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Paul Mason recently published an interesting column on the Guardian website. What follows is a response to it. It’s not intended as a set of criticisms, but as a set of reflections provoked by Mason’s very important argument.
Mason’s short piece is a response to the news that statistics show white working class students to be the worst-performing demographic in British schools. He offers an explanation which in part (at no point does he claim it be an exhaustive explanation) accounts for this situation in terms of the destruction of working class culture in the 1980s. The point he makes – powerfully, and accurately – is that the destruction of that culture has left white working-class youth without a ‘story’ to tell about themselves, and that such a story is necessary for young people to be able to make sense of their place in the world and to motivate them to subject themselves to the forms of self-discipline which any educational programme requires. He makes the crucial analytical point that the period of mass unemployment of the 1980s was not merely an unfortunate byproduct of Thatcher’s economic policy, but was the result of a deliberate policy designed to destroy the basic infrastructure of working class culture in Britain, and thus to politically disable the British working class, permanently.
