The ghost of Enoch

Newsnight is doing a major series on the "white working class", which is presumably going to say some interesting stuff about the decline of manufacturing and the generational skills gap. Presumably. Not that you'd know it from the BBC's website, which just seems determined to point out that white working class people are racist toerags.

The Beeb's reporter seems to have spoken to half a dozen people, all of whom are prepared to state, in forthright terms, that it's all the fault of the foreigners. A third of this extensive sample - and we're not making this up - are the barstaff at a working men's club:

"They're paying them a lot less money than they've got to pay the Englishman so they take them on and the English men can't find jobs. They hold the Englishman back from getting a job."

So would he ration services or prioritise them in some way? "To tell you the truth, I wouldn't even let them into the country because they're just taking what Englishmen are entitled to."

But is there evidence that immigration is to blame for what people like Gary and Marie feel is happening to white working class communities like theirs?

Both conceded that immigration hasn't actually impacted directly on their lives. Shirland - an old mining village - remains almost exclusively white.

All illustrated - as if the point wasn't sufficiently clear - with a nice Orwellian photo of Enoch Powell. How's that for iconography? Westmonster would like to propose a new series in which Newsnight investigates the opinions of the middle class mediarati by interviewing the cleaners at the BBC. And the immediate publication, by BBC Worldwide, of the jokes of Bernard Manning under the title "What the Working Classes Really Think."