Local lad Sam Fender is in the news today for calling out the Woke and the irrelevancy of identity politics in the North East, where much of the population exists at the sharp end of class injustices.
Part of that statement is true, but overall, what the hell is Fender or anyone else even talking about? On an island as completely neurotic about class as this one, we talk about class all the fucking time (even if poorly).
There isn’t much to be surprised by here — although this does feel like a belated echo of disgruntlement in light of North Shields’ Golden Boy being called out for partying with Johnny Depp in Newcastle, shortly following the conclusion of his legal battle with Amber Heard. Has he had one public controversy, and gone anti-woke of the time since? It wouldn’t be the first time someone had fallen headlong into that kind of resentment…
That’s probably ungenerous. Fender clearly cares about his local community, and does what he can to be a vocal ambassador for the North East. But he also seems to hang his personal class credentials on simply having a regional accent (according to someone who messaged me about this who went to college with him). Furthermore, as Shon Faye pointed out on Instagram, Tate’s fans clearly aren’t exclusively white working-class men anyway! Comments like this really don’t hold much water, no matter where you’re from. It’s all useless handwringing that disappears into smoke under the slightest bit of scrutiny.
With all that in mind, it has genuinely surprised me to see some people on the left swallow all this up uncritically. (See tweet above, which was widely and rightly ridiculed in the comments.) Something is clearly in the air at the moment, and it is probably Ash Sarkar’s baity press tour, in which she’s been making various bizarre claims that feign nuance, but seem based on the very limited experiences of the British punditry. Said pundit class, on the left and on the right, appear all too ready to rally around these vague observations about how we’re all doing politics wrong, as those who aren’t commentators and are instead organising in their communities look on bewildered, unable to see the imaginary struggle sessions being described to them.
I don’t understand it either, or know of any actual incident in which someone has been preaching to disenfranchised working-class men and insisting that they need to go woke or go even more broke.
What is the sudden allure of this kind of invented moral panic? Haven’t we spent years rightly laughing at “you’ll get put in jail for saying you’re English” chatter because it is completely invented and a product of reactionaries telling the disenfranchised all their problems are because of the amorphous scourge of woke? It’s wild to see some prominent people on the left accept that suddenly.
In reading all of this babble, I couldn’t help but think about my experiences working in a pub in Newcastle over the last two years. It might not be a pit town in Country Durham, but some of the the communities we serve aren’t far off that. This might also be an anecdotal meander that’s not really relevant to a political reality, but if that’s good enough for Ash Sarkar, it’s good enough for blog.
I could tell you all the ins and outs of pub life and its complexities, but my feelings remain largely aligned with James Wilt’s Drinking Up the Revolution, in which he navigates the romanticism that surrounds British pubs as spaces of community and community organising, which are nonetheless under the thumb of Big Alcohol and also inevitably contribute to various social problems.
Our pub feels very much like this. We’re an openly queer-friendly establishment displaying some big ol’ pride flags that sits on a hill. We’re down from a largely deprived neighborhood in Byker and up from the post-industrial Ouseburn Valley, which has seen rapid gentrification over the last 10–15 years or so. We’re also very close to Heaton — a part of the city where, according to the last census, something like ~70% of Newcastle’s openly queer population lives. We’re at the intersection, then, of shifting demographic zones and apparent battlelines of social tension.
This makes our pub a fascinating place to work for me. Despite the changing social landscape in this city, its continuing deprivation and swells of gentrification, many people love us because we’re a pub that has changed very little. The building itself has been a public house for over a century, and the interior hasn’t been updated for decades. Far from looking tired, it has all the charm of a lovely old pub that has played a part in countless people’s lives for generations.
We see our fair share of problems, as all pubs do. We’re only a few hundred meters from a halfway hostel for the unhoused, for example, and often find ourselves navigating people with drink, drug and mental-health problems, who we want to treat with kindness and generosity, at the same time as none of us are really trained to deal with this stuff and know all too well that a pub is both a friendly place where isolated people can have some human contact and also a place ill-equipped to help and support them in the ways that they need.
