Wibsey Working Men’s Club in Bradford was the focus of the opening film in the BBC’s new season of programmes about white working-class Britain. Pinch yourself, and the documentary could have been mistaken for a Play for Today from the late 1970s or the 1980s – one of those searing dramas, beautifully made, about being poor and left behind.

Time and tide have bypassed Wibsey, and with it the members of the club, all of them tough northerners who in their prime were the engine room of Britain. Their way of life is endangered. The heavy industry that gave them status has gone; their sons did not choose to join them in the club; and their city, one of Happy Eid and unhappy ethnic tension, is now an alien place to them.

The men, most of them unemployed or retired, held futile committee meetings to discuss their financial crisis, and faced the fact there was little that could be done to keep the club open. Not enough people came any more. It was as simple as that. “We’re oop shit creek,” muttered one.

And it struck me, as they sat in the gloom, rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, that one of the ironies of Britain today is that if these white working-class men were an ethnic minority group – Asian elders, say, or Polish unmarried mothers – their club could have applied to Bradford council for a support grant and had ethnic minorities co-ordinators swarming around them immediately.

If we provide Muslim women-only swimming clubs, Asian football groups, or Ukrainian festivals, then surely we could also spare some local authority cash for a group of relics from our industrial past. Living history, isn’t it? Social cohesion. Shoulders of giants, and all that. Give them a grant at once. It’s only fair.

Now the whole point of this poignant film, of course, was precisely that: to suggest unfairness. Remember the title of the BBC theme: White. To make it apparent that in the rush to multiculturalism, someone forgot to remember that white working-class males are disenfranchised and discriminated against too.

Thus the BBC season, which continues this week, makes a brave leap. It theorises that immigration is to blame for the plight of the working class; for its sense of alienation within its own heritage. Multiculturalism, that state-sponsored form of ethnic diversity, has created dangerous inequalities and segregation.

But is it true? I wonder. Much as I find the BBC’s theme fascinating, I think perhaps it is chasing the wrong hare. Many things have made life difficult for the working classes, but most of them relate to global economics, snobbery and the death of heavy industry, rather than to skin colour.

That is not to say that we do not discriminate. Of course we do. We are ruder, in public, to the white working class than we would dare be to ethnic minority groups. We call them chavs, or – in Scotland – neds, and we award TV comedy such as Little Britain that eviscerates them. We simultaneously neglect and romanticise them. But this is not new.

In fact, it’s so not new that Wibsey working men’s club reminded me not just of the socially aware Plays for Today but also of Boys from the Blackstuff. I half expected Yosser Hughes to come bursting into the bar and ask for a pint and blame Maggie Thatcher for everything.

For the old white men of Bradford, with no jobs, no money, no future, disempowered in bleak surroundings, the parallels with the political landscape of the 1980s were obvious. In the ultimate act of discrimination to the working class, Britain’s engine room was shut down. Steel, coal, textiles, shipbuilding, carmaking and almost every part of the heavy manufacturing sector disappeared; lives and jobs and communities folded. It happened in Ayrshire, Fife, Wales, the Midlands, Newcastle, Yorkshire, Lanarkshire.

And here’s news for the BBC: there are sad, emasculated, iron-faced older men, just like those from Wibsey, sitting in rundown bars in every former industrial area in Britain, bemoaning that they’re not selling enough beer, that Labour has deserted them, just like every other tosser, and no one wants to come to their karaoke nights any more. The modern world has disenfranchised these men, not Pakistanis.

Being human, they want somebody to blame. Thatcher. Blair, now Brown. If there are Asians, Poles, Catholics, women, Martians, they will blame them too. It’s always someone else’s fault that they haven’t got a job. If there is racism, there is also sexism, bigotry and small-mindedness in equal measure.

Many things hold back the older generation of working-class men – things that have nothing to do with black people taking their jobs. They are the same things that have always held them back. Lack of education; lack of enterprise and confidence.

But most of all, perhaps – and you could see this shining out from the members of the working men’s club – the inability to accept change. Life has moved on, and the tragedy is in the inability of a diminished, decent tribe to cope.

Michael Collins, who wrote The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class, suggests the target that the BBC is hunting has moved. The working class is no longer symbolised by these near-extinct grafters in working men’s clubs – but rather by their children, who have moved into suburbia, where they have chosen work, cash and shopping malls over education and intellectual upward mobility.

This working class “white flight”, carried out over the past 30 years and fuelled by the massive increase in affluence, has left the inner cities largely to the immigrants and those white people too old, poor or set in their ways to move. Now settled in its newbuild estates, in postcodes where it would never have been found in previous generations, the modern working class, Collins’s thesis goes, is recreating the habits of its traditional culture. This diaspora, he argues, cannot be held responsible for the failure of multiculturalism in the cities.

I suspect the answer to the kind of divisions we face lies in lack of recognition. Immigrants have not denied the white working class jobs and houses – the ones they got were the ones the whites didn’t want – but what they have denied them is political love and attention. The old working class, you might say, is simply fed up with being ignored.

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