Today, Daily Mail journalists were astonished to discover that working-class men are not the boorish stereotype they imagined. ‘UK builders go WOKE,’ their headline screamed in amazement after 2000 builders surveyed by Toolstation said they enjoyed history, art, politics, ate healthy food and weren’t particularly interested in sport.
Image caption: screenshot of the Daily Mail, with a headline: ‘UK Builders go WOKE.’
I could have told the Daily Mail this. My working-class family and community are also rich in education and politics - if not the healthy food! And they aren’t unique. British history is full of examples of working class-led education.
My dad was a foundry worker who left school at fifteen, taught himself to read and write and knows an astonishing amount of geo-political history, not least because he was stationed in Jordan in his army days. He would wake me up to watch Panorama when I was a child, and take me to union meetings and CND marches. My mum played me classical music and taught me my times tables, despite being busy with caring for my disabled sister. Our council house was filled with books and musical instruments and lively political meetings, even when my both my parents became disabled with stress and illness, and even when we were struggling to survive in the benefits system.
My early reading ranged from socialist classics like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists to more formal novels like A Tale of Two Cities. My school, full of working-class kids drawn mainly from the Irish diaspora community, was full of music, art and Irish dancing. Our community was rich in education and culture and full of heated political discussion about Irish politics, religion and the British Empire. I see the same thing in Wales, where I live now. The school pupils, many from poor and working-class areas in Wales, take part in the National Eisteddfod every year which is immersed in arts and culture.
Image caption: The cover of Jonathan Rose’s book ‘The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes,’ showing a woman on a beach reading a book, sat next to a child.
None of this is new. Culture and politics was always woven into the fabric of working class life in Britain. The Daily Mail journalists would also be amazed to learn of the Welsh Miners’ Libraries and the ‘thriving autodidact culture in the coalfields’ where miners filled adult education classes and read Marx alongside Jane Eyre. 1 I doubt they’ve ever heard of the Women’s Co-operative Guild lectures, or the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute that circulated 100,000 books a year. According to Jonathan Rose, author of ‘The Intellectual Life of the Working Classes,’ the historic Libraries in South Wales are rivalled only by the Social Democratic Libraries of Wilhelmine Germany or the Jewish workers’ libraries of interwar Poland. 2
I bet those journalists haven’t heard of the extensive Mutual Improvement Societies, set up and run by working-class people through the 1800s to discuss the scientific and cultural discoveries of the day. Or that the first Mechanics’ Institute was attended by 450 working men in its first month and within ten years had spread from Scotland to all over the world. Or that in 1825 the twenty volunteers at the Lothian Itinerating Library were made up of shoemakers, wrights, sadlers, drapers and labourers. Writer H.V Morton was once surprised to overhear two young miners discussing Einstein’s theory of relativity. 3
Image caption: woodcut drawing of a miner carrying a pick-axe.
Even now, many of my peers - other PhD researchers and academics - are also working-class and achieving their education in longer, less traditional ways. One of my professors talks about how he would meet his supervisor with oil stained hands, squeezing his supervision meetings between his job as a mechanic. A single parent I know writes her thesis in between childcare and part time admin work. Until recently all of my higher education was crammed between low paid jobs and childcare, getting my laptop out late at night and in the early mornings.
The media stereotypes of working-class people - and the Daily Mail definitely isn’t the only culprit - are tedious and cliched, betraying the lack of diversity in their profession and and revealing the poor effort to read, follow or listen to the varied voices of the working class across Britain. Working-class education is full of the life experiences of those who work and live in the systems that keep society functioning - the healthcare systems, the built environment, transport, food systems and more. This added lived experience enriches the education in our society. This makes it frustrating but not surprising, to see the lack of curiosity on the part of these journalists into the real and varied lives of the working class.
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, p244.
Ibid, p237.
Ibid, p237.
In what the late Saddam Hussein once dubbed “the great Satan,” roughly two-thirds of the United States enlisted military corps is white . . . The fat, bulbous U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin once confirmed in a 93-2 vote of the U.S. Senate, immediately embarked on a whirlwind media tour of duty, telling the pseudo-secular sycophants in the state-controlled tabloid press and state-controlled television talk show circuit about how the U.S. Army is full of bad racist white men.
Senior Defense Department leaders celebrating yet another Pride Month at the Pentagon sounding the alarm about the rising number of state laws they say target the LGBTQ+ community, warned the trend is hurting the feelings of the armed forces . . . “LGBTQ plus and other diverse communities are under attack, just because they are different. Hate for hate’s sake,” said Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness, who also serves as DoD’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.
And now the U.S. Army is doing ads begging for more young white males? What happened?
Even with a full-on declaration of war from Congress, and even if Gavin Newsome could be cheated into the Oval Office by ZOG somehow, with Globohomo diversity brigades going door-to-door looking to impress American children into military service, they will be met with armed, well-trained opposition, the invasion at the Southern border is going full tilt, and the drugs are flowing in like never before.
Get ready for it . . . the fat old devil worshipping fags on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, in Whitehall, and in Brussels are in no shape to fight a war themselves, and most Americans are armed to the teeth with their own guns . . . NATO hates heterosexual white men . . . they said so themselves . . .
https://cwspangle.substack.com/i/138320669/nato-an-anti-white-and-anti-family-institution