Review of Joel Budd’s Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class
By Andy Yorke
Underdogs is a well-researched book attacking stereotypes of the ‘white working class’, though problematically it accepts the term itself. He condemns the right’s claims of an ‘alliance between white elites, corporations and minorities against the white working class’, as victims of mass immigration and woke policies.
Joel Budd’s timely investigation, published after the August 2024 Southport race riots, breaks down many of these myths with statistics and arguments, particularly exposing the realities of racism and white privilege in housing and the job market. He sensitively explores many different areas from Teesside to the Isle of Wight, listening to and defending some of the most downtrodden in Britain.
However, Budd’s mainstream framework for analysing class is flawed. He defends the white working class as a meaningful category, despite recognising that there is a big gap between a retired, homeowning white steelworker living in a village on a decent pension and a single mother struggling to make ends meet with part-time work in a small coastal town down South.
The point is his example here is true whether she is black or white. Both will share immediate needs – low rent, good quality social housing, free nurseries, well-paying jobs – and might live in the same neighbourhood. Ultimately his findings contradict his assumptions, including that a ‘white working class’ exists as a distinct and self-conscious entity, while his liberal solutions are impotent answers to the forward march of the right.
Underdogs uses a subjective definition of class relying on identity (‘if they tick that box on the census, if they describe themselves that way, or if I think most people would see them as such’). For analysis Budd simplifies the official government classification system of occupations into a two-class scheme, middle versus working class. He puts teachers, nurses and other higher-educated or white-collar workers in the middle class while putting self-employed tradesmen – plumbers, electricians, builders – in the working class.
Every use of ‘class’ in his analysis has to be taken with more than a pinch of salt. His definition fundamentally skews his analysis of who is working class, where they live, what their views are. For Marxists a person’s class is defined by their relationship to the means of production and exchange, by whether they own capital or sell their labour power for a wage or salary.
Budd recognises that the ‘British’ white working class is contradictory. It has added Eastern European workers in the pre-Brexit decades; Irish immigrants and their children would not necessarily have been included in the past. He recognises it is internally stratified and that hypocritical ‘journalists, politicians and researchers’ have focused on its more privileged, conservative voices.
He shows many workers are not racist, especially the younger generation and, where it exists, their racism is contradictory and based in part on misinformation. He also insists the middle classes are just as racist, hiding behind sympathy for the workers, so that ‘the prejudices of the suburban golf club are imputed to the council-estate boxing club. It is a kind of ventriloquized xenophobia.’
All this is useful, but recognising this stratification within the working class fatally undermines the concept of the white working class as a sociological category or political entity, separate from Black, Asian and immigrant workers.
Privilege and Racism
Most damaging for the right wing’s arguments, Budd clearly asserts that racism is real and non-white workers and people in Britain are worse off than their white counterparts:
‘This book will disappoint anybody who believes that white working-class Britons are the very hardest-done-by members of society. They have certainly been abused by some politicians and the mass media, but not as badly as some other groups (if you don’t believe me, ask an immigrant from Romania or Somalia). Relative to other working-class people, they are well favoured in some ways.’
He points to housing, where 5% of ‘working-class white Britons’ in England and Wales live in households without enough bedrooms ‘but others have it much worse’, e.g. black Africans (33 percent) and Bangladeshis (40 percent). The fact that the latter are on average younger and more likely to live in families ‘explains only some of the difference.’
The housing crisis is a major issue running throughout the discussion on race and class. Previously white, run-down estates, where immigrants now move in for cheaper housing create a creeping frontier for racism. Likewise toxic policies that concentrate asylum seekers in economically collapsed towns like Hartlepool do the same. Huge waiting lists for council houses are the final straw, creating a hearing for Farage’s demagogy.
Many of the indices of deprivation and inequality are rooted in the economic polarisation between a Southeast centred on London, and many ‘left behind’ areas or coastal towns whose fishing, industry and tourism has withered. Budd asserts that even large cities like Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds are nowhere near as economically dynamic as London, partly due to bad transport links. However, in terms of deprived households and child poverty, boroughs like Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham are as bad if not worse than cities in the North or Midlands.
