White light, white heat

The BBC is running adverts for a series of programmes on white people, specifically white working-class British people. These adverts (and the programmes I will definitely not watch) might score low on my personal exponential scale of media-generated rage, when compared to the ID cards news item, but they still make me really angry.

The television adverts show a homely white male, whose face is gradually overwritten with phrases in other languages, such as Urdu, until his face becomes well nigh invisible. There’s an image on the website. Someone from the BBC was (ineptly) justifying this, on BBC Breakfast, against a reasonable complaint that it was using images designed to promote the idea that allowing non-white people to express themselves was wiping out white British people.

My problems with the way this image is used include:

  • The inherent assumption that the lumpenness of the man’s face identified him as working class. (As opposed to the shiny chiselled, buffed, botoxed – almost all white – features that normally appear in the media.)
  • The flow of images that are supposed to represent whiteness include a politician, Enoch Powell, who presented an almost-socially-acceptable face of 1970s racism. When I say “almost-socially-acceptable” face of racism, he was in fact quite rightly on the far margins even of the Conservative party. He was only regarded as “not a dangerous lunatic” by the extreme far right. Who could formerly count their supporters in tens.
  • The almost-subliminal message is that the white working class is inherently beleaguered. And racist. And stupid.

It seems that the spirit of the execrable Powell is indeed alive and well at the BBC. The web page presents the results of a poll that is supposed to show the “despair and fear among white Britons.”

IMAO, if anything has caused “despair and fear” among the white working class, it is not “immigration” – which seems to be the underlying message of this BBC nonsense – it is a combination of the following circumstances :

  • The destruction of UK manufacturing industry
  • Decades of precarious employment
  • The weakening of traditional working class institutions, such as trade unions
  • The suborning of the traditional working class political voice to the nuLabour project
  • The disintegration of the post-war welfare state
  • And plenty more. Had we but world enough and time, then I’d rant about this for weeks…… Last year, Ian Curtis’ short series The Trap managed to discuss (concisely) some of the social changes that are destroying or damaging our institutions.

Marginalising “whiteness”, my arse.

In pursuit of its dubious sensationalist ends, the BBC ran a blog post on the Whitest Place in Britain. Well, this is apparently the whitest place in Britain because it was destroyed when the British coal industry was destroyed, in the 1980s (under Tony Blair’s apparent role model, Margaret Thatcher.) Nothing took its place. So, unsurprisingly, it didn’t prove a big draw for immigrants or Britsih people of any “race”.

If you want to find out what the English white working classes think, then this area of the country is a pretty good place to start.

Well, no. It isn’t. It might be a good place to look at the social impact of shutting down the industrial capacity of a town. But that’s about it. These people aren’t marginalised because they are white. They are no more white than working people who live in more prosperous parts of the country. Indeed they are about equally as white as the great majority of the people in the House of Commons, for example.

So, discussing them as if they are badly off BECAUSE they are white is nonsense. Seriously irresponsible and dangerous nonsense.