Tag: workingclass
Just one in 100 Tory MPs came from a working-class job, new study shows
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Only about 1% of the current crop of Tory MPs entered parliament from a working-class job, according to new research that suggests a growing “representation gap” in parliament. Just 7% of all MPs can be considered “wo...
Labour may think it’s moving on, but working-class voters aren’t following
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On a filthy night three days before Christmas in 1978, I was sitting on a rather ancient coach travelling across the Pennines towards Lancashire, along with about 50 other football supporters. The Bradford branch of t...
Shove over, stale males! Meet the working-class women storming TV
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Television is meant to be for everybody – but it isn’t. How can it be when, after nearly a century, it remains predominantly male, stale and middle-class? For decades, the industry has been talking about nurturing wor...
‘You don’t have to be invited – you do it’: Beth Steel on her working-class family epic
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In 2016, Beth Steel was in rehearsals for her play Labyrinth at Hampstead theatre when the EU referendum result was announced. People around her were surprised by the outcome. Steel wasn’t. “I was fascinated by how sh...
Heeding working-class voices on Brexit and labour shortages
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Reading Christopher John’s account of the working conditions of HGV drivers in the UK (‘Getting into Europe is a relief every time’: an HGV driver reflects on UK crisis, 27 September), I was struck by the fact that I ...
From The Outsiders to Cloudstreet: the best working-class books
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I grew up in a southern seaside town. No dad on the scene. No money, but the beach at the end of the road. When I was a kid I knew I wanted to be a writer, but writers didn’t come from where I came from. Then I read a...
Ethel Carnie Holdsworth: campaigners push to revive fame of working-class novelist
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Ethel Carnie Holdsworth wrote in 1914 that “literature up till now has been lopsided, dealing with life only from the standpoint of one class”. Now the Lancashire mill worker and author, a forgotten name who is believ...
How white working-class underachievement has been used to demonise antiracism
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There is a tragicomic element to the title of the latest report by MPs: The forgotten: how white working-class pupils have been let down, and how to change it. If there is one group that has featured consistently in n...
The Belfast violence shows young working-class people have been failed again
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It’s 23 years since the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast agreement, which effectively brought the conflict in Northern Ireland to a halt but didn’t deliver on the promises of peace, prosperity and stability. It woul...