An abandoned working class has found its voice. Tragically, it’s through the reactionary right

‘I’m England till I die. I know I am, I’m sure I am, I’m England till I die!” Sandra Forsyth was almost 50 when she found her voice marching across Tower Bridge with several hundred supporters of the English Defence League. “Have you spoken to Mum lately?” her son Billy wrote to his sister Nicola from prison. “She’s turned into a fascist, lols.”

Billy’s sister, the documentary filmmaker Nicola Wilding, was as shocked as he was amused. “How did a woman who had spent her life caring for the sick and vulnerable and elderly,” she asked herself, “find herself facing off against anti-fascists, getting labelled scum?”

It’s a question that, in different forms, many have asked in recent years as thousands of Sandra Forsyths have marched with the EDL, protested outside migrant hotels and voted Reform. Wilding, brought up in the rural working-class communities of Cumbria, tries to answer it through a memoir, These Wild English, that is also a gripping portrait of working-class alienation and fragmentation. It is tender and raw, angry and elegiac, deeply personal and profoundly political. And it gets closer to the truth than much of what has been written on the issue.

It was, as EP Thompson observed in The Making of the English Working Class, in the fields and cottages of rural England that working-class consciousness first emerged. But unlike in the mills and factories that came later, here it was much more difficult to maintain collective organisation. Instead, rural working-class life bred, in Wilding’s words, “a sort of bootstrap fatalism” that came to shape Sandra’s world view, too.

Wilding’s grandfather was a labourer, one of a class of people who could not get on the social ladder because they held “the ladder for others, which is how they come to own nothing but the shit in their welly treads”.

Her mother was, as a teenager, a skinhead – a marker in those early days not of racism, as it would later be, but of working-class attitude, a “fuck you defiance”, as Wilding puts it. Sandra’s life was circumscribed by violence and powerlessness, ill health and debt, poverty and broken marriages, all wrapped up in a sense of duty that so often fell upon working-class women.

She worked mainly in social care, which for her was about “protecting the dignity of the people she looked after”. When she started, care homes were run by local councils. By the end, they had become the property mostly of private corporations, exploiting minimum wage workers on zero-hours contracts.

In his book The Next Shift, the American historian Gabriel Winant shows how in Pittsburgh, once the heart of US manufacturing, deindustrialisation replaced the steel industry with the health industry, staffed mainly by poorly paid caregivers, a model in which “costs were passed on… to employees via low wages”. So it is in Britain, too. Jonas Patrick Marvin describes in a forthcoming book, The Breaking of the English Working Class, how in a city like Stoke-on-Trent, manufacturing has given way to health and social care, and how “those doing the work are often the same people whose sickness and exhaustion feeds the growing industry”.

The towns often dubbed “left behind”, the sociologist Sacha Hilhorst observes, have in fact been “testing grounds for successive waves of neoliberal policymaking”, places “dominated by low-paid work… patchy labour rights and cheap land”. Andy Burnham may have pulled off a significant victory in Makerfield, but “Manchesterism” is seen by many critics as a cousin of the neoliberal model, its policies benefiting the urban centres but hollowing out the peripheral regions.

Sandra’s experience of work – insecure, exhausting and with a pay packet that leads only to more debt – is familiar to many today. What one report calls the “Uberisation” of the labour market has turned insecurity into “an endemic part of British working life”.

Decades of economic exploitation, political disdain and social abandonment has created profound cynicism about mainstream politics and a search for anything, anyone who would listen to them. So it was for Sandra.

When Billy was sent down for an attempted carjacking while blind drunk, Sandra blamed herself – “I was a bad mother”. Shortly after, Fusilier Lee Rigby was murdered, hacked to death by two jihadis. The two events combined in Sandra’s mind to transform her anger. Rigby’s murder “felt personal”, Wilding writes, “as though the killer with the cleaver had come for everything that mattered to her” and yet she was “powerless” to prevent it. Tommy Robinson, founder of the EDL, seemed to give a voice to that powerlessness: “No more defencelessness against an enemy in our midst. For Mum, Tommy was telling it like it is.”

Sandra knew there were many bigots in the EDL. But the more counter-protesters shouted “Nazi scum”, the more she felt condescended to by what she saw as the same middle-class liberals who had betrayed and ignored her throughout her life, the social workers and council officers who had surveilled and demeaned her, and the more her “fuck you defiance” came to the fore. It reinforced her view that if people like her didn’t have a voice, they would be ignored, and if they spoke up, they would be told to shut up.

What was true of Sandra has also been true of hundreds of thousands of others who, abandoned by the traditional parties, have themselves abandoned those parties and searched for a home and an identity elsewhere. It is a tragedy of today’s politics that, for too many, working-class defiance finds its outlet in racist organisations and reactionary parties, and that the left’s neglect of class politics, and embrace of identitarian arguments, has left it with little moral standing to challenge that.

Photograph by Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images