White working-class British men are fighting a war on two fronts. The first and most obvious is out there in Iraq where they are doing the dirty — and rather dangerous — work of a government that seems to loathe and despise them.
The second is back here at home where their adversaries are pretty much everybody else in the country. Civilised polite society has it in for the white working-class male. So it is with laudable self-awareness and chutzpah that the Millwall supporters sing down at the Den: “No one likes us, we don’t care.”
White working-class males are the almost exclusive recipients of antisocial behaviour orders, which seem to have been created with them in mind. The government berates them for their homophobia and racism, for their loutish behaviour, for their slovenly diets and sexual incontinence. They are useless at school.
There is also a fervent determination in government circles to stop them enjoying the pleasures of nicotine, of which they are the country’s most resolute aficionados — and they are perpetually upbraided for getting drop-dead drunk every night. The clock is therefore ticking on most of their preferred pastimes.
Meanwhile, they have middle-class and toff social commentators with whom to contend. It is perfectly okay to sneer at the white working-class male with his predilection for garish clothing in man-made fibres and tattoos, his rude grammar and utter lack of social etiquette and refinement. No quango or pressure group will censure you for a spot of chav-bashing. There are plenty of people happy to earn a living kicking the hell out of the white working-class male. And why not? It’s risk-free journalism, after all.
Bad enough, then, to have the fourth estate and the polity slapping you around the head; but maybe we ought to draw the line at the judiciary and the police.
I wonder if the name Harry Stanley rings any bells with you? Harry was shot dead by two Metropolitan police officers for the crime of walking down a street while carrying a table leg in a plastic bag. You will probably be aware that the Met’s armed police officers went on strike recently following the suspension of the two officers in question, but the name of Harry Stanley was scarcely mentioned in the press reports, all of which focused on the industrial action taken by the armed policemen in support of their trigger-happy colleagues.
Harry was, of course, a white working-class male. If he had been black or gay or female or, for that matter, a barrister or a newspaper editor, I think it is fair to say the events would have been reported differently. There would have been voices expressing outrage at the killing of someone deemed to hail from either an oppressed minority group or a “respectable” profession.
The clamouring for prosecution of the officers — rather than their mere suspension — would surely not have been resisted by the Crown Prosecution Service. But Harry’s killing has resulted in no prosecution. And there has been no great clamouring. Be honest: you can’t recall even hearing the name Harry Stanley, can you? The name Colin Stagg may be more familiar to you. He murdered that pretty girl Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common, didn’t he? Well, no he didn’t, it would seem.
It’s true that in 1993 he was arrested for this horrible crime and spent a year in prison on remand — but the court threw out the prosecution because quite clearly he’d been ensnared in a crude police honeytrap.
Now, again at this point if Stagg had been anything other than a rather thick chav, a white working-class male par excellence with dubious habits and an unengaging personality, we might have witnessed furious remonstrations at his appalling treatment. But instead everybody, including the police and especially The Mail on Sunday, continued to maintain that Stagg was in effect guilty.
And now the police have decided that actually it wasn’t Stagg after all, but more likely a psychopath in Broadmoor called Robert Napper, have we seen newspaper articles headlined “Colin Stagg: An apology”? You’re having a laugh, guv. Instead, a sister paper, the Daily Mail, concentrated its outrage on the fact that Stagg wants to claim a million quid in compensation.
I’m usually opposed to such manifestations of our “compensation culture” — but Stagg has been unemployed, indeed unemployable, these past 10 years thanks to the police and some of our press. He gets spat at and attacked in the street. So maybe we should say sorry and give him the money.
If Stagg has few supporters, they are nonetheless more numerous than those who would affix their flag to the masts of the indisputably nasty young men accused of having murdered the black youngster Stephen Lawrence.
Two judicial procedures have seen them, in effect, cleared of this crime. But still they are persecuted. A couple of years ago two of them — David Norris and Neil Acourt — were up in court again, this time accused of racially abusing an off-duty black police officer.
The facts are these: the two men were in a car when they saw the aforementioned officer. Norris threw a paper cup at him and shouted “n*****!” Acourt reportedly laughed. For this, they each got a sentence of 18 months in prison, despite a lack of relevant previous convictions. That’s right: Acourt got 1½ years in prison for laughing at something his moronic friend had said.
Are we comfortable with that decision? Or do we not give a monkey’s because both defendants are ghastly people who offend our bourgeois liberal sensibilities?
Pronouncing sentence, Judge Carroll said Norris and Acourt were both “infected and invaded by gross and revolting racism”. I’m sure he’s right. But was Judge Carroll, in passing his sentence, not also infected and invaded by something (to appropriate his lordship’s somewhat portentous grammar)? Was 18 months an appropriate sentence for the crime of laughing at someone who shouted a foul word and threw a paper cup? Or was there some prejudice at work at the back of the judge’s mind?
Again, the civil liberties lobby was silent. Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, put out a statement welcoming the men’s incarceration, although what the hell it had to do with him I am at a loss to understand.
The white working-class male used to have the Labour party to fight his corner. Those days, however, are long gone. The left thinks him politically uncouth; the right thinks him socially uncouth. Sometimes I wish the boys of the Black Watch and the Green Howards and the Welsh Guards would wise up. It is all still much as Kipling had it:
O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy
that, an’ “Tommy go away”;
But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”,
when the band begins to play
