Labour MP Frank Field said white working classes are unsure of identities. He told conference that English society has ‘lost confidence in what it is’. Concerns over immigration’s impact on white working class communities.
Ideas: Frank Field, Labour MP for Birkenhead, said at a symposium that the white working classes are increasingly unsure of their identities
The white working classes are so alienated from society that they should attend citizenship ceremonies with immigrants, according to David Cameron’s poverty tsar.
Frank Field said some working class people were increasingly unsure of their identities.
He suggested that going to the ‘wonderful’ citizenship ceremonies could help them feel like they were part of British society again.
Mr Field, who was welfare minister under Tony Blair, told a conference that society had ‘lost confidence in what it is’ and needed to ‘relearn the rules’ it used to live by.
The Labour MP criticised his own party for having lost touch with the working classes, the very group which created it.
He said: ‘There are dangers for that group which used to run the Labour Party, [but] now is almost forgotten by it – the working class.’
Mr Field, MP for Birkenhead, made his comments amid growing concerns about the impact of immigration on white working class communities, some of whom are turning to the far Right as unemployment rises.
In March, Ed Miliband pledged to limit the number of unskilled people able to enter Britain to protect jobs and apologised for the previous Labour government getting it ‘wrong’ on immigration.
Mr Field told the audience of academics: ‘In my lifetime, we’ve moved from a Labour Party which was working class-dominated. Some trendy London middle classes went along with it but were subjected, at least publicly, to the moral economy of the working class.
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