23 h. ago The white working class is nothing like what politicians think – or claim – it is | Kenan Malik

A new book, Underdogs, demolishes the myth that it is homogeneous in its hostility to immigration‘Many of those who act as the champions of the white person against immigrants,” Labour MP David Winnick told the House of Commons in 1968, “have not in the past gone out of their way to defend the interests of the white working class.”It was the first time anyone had referred to the “white working class” in parliament to describe a segment of the British population. Half a century on, that segment has become the focus of one of the most contentious and polarising of debates. For many on the right, the white working class constitutes a distinct group, both their distinctiveness and their problems, stemming largely from their whiteness. Many on the left have, Joel Budd notes, “fallen silent on the subject”, nervous of racialising issues of class. Continue reading...

Politics

6 d. ago Guardian editors helped fuel Southport riots by showing contempt for the white working class, peer claims in explosive talk

At a debate at the Oxford Literary Festival, Lord Sewell reportedly said the disorder that followed the Southport attack stemmed from 'a combination of two people: Guardian editors and criminal arsonists'.

Events

7 d. ago Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets | Kenan Malik

Arrests, blacklists and deportations are chilling reminders of the red scare that transformed America‘Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed by his son, John Huston. That line was to have appeared on screen at the beginning of the film. It didn’t, on orders from the studio, Warner Bros. “It was all on account of the word ‘labor’,” John Huston later reflected. “That word looks dangerous in print, I guess.”It was a relatively insignificant moment in the drama of America’s postwar red scare. McCarthyism proper had still to take flight. Yet, so deep ran the fear already that a single, everyday word could create consternation in Hollywood. Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago Why decolonise Shakespeare when all the world’s a stage for his ideas on injustice? | Kenan Malik

The trend for cultural reappraisal could risk upholding the very ideas it aims to dismantle‘My quarrel with the English language,” James Baldwin wrote in his essay Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare, had been “that the language reflected none of my experience.” And so “I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression”.Then, he “began to see the matter in quite another way”: “Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.”Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago Google to pay $28m to settle claims it favoured white and Asian employees

Class action lawsuit alleged company discriminated against minority background staff on pay and career opportunitiesBusiness live – latest updatesGoogle has agreed to pay $28m (£22m) to settle a class action lawsuit claiming that it favoured white and Asian employees by paying them more and putting them on higher career tracks than other workers.The accord with Google, a unit of Alphabet, won preliminary approval last week from Judge Charles Adams of the Santa Clara county superior court in California. Continue reading...

Economics

3 w. ago Covid shows why we should be wary of politicians who claim to be 'following the science'

Was lockdown worth it or was the prescription worse than the disease?

Politics

3 w. ago It’s ‘Maganomics’: Trump’s brash economic strategy is likely to end in crash or crisis | Jonathan Portes

Large tax cuts for the rich, import tariffs, and the competing interests of Republican nationalists and the techno-right is a dangerous combinationWhat connects Donald Trump’s approach to trade, tax and government spending? Is there a Trumpian theory of economics – Maganomics? Trump, like most politicians, would doubtless reject any claim that he was following a particular ideological blueprint, but then, as John Maynard Keynes said: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”It’s certainly difficult to attribute Trump’s policies to the intellectual influence of any one strand in economic thinking. The most obvious frame is the dual one identified by Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, who describes it as a combination of economic nationalism and the techno-right. The former, represented by long-term Trump confidantes Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, wants to rebuild America’s traditional indu...

Events