Katia N’s Reviews > Underdogs: The Truth About Britain's White Working Class > Status Update

We have ended up in a bizarre situation, in which the government has handed local politicians huge powers to block development but also puts huge pressure on them to build.if Britain had a proper system of local property taxes,&if councils were able to keep the proceeds from new home sales, rather than the money flowing 2the Treasury the local people might begin to see the advantages of building near their backyards.

Much better jobs can be found in advanced engineering firms. But those jobs are already technically complex and are likely to grow ever more so. They will require highly trained workers. When people talk about reviving manufacturing, I sometimes think they envisage high-paying, steady industrial jobs that can be done by people who have just left school with few qualifications. Those jobs have vanished.

In 2024, the Labour Party won a huge parliamentary majority in an election that was notable for feeble turnout. Just under 60 per cent of eligible voters in Britain cast a ballot, the second-lowest figure for a century. Turnout in places with large working-class populations was especially pitiful: just 47%in Glasgow (Ne); in Rusholme, an ethnically mixed constituency south of Manchester, it was a mere 40%.

2/2 It would be abhorrent to say that young working-class people who rent their homes do not matter. But, politically, they barely matter. Cut benefits for pensioners, and a noisy row will ensue, amplified by newspapers that have many elderly readers. Cut benefits for working-age people on low incomes- Politicians might feel sorry but they do not fear them, because they are unlikely to vote.

1/2 Before the year 2000, a person in the richest fifth of the population was up to ten percentage points more likely to vote than a person in the poorest fifth. Since 2010, the gap has been about twenty percentage points. Other fissures have opened, too. The old, the highly educated and homeowners have become much more likely to vote than the young, the less educated and those who do not own their homes.

Nor do I think it is necessarily a sign of state failure when people move from one place to another, as politicians have argued. The opposite might be closer to the truth: a lack of movement is worrying, because it suggests that people cannot take advantage of opportunities. Somehow, we have turned an alarming trend into a virtue. Some working-class people do leave the poor areas where they grew up.

I don’t believe the country really has two tribes, which David Goodhart called ‘Somewheres’ and ‘Anywheres’ – one rooted and conservative, the other deracinated and liberal. If it did, how would we explain the fact that so many working-class Somewheres are descended from people who moved so energetically around the country?