Is this a space where the queers are likely to organise struggle sessions that make white working-class men reflect on their privilege? Not remotely. The closest thing to this you will find is a monthly poetry night, which is more than likely to feature an idpol slam poem of some description. But it is also a night where many white working-class men have performed poetry of their own and been welcomed warmly for having the courage to speak their truth, no matter how much it might rub up against the truths of others.
For all the problems inherent to pub life, I like to think that this kind of night is representative of the pub at its best. We are a welcoming space for everyone. We have to be. We get people from all walks of life through our door, in a way that exceeds the idiom. It’s been a job that’s totally changed my perspective on the area I live in, feeling totally immersed in its complexities, but it is a job I love because it is governed by one simple rule: you are treated with the same respect you give out.
Who is the least likely to follow that rule? Sadly, it is straight white men. But beyond rolling our eyes at this predictability to ourselves in private, do we hector these men with idpol posturing? No, they’re actually far more likely to do this themselves.
On multiple occasions, I have had to ask people to leave our pub. This is something that always terrifies me, but it is nonetheless a part of the job. If someone has had too much to drink, or is otherwise being a nuisance and disturbing other customers, they’ll be asked to go away. Occasionally, these people are just students who’ve mistake us for a city-centre gaff, the purpose of which is to sell them ‘trebles’ and get them ‘mortal’. But 9 times out of 10, this will be someone who is really struggling, and generally, I’m happy to listen to their troubles before getting them a glass of water and sending them on their way. No matter their background or experiences, our concern is with their well-being, and most people respond well to being shown respect in an unbecoming moment they’ll no doubt regret the next morning. But when this is not the outcome, I can guarantee that most of the time they will have perceived some sense of difference through the fog of inebriation, and claim you can’t be a drunken nuisance anymore because of woke. That is to say, it is always the self-proclaimed hard-done-by white men, drowning their sorrows, who bring up their identities first.
The majority of people I’ve cut off for being a nuisance have given this response. Just last week, I was on shift when a guy came in who had clearly already had too much to drink. He wasn’t served, kicked up a fuss about it, and then proceeded to claim he was, in that moment, the epitome of white British masculinity and he’s fed up of living in a woke society that hates him.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve experienced this over the last two years, but I don’t think it’s a universal experience on the staff. It seems to be a reflection of what they see in me. They see that they’ve been told off by a bearded femboy wearing makeup and a skirt, and immediately start projecting onto all of it. You can see it happen on their faces. “I’ve just been told off by this queer; it must be because I’m a straight white man.” Before long, this is the thought they insist on vocalising. Never do they have the awareness in that moment to realise that they are being asked to leave simply because they are completely blathered.
No one is telling them to check their privilege. No one would. (Although a lot of these men aren’t working class and are simply oblivious to the existence of others.) Rather, it is clear they’re being fed this assumption by reactionary media and making it the foundation of a rejection of solidarity. “Wokescolds hate me, so I’m gonna hate them first.” Meanwhile, you’re just trying to make sure they don’t get any more drunk and — completely ineffectively, of course — try and angle them towards somewhere that doesn’t sell alcohol, which is not going to solve any of their problems — and they have plenty, as many local people do. But point being, from experience, it is a certain type of man, who is told that the world thinks they’re the problem by the media that proclaims to help them, and then scapegoat others for their lack of social provisions, despite the fact that many of us are existing at the same sharp end of exploitation and disenfranchisement.
This is the Andrew Tate logic. A man who inflicts material harms on the world around him draws in disenfranchised men and affirms their belief that the world is out to get them. Self-victimisation is what brings him cash as he tells them they’re all useless if they’re poor. The sad truth is that much of the world is out to get these men, at the level of class injustice, but in leaning into their resentment, they are also largely the people to cause the problems in our local community, irrespective of those who are different to them wanting to see more solidarity as we all try to help each other. That reluctance isn’t a consequence of them being straight white men. It’s because class disenfranchisement is a vicious circle, which metes out material harms on men who then mete out harms in their communities. Is it really just woke impatience to want to break that cycle?
That starts not with individual men themselves but the media infrastructure that nurtures resentments. As Mark Fisher argued towards the end of his life, the emergent regimes of neoliberalism in the 1970s, where much of this discourse originates from, had one overarching fear: what if the working class became hippies? The reappearance of a white working class being set across from the woke feels like a reiteration of this same fear. Political elites fear nothing more than working class people (of any race or gender) waking up to the social injustices that shape their lives.
Ultimately, the only people who are actually telling white working-class men a reductive version of this story are the Tates of the world, exploiting and inflaming their resentment further. It has nothing to do with the left, many of whom — again, speaking from my experience in Newcastle at least — are instead out here working in food banks (again, there’s one a few hundred metres from our pub, which I had to use myself for a few months when times were hard), or for local mental health charities, or community centres, or sexual health clinics, or wherever. Have all these places been infiltrated by woke? In a way, yes, if we’re going to retain that original sense of the world that means being awake to social issues, because the communities they serve aren’t simply made up of white working-class men. No, not even in the North East. They’re diverse communities that have a lot on their plate. Black and brown people can also be working class. Queer people can also be working class. These communities are very aware of this, and are actually really good at talking about class in this more complex way!
It is only ever the straight white men who make it all about them in this way, or otherwise it’s politicians and their commentators (some academics included) flagging a superficial description of the situation and throwing all those people who work directly with disenfranchised communities under the bus.
This is a very particular set of examples, but I’ve heard countless other stories like them. The only time identity politics is ever discussed in the course of most people’s daily lives is when it is invoked by those who feel slighted by a wokeness that only they are perceiving.
This isn’t to deny that people can be oversensitive about identitarian issues on the left. The biggest culture shock of my life was becoming an impoverished postgraduate at Goldsmiths — having grown up in Hull and first attending an old polytechnic in Newport, South Wales — and having to listen to out-of-touch rich kids moan about their paltry hardships whilst doing class drag. Goldsmiths nonetheless prided itself on its reputation for being hyper-politicized, but compared to the more deprived areas I’d lived in for the first 26 years of my life, it was here that people overtly centred the self rather than attending to the social makeup of the place they live in and their more complex relationship to it. (Here again we can note how the British commentators inflating this problem have a twisted London-centric view — anathema to the sociocultural makeup of London itself — and love boosting someone as out of touch as Sam Fender because he’s got a region accent.)
But most recognise that those people who do use these principles as a hammer to hit people over the head with — not in the media, but in our diverse communities, and whether that is from the left or the right — are usually just as insecure about their place in society than the white working-class men who supposedly face the brunt of it.
The truth is that everyone is made to feel like they are the problem — everyone — so that we ignore structural issues and instead engage in a magical voluntarism, pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps. If white working-class men feel scapegoated, welcome to the club! The solution isn’t scapegoating whoever else isn’t like you. Solidarity without similarity is the goal throughout the spaces I’ve been participating in over the last decade and although this is a difficult goal to achieve, which generally does stumble as people trip over the nuances of the British class system, from experience it remains the case that it is white working-class men who reject it first and foremost, on the grounds that they feel the most hard-done-by and warrant special treatment.
Is this a narcissistic, self-centred politics from below? No, only the woke middle-class left displays that kind to myopia when talking about microaggressions, as Ash Sarkar has almost told every UK political podcast over the last two weeks. But this vague prevaricating over the difference between identity politics and “actual” politics seems to rest on a familiar shorthand that completely fails to understand the role of the self in political life in the present, alongside the role of the self in our notions of communality and collectivity. Indeed, the left isn’t about to renounce selfhood on the way to communism, nor does it need to. Rather, it is the ways in which the label of “narcissism” is so uncritically applied to anyone trying to navigate the entanglement of self and social that we are better off doing away with.
If only someone had written a book about that side of our political moment…