The BNP, Education and the British Working Class

The furore over the inclusion of BNP Nick Griffin on tonight’s Question Time, has prompted a lot of discussion in the media. Last night the BBC’s Newsnight, got in their two pence worth. If you missed it, click on the link to iPlayer and have a listen. It’s somewhere around halfway through I should think.

In amongst all the debate about Griffin, Newsnight did some very interesting contextualisation.

The Newsnight team suggested that the rise of the BNP can be seen in terms of the decline of the white indigenous working class - though we have to be careful with that term ‘indigenous’ as there are now many second or third generation Black and Asian and other Britons, who, since they were born here, would surely count as ‘indigenous’?

Anyhow, Newsnight produced an interesting clip about the long term unemployed in Stoke-on-Trent, some of whom were wheeled on to say that they would be voting BNP. Then there was a studio discussion, which included a guy from the Runnymede Trust, Barbara Follet MP, and author Tim Lott

The man from the Runnymede Trust made the good point - I thought anyway - that race was in a sense neither here nor there - what the film report was documenting was poverty and inequality. To focus on race, he argued, was to swallow the BNP bait, and perceive things through a racist lens.

I was also struck by the comments on education. Several of the speakers saw education as the route out of unemployment, inequality and poverty. Follet, dutifully trotted out the Labour line on this. Admittedly its not very strong sociological evidence, but it seemed to me that the problems with unemployment as shown by the film were not about lack of skills, but about lack of jobs. Maybe we are living in a service economy, but I got the distinct impression that there were precious few lesser skilled service type jobs - shop assistants and such like - in Stoke.

Tim Lott added very usefully to this discussion. Lott comes from a working class background in London, but he got into journalism and has now become an author. He said that when he was growing up - in the 1980s - and before that - the working class attitude towards education was one of suspicion and disdain. Those ‘buying in’ to education - say going to a grammar school, or aiming for university - were seen to be turning their back on their family and their community. Lott also said that the working class - or himself and his friends at least - didn’t want to become educated. For his friends and himself, that was perceived as becoming ’ a middle-class robot’. Shades of Paul Willis, Learning to Labour in a way?

As someone who has worked as a teacher, and indeed likes learning, perhaps I’m contradicting myself. But in many ways, Lott’s tentative suggestions seem convincing. Although I’ve been a teacher and although I am still involved in educationally related work - by writing this blog for example - it seems to me that formal education can in fact be a rather blunt instrument. It can, and I think does, often kill the joy in learning. It’s easy to buy into the whole educational promise if you come from a comfortable background, but if you don’t, not only can it seem alienating, it can be costly - both financially and personally. And real originality and enthusiasm is I think, only found in a few pockets of our education system.I’m not saying that refusal or resistance is the only way out. For myself though, I think I must try to be a subversive robot - if such a contradictory thing can exist.

So the whole discussion drifted some way from the BNP topic. But it was a very provocative digression. Perhaps you’ll find it provocative too. And the linkage between these various elements (education, working class, the BNP) I guess, is a sort of theory that the more inequality increases, the more social stability is threatened; making room for aggressive political parties to express what is arguably just class conflict -albeit in a rather different way to that suggested by Karl Marx.