I THINK both Wallace and David Selbourne would do well to read Orwell's 'Politics and the English language'. Much of what Wallace has written here along with the quotes from Selbourne, would be barely comprehensible to most people. It is pretentious academic verbiage that doesn't illuminate at all.
The cloth cap Tory or the Tory in clogs, is a well known archetype within the English working class and I meet them frequently. We've always known there were plenty of Tory voters who lived in council houses and why do you think the Irish socialist, Robert Tressell called his famous book the 'Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist'? You can't read Tressell's book without being fully aware that his socialist character, Owen, (Tressell himself), is largely contemptuous of many of his fellow workers for their political ignorance and apathy, their conservative outlook and the fact that they acquiesce, in their own exploitation. "They were the enemy" Tressell wrote, they not only "submitted like so many cattle to the existing state of things, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion to alter it."
It is often said of the book that you can identify many of the characters with people you know and that is perfectly true. The same arguments that you find Tressell's working men having between themselves, you can still hear played out to this very day.
However, it would be a great mistake to tar all the working class with the same brush as middle-class academics, who write about them,are inclined to do. Anyone who has been involved in English left politics, will know, that most of the participants are middle-class university types, the sort who make up the bulk of the Labour Party membership today.
Yet, the people who most influenced me politically, were not academics like Dave Selbourne, who I knew as a student, but ordinary working-class people, like the anarchist copytaker, Jim Pinkerton, from Ashton-under-Lyne and the opera buff, Jack Macpherson, who lived in a council house with his wife Margaret, in Dukinfield. Both these men were representative of what I would call, the class conscious working-class, politically savvy, as well as highly cultured.
I think Brexit is a big mistake, for a variety of reasons, and though it seems to have politicised many working class people, who previously may have been indifferent or apathetic to politics and felt powerless, I suspect it will be economically damaging to many of the Brexiteers in the long run. Yet, one can't deny, that with Brexit, the worm has turned; the working-class voter has found a voice and far from feeling impotent and powerless as they used to do, they now know they have some influence and can make a difference. Now the genie is out of the bottle it might be difficult to put it back.
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THANKS for Mr Pattison’s reply on my article which raises some interesting issues, particularly concerning what he considers to be my penchant for ‘pretentious academic verbiage’ along with the social philosopher David Selbourne whose writings I drew upon.
His beef at the outset seems to be with my perceived stylistic idiosyncrasies and resort to pedantry, which he considers ‘barely comprehensible to most people’. This seems to be an ad hominem attack and a disingenuous slice of anti-intellectualism. Northern Voices amongst other things is a forum for literate and stimulating thought-pieces of various complexity and for employing a ‘highbrow’ discourse I make no apologies. I suggest my vocabulary is hardly a radical departure from the general tenor and house style of NV.
Leftists struggle to push this faux anti-intellectualism because it is so obviously built on contradiction. Leftists are often the chattering classes incarnate. Only in the discredited regimes of ‘actually existing socialism’ did intellectuals face real persecution, but of course those societies had a very different dynamic in contrast to their Western European counterparts.
However even thinkers like Selbourne has taken issue with the “incomprehensible scholasticism, emanating from the nether darkness of academia where nothing grows”, so it seems a certain ‘anti-intellectual intellectualism’ is justified. Certainly Selbourne and other writers of his ilk have largely avoided the dense impenetrable obscurantism of post-modernism that was so successfully lampooned and deservedly so in the Sokal Affair. So Selbourne might be galled to learn his former student accuse him of this very vice that has been so assiduously critiqued in his life work.
Dan Fox seems to have the measure of this ‘Prolier-than-thou’ trolling in his book (see below) even references Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ –
' “pretentiousness” is the put-down of choice for a certain sort of bluff, meat-and-potatoes Englishman who distrusts foreign words and complicated ideas'.
I do plead guilty to neglecting the newer, more ‘liberal’ cohort of the working class as depicted by Guy Standing in his work on the Precariat. My admittedly non-scientific anecdotal observations are largely based on the older, traditional working class, based around the factories and textile mills that gave brief sustenance in the post war era.
Working class autodidacts are often deeply impressive and imposing figures, yet their comparative rarity makes them extra-ordinary individuals and a far cry from being representative of the working class.
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