Brendan O’Neill says that the worst form of bigotry today is the liberal elites’ view of the working classes:
We often hear of self-loathing Jews, but what about self-loathing proles — working-class people who look back with contempt at the communities they had the misfortune to grow up in? There’s a very good example of it in today’s Guardian, in this column by Lynsey Hanley, a woman who has made a writing career on the back of the fact that she grew up on a council estate. (It is testament to the middle classes’ continuing colonisation of the media that Ms Hanley can be treated as a curious novelty by Granta and the Guardian, almost as a messenger from some distant, dark planet, simply because she once lived in social housing.) Ms Hanley writes of the “terrible ignorance” of the community she used to live in, prior to her moral and mental rescue by “metropolitan elite liberal values”.
Perhaps keen to assure her current employers that she is now one of them and has been scrubbed clean of any trace of working-class brutishness, Ms Hanley sneers at the “view of life” that held strong in the community she was born into. These people were “paranoid, suspicious, mistrustful, misogynist and racist”, she says. She heaps disdain on the “social conservatism” of white working-class communities, which are given to “silently or violently rejecting anyone who is different or who expresses a different opinion to that of the crowd”. Thankfully for her (and let’s face it, probably for the community she was born into), Ms Hanley escaped from this “crowd” (in pre-PC times they called it “the mob”) by embracing what she refers to as metropolitan, liberal values. She pleads with New Labour not to ditch these values, since there might be other “provincial working-class teenagers” who, like Ms Hanley, also want to be rescued.
[. . .]
What’s more, Ms Hanley’s dutiful provision of moral porn for the chattering classes, who so enjoy reading about the weird goings-on in mysterious council estates over breakfast, speaks to the prejudices that are rife amongst the community she has now embraced: the “metropolitan liberal elite”. The great irony of this elite’s war on the wantonness, gluttony, slothfulness and bigotry of the little people is that it is fuelled by a bigotry of its own, a respectable, PC form of bigotry — one which treats the white working classes as unenlightened Daily Mail drones in need of moral deliverance by sussed outsiders. It is not the working classes who “silently or violently reject anyone who is different”; rather it’s this increasingly intolerant metropolitan elite, which can’t even abide the fact that some communities eat and drink differently, never mind think differently, to itself. In presenting Britain as being neatly split between a morally superior race of liberals and mongrel race of paranoid racists, Ms Hanley and others are unwittingly rehabilitating the very prejudices that originally fuelled the politics of racism in the 19th century: a mean-spirited, Malthusian view of Britain’s own native lower classes as morally defunct.
