wanted everyone's lot to improve but who never “idealized working-class life;” we meet Vivian Nicholson, who was down to her last few pounds in 1961 before winning the then biggest bounty on the football pools (she was penniless again a decade later after telling newspapers of her intention to “spend, spend, spend”).

But we also hear about scores of domestic workers; factory hands; the unemployed and, of course, the upwardly mobile. None in their own right is fascinating, or more interesting than the family next door, but taken together they paint a detailed picture of life for the vast majority of people in Britain over the past 100 years.

Indeed, the fact that the book is peppered with anecdotes of real people, from those working in what was little more than domestic servitude in some cases in the early part of the last century, to the militant trade unionists of the 1960s and 1970s, to the consumers of today is what sets it apart. We learn about those whose lives were changed by fame, fortune and in Vivian's case, the pools (before the greater riches of the National Lottery), to those who became the first property owners under Margaret Thatcher.

The century was marked by more social movement than ever before, but we also hear of the disappointments of those whose attempts at social elevation were thwarted.

But if The People is a social study of the working classes, it is also a warts-and-all political review of the last century. Not only does it chart the hope that came with the formation of the modern Labour Party and its ultimate conversion to the post-Thatcher consensus, it also demonstrates the expedient changes made by the Conservatives to make the agents of the landed and wealthy attractive to those who might naturally eschew such trappings.

The book's final chapters are its best, not because the stories of the people it studies are more interesting or contemporaneous, but because it provides an analysis of what we have all lived through.

For all the gains made by the workings classes, John Major's assertion that Britain is a “classless society”, or the claim made by John Prescott (himself arguably little more than a tease for the less affluent when Tony Blair courted the middle classes in 1997) that we are “all middle class now,” simply doesn't stack up, according to Ms Todd's analysis.

The book concludes in 2010, but it appears that little has improved since the advent of the Coalition government. Indeed, the successors of Mr Blair and Mr Prescott have done little to help the lot of the working classes. The reaction to the economic crisis of recent years has been a crackdown on the “benefits culture” – little more than a naked attack on the poorest.

The focus on “hard working families” or “alarm clock Britain” is simply offensive to the millions who live by hard work but who have been stymied at every turn by a government run in some departments by ideologues.

Ms Todd's great ability as an academic is to avoid writing like one, and that makes her book an accessible and entertaining read. She does not hide her political views, but that makes the book more readable. It also serves as a social history of Britain, and even for those who are not engrossed by the politics, the tales of the ordinary people whose lives spanned the last 100 years are compelling.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-people-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-working-classes-1910-2010-by-selina-todd-book-review-9252081.html