Over recent years, tabloid readers have become familiar with the concept of the'white working class', those thought to have been'left behind'by globalization, including immigration. Such sentiments were weaponized by politicians on all sides to fuel the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Brexit campaign. And this racialized narrative has emerged repeatedly in mature democracies – in the political campaigns of Trump, Le Pen and others – and continues to gain traction in the guise of economic nationalism and populism. The need to understand the putative emergence of the white working class has become both intellectually significant and politically urgent. In Race and the Undeserving Poor, Robbie Shilliam does just this. He charts the development over the past 200 years of a shifting postcolonial settlement that has produced a racialized distinction between the'deserving'and'undeserving'poor, the latest incarnation of which is a distinction between a deserving, neglected white working class and'others'who are undeserving, not indigenous, and not white. Shilliam's analysis shows that the white working class are not an indigenous constituency, but a product of the struggles to consolidate and defend imperial order that have shaped British society since the abolition of slavery.
Author(s): Robbie Shilliam
Series: Building Progressive Alternatives
Publisher: Agenda Publishing
Year: 2018
Cover
Half-title
Series information
Title page
Copyright information
Dedication
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 English poor laws and Caribbean slavery
Introduction
Property, patriarchy and slavery
England’s poor and the slave analogy
Conclusion
Chapter 3 Anglo-Saxon empire and the residuum
Introduction
Emancipation and the making of the Anglo-Saxon family
The eugenicist defence of the Anglo-Saxon family
Conclusion
Chapter 4 National welfare and colonial development
Introduction
Labour’s cooperative spirit
The cooperative spirit in the colonies
The Beveridge and Moyne reports
Conclusion
Chapter 5 Commonwealth labour and the white working class
Introduction
Black immigration
Black settlement
Conclusion
Chapter 6 Social conservatism and the white underclass
Introduction
Problem families and Thatcherism
Workfare and council estates
Conclusion
Chapter 7 Brexit and the return of the white working class
Introduction
Red Tory/Blue Labour
Euroscepticism: left and right
Brexit and the “left behind”
Conclusion
Chapter 8 Conclusion
References
Index
