Here's an interesting (and extremely depressing)drama that i recently watched on BBC TV
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p07f4j35/the-left-behindas usual, if anybody can find a link that enables people ouside Brirtain to watch it , that would be great.
What impressed me most about the drama is that it really does offer an highly realistic portrayal of working-class life in modern, post-industrial Britain. Beyond that, i think it tries a bit too hard to make a point about right -wing radicalisation, and there's a danger that those who are unconvinced by that and/or unsympathetic towards the protagonist might reject the entire portrayal as unrealistic.
Personally, it looks to me like a lot more people are driven further to the left by social inequalities than to the right. But by that I mean the real left wing, not some kind of wishy-washy bleeding-hearts liberalism that seeks to seperate the "deserving"from the "undeserving"and to give the former group an equal chance to be hammers rather than nails. That kind of thinking does more to aggravate racism than anything, IMO, because it increaaingly marginalises, and even castigates native Brits; and the assumption that white, working-class Brits are överprivileged racists really can become a self-fulfilling prophesy...at least the second part of it can . That's where the "remain" campaign shot itself in the foot, by explicitly making that asumption and urging their fellow Brits to be more generous and share their "privileged lifelstye"" with immigrants; that kind of rhetoric completely alinated great swathes of the population in the post-industrial north. that is, people who, personally, have absolutely nothing left to share. Also, the economic arguments in favour of remain fell flat, for the same reason. People who've been promised "jam, tomorrow" just as soon as the economy picks up, yet who continually get poorer and more insecure, over the course of decades, clean stop believing that the Economy is designed to worked for
them. A healthy economy very much appears to mean that the rich continue to get richer and won't
ever get around to sharing with anyone at all. So, who cares?
So people get angry; and they sometimes get angry at the wrong people. If you live in a district with a high proportuion of Pakistani landlords and a local Council that practies a policy of "positive discrimination", then Muslims can easily appear to represent the "over-privileged minority". That might be no more realistic than casting the native Brits in the role of an "'överprivileged majority", but the thing is, we badly need to understand how the environment and circumstance influence people's point of view. and this drama is surely a step in the right direction .
The idea that we can tackle problems such racism and Islamophobia in Britain without, at the same time, tackling issues such as job security , social security, the housing crisis, the deepening divide beteween rich and poor etc. is nuts.