The education debate
A 2005 Economist article by Budd kicked off the manufactured crisis over the lower educational attainment of white working class boys, and in Underdogs, to his credit, he apologises for getting it wrong. While other racial groups have pulled ahead of ‘white working class’ pupils (Bangladeshis since 2011) he admits that Afro-Caribbean students still ‘fare worse than white Britons at school’.
He identifies racist attitudes by teachers, stereotyping black boys as troublemakers and less intelligent. Statistics show they are excluded at a higher rate than white kids. This results in lower grades – even for better-off black children.
But despite this he clings to his argument that the white working class has specific issues and disadvantages, in the final analysis centred on education. He attacks the left, stating these are ‘irreducible facts, not statistical mirages as the political left has sometimes argued’. But his own statistics show even on this narrow point, this is not the case.
There is an exceptionally wide gap between the attainment of working class whites and middle class whites, which drags down the white average. In fact it is this class differential that represents the more pressing crisis. But where is the outcry over this?
In terms of those ethnic groups pulling ahead of white students (for now), Budd also shows how their parents’ focus on education is calculated to ‘overcome racial bias’ in the job market. This is key to understanding the whole phenomenon. After reminding the reader of studies and the shocking statistics of racial discrimination in the job market, he explains:
‘Minority ethnic Britons often approach higher education differently from white Britons. They tend to live at home and commute to campus. They are drawn to courses that seem likely to lead directly to jobs, such as business, law or pharmacology, and are unlikely to study the creative arts. They strain to get a place somewhere, even at a recruiting university. They go even if their grades are barely adequate: black and Asian teenagers are more likely to start degrees than white Britons with identical grades. After they graduate, they often struggle to find jobs… Bangladeshi, Pakistani, black Caribbean and black African men with degrees earn less than white Britons with degrees. Remarkably, and depressingly, a thirty-year-old Pakistani man who has gone to university earns only as much as a thirty-year-old white British man who has not gone.’
In contrast Budd highlights the reality of many white, economically marginal areas where young white workers get a job locally instead of leaving to go to university, high quality apprenticeships or job-rich areas like London. They stay in a materially poorer economic environment but find jobs (often lower paid, seasonal, or precarious), cheap housing and childcare with the support of a stable network of family and friends.
The huge housing costs of cities where the jobs are creates a further disincentive to move, as does university debt. Crucially, he notes that whites do just as well in education until teenage years, where they start to weigh up their options.
In contrast, he notes that Asian men with university degrees are actually less mobile than white graduates. But since nearly half (4.3 million) of BAME people live in London, Manchester, and Birmingham alone, they are where the universities and the jobs are, rather than in ‘decaying small towns’.
Budd is honest enough to explain the motive behind this gap is the need to avoid racism in the jobs market, though his conclusions that white youth are more jobs savvy is less convincing:
‘Working-class black and Asian Britons, especially girls, simply must do well in school if they are to avoid lives of penury… Working-class white Britons, especially boys, need not do so well in order to achieve a decent standard of living… they have enough sense to see how the British job market works. They weigh their few options, and they make their decision.’
As both groups get worse off, these strategies have more meagre returns, with those living in the most deprived wards trapped in poverty. Budd’s lukewarm solutions can’t reverse that or build a fighting unity.
Lame conclusions
As a long-time Economist journalist and editor, it is unsurprising that Budd sees no problem with capitalism. His prescriptions on how to help all workers are token policy tweaks that even he admits would take ‘decades’. His proposal for more integration for immigrants is a dog-whistle for racism based on skin colour.
This is made clear when Budd contrasts with immigrants from Poland and Lithuania, who have become part of the white working class with black and Asian workers, whether Black British or immigrants, who are automatically excluded from the concept. Fundamentally this reveals its basic racist premise.
Equating the left with the right, despite the latter’s cynical, dangerous demagogy, may mean better reviews from the Tory press, but Underdogs actually proves the left’s case. White workers’ disadvantage is indeed based on class and residence in ‘left behind’ areas. This does not trump racism, even in education.
Ony a Marxist analysis based on class and struggle can explain these issues. Budd could never see that the ex-miner and single working mums have fundamental, historic class interests that are the same, to overthrow the system that promises only a worse future.
