I actually spent most of my childhood in Blackley and that's a good article. I'm generally wary of the white working class framing - it seems to be the only way class issues can get a hearing in the mainstream media - and Blackley is a multiracial area (albeit not as multiracial as nearby Crumpsall or Cheetham Hill) but otherwise a very interesting piece. And this can't be repeated often enough:
Owen Jones, in his marvellous book Chavs, (“chav” is the derogatory British term for the white working class) tackles the notion that poor people milk the state more than the rich do. Some updated statistics:
• Total cost of Jobseekers’ Allowance in 2011/2012: £4.91bn.
• Total taxpayers’ support for British banks peaked after the banking meltdown at £1.2 trillion.
• Total overpayment of benefits due to fraud and error in 2013/2014: £3.3bn, estimates the government. Meanwhile underpayments due to fraud and error totalled £1.4bn. The net sum, £1.9bn, is just over 1 per cent of British benefit spending.
• Even if this is a massive underestimate, and the real cost of benefits fraud is three times higher, it would still be just one-sixth of the sum lost in unpaid or avoided taxes in 2011/2012, by the government’s own estimate.
• That estimate doesn’t take into account the puny British tax bills of companies such as Starbucks, Amazon and Google, or of resident non-domiciled billionaires.
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.
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