White working class: the forgotten demographic or identity grievance-mongering?

The progressive obsession with identifying and grouping people by race and religion, according to different levels of perceived grievance, has produced its own counter-identity: the ‘white working class’.

Trade unionists of old would never have needed to identify themselves as ‘white’, yet initiatives intended to reduce inequality have frequently positively discriminated in favour of non-white ethnic minorities. As Michael Collins observed in The Likes of Us, his 2004 chronicle of a changing South-East London, subtitled ‘A Biography of the White Working Class’: ‘The white working class have never needed to define themselves or be defined before.’

Now in 2026, in every debate on EDI, inequality, positive discrimination or even who isoffered Cambridge University professorships, there’s become an obligatory response of ‘what about the forgotten white working class?’ The issue is so ubiquitous that organisations including MI5, the BBC, the Civil Service, the Bar Council of England and Wales, Transport for London and Google have all offered internships restricted to candidates from ethnic-minority backgrounds. Meanwhile, Dulwich College and Winchester College declined a combined £1.2million in bursary funding that had been earmarked for disadvantaged white boys.

It’s true that white working-class boys are the worst-performing demographic in England’s schools: in 2025, just 36 per cent achieved the expected standard in GCSE English and maths, compared with 58 per cent of Black African boys and 82 per cent of Chinese boys. There have also been individual flashpoints, such as the treatment of Henry Nowak by the police, suggesting that, as a consequence of diversity policies, young white men are increasingly unprotected due to the colour of their skin. Against this backdrop, some argue that the white working class have grounds for grievance. But other worry that aping the worst aspects of identarian victim claim-making is itself problematic.

And are politicians and activists also at risk of stereotyping – or even fetishising – the white working class? Politically there is a temptation to treat the group as a political monolith, as though millions of people who happen to share a racial and socioeconomic label necessarily think, live and vote in much the same way. In doing so, it risks committing the very mistake for which they have criticised progressives: reducing individuals to members of an identity groups and assuming that the group possesses a common set of interests and grievances.

Meanwhile, the fixation on identity may be part of the problem, serving as a distraction from the structural and economic problems that have left the white working class behind. If the objection to identity politics is that it divides