Posted by Guy Matthews on Facebook:

Just been told by a UKIP type that I don’t understand the white working class concerns.

I live in a council house in the East Midlands. I’m a Labour member. I’m a union member. I work long hard hours and make sweet fuck all. My mum was a cleaner and my dad was a groundsman at a stately home. I never went to university because I was too busy trying to negotiate the drug epidemic that plagued ex-pit towns after the Tories destroyed them. Oh yeah, and I’m from white Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock on both sides of the family. That’s pretty fucking quintessentially white working class. Am I proud of it? Not really. It’s just stuff that happened to me for the most part. I’d much rather have been born in Kensington and called Herbert Fotherington-Smythe III, Viscount of West Surrey. I probably wouldn’t have spent my thirteenth Christmas watching my mam burn fucking shoes because we couldn’t afford to pay the coalman. But that would have made me a different person so I am glad in a way that I come from where I do.

Anyway. Back to the point. This UKIP fella. I understand white working class concerns perfectly, because they fucking keep me awake til 3 in the god damn morning, worrying whether I’ll get paid on time and in full this week, and how I’ll pay the bank charges if I can’t cover my financial obligations. Or wondering, not if I’ll ever own my own home because I know I won’t, but whether my kids will. Or whether my parents will suffer if the NHS goes or social care collapses even further.

Where myself and the UKIP guy differ is in the apportion of blame and the method of tackling those issues. The UKIP fella seems to think the white working class is very important, specifically the white part. I don’t. I think the working class is the working class regardless of skin colour. He wants to get rid of the brown people, like that’s magically going to fix the housing market, and exploitation of labour by capital, and the NHS, and make the fucking trains cheaper. To this end, he votes UKIP or Tory, whose policies are responsible for all of the above and more. He’s that blinded by skin colour that he will literally vote for the very people who are causing the problems he rails against. Does he think that Jacob Rees-Mogg or Nigel Farage give a fuck about him because he’s white? Does he honestly believe that landed gentry and stockbrokers care about him in any way other than how they can exploit him?

They don’t. They don’t give a fuck about any of us, black, white, brown, hell, even if we were purple they wouldn’t give a shit beyond seeing how much they could extract from our labour without lifting a finger themselves. I have more in common with a Jamaican born brickie than I do with Jacob Rees-Mogg. I’m closer to a Polish hotel maid than Nigel Farage. All this anti-immigration, anti-foreigner shite is doing is dividing the international working class when we should be united against the bastards who lord it over us.

If you’re tempted to blame immigrants for any of the ills facing the white segment of Britain’s working class, ask yourself: “Who has the power in this situation?”

Did Magda set the national minimum wage at a level that is so inadequate that a 40hr week isn’t enough to pay for both rent and food without top up benefits?

Did Sadiq refuse to impose rent controls on a rental market that is spiralling out of control?

Is Kemal responsible for cutting police budgets by billions, leaving us with 20,000 less police officers than ten years ago?

Has Nguyen chronically underfunded the NHS year in, year out for almost a decade?

The answer’s no.

Then the question is “Well who did?”

And there’s only one answer to that.