Let's talk politics

On a Sunday in spring? Really?

I’M LAID LOW with a bug, so just a quick message from me this week.

I was thrilled to see that Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class by my brainy Economist ex-colleague Joel Budd was picked by today’s Sunday Times as its book of the week. It has already been excerpted on Radio 4.

Joel was one of those infuriating colleagues who would always be ready to meet your latest clever idea or hot take with a wise, nuanced reflection. More annoying still, he’d usually be right, and maddeningly nice about it all. So I am delighted and reluctant to say that he is going to be joining me to talk about his book at Backstory on May 7th.

Here’s a snippet from Will Lloyd’s review:

“The biggest lie told about members of Britain’s middle class… is that we do not think or talk or agonise about what is now called “the white working class”.

Overlooked? Ignored? Rubbish. The middle classes have both feared the revolutionary potential and yearned for a dusting of the hard-won authenticity of this country’s white working class for almost as long as there has been a printing press…”

In my lifetime alone, members of the group have been demonised as “chavs” and lionised as the left-behind voters who revolted to bring about Brexit.

This demographic is often said to be politically pivotal, courted by Boris Johnson in his (partially successful) attempt to dismantle the Red Wall, and now supposedly pitted against metropolitan liberals in the battle for the future of the Labour Party.

But who exactly makes up this group? And what really motivates these voters?

“Budd is more of a caveat-ist than a polemicist,” Lloyd goes on. “A reporter who travels widely through Welsh towns, Leicester estates and Lincolnshire villages, rather than a commentator issuing pronouncements from his desk. This is a calm, sensitive, sociological book.

His notion of the white working class is fuzzy and porous. They are different in different places, although they are everywhere — “not one of the 7,500 wards in England and Wales contains no members of the group”. The young are different from the old. The women are different from the men. If they have problems (and they do), these have little to do with being disrespected by the liberal elite.”

All this has whetted my appetite to read the book, and then to join you to talk with Joel about it. It should make for a fascinating evening.

Book your tickets here. And if you live further afield, but would like me to share an audio recording afterwards, just reply to this note.

And check out our full line-up of events in May — including discussions of the history of Britain in data, a book about the power of listening in a world full of noise, the Russian spies who hid in the West after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and neurodiversity.

Want more Backstory?

• Come to one of our events

• Request a book to pick up in the shop (we can usually get a book for the next day)

• Order a book from our website with free UK delivery

Happy reading,

Tom