The Stigmatised and De-valued Working Class: The State of a Council Estate

Abstract

This chapter will explore the experiences of those living on a council estate in Nottingham, called St Ann’s, as a means to understanding the causes of the riots in the UK’s major cities in August 2011. These people are amongst the most disadvantaged in Britain, with families who have not known regular or stable paid employment since the deindustrialisation of the 1980s and social housing and public services being necessary to, as they say, ‘keep their heads above water’. Some still do work in what is left of the traditional industries — factory work, warehousing, low-level engineering — and many also work in the new low-pay service sector or public authority jobs, such as teaching assistance, youth assistance, social work and retail, but a significant group, due to changes in social housing policy,¹ remain unemployed through sickness, disability or lack of jobs. There is also, however, a distinct cultural dynamic to being working class in the UK today as significant as the economic, material forces. Working-classness has, in short, been negatively re-branded and stigmatised over the last 30 years under successive Conservative and New Labour governments,² such that being a resident of a council estate in the UK in the twenty-first century has a very different meaning compared to the last century, when social housing was connected to the employed working class, keeping extended families close together and allowing communities to grow around work and local services.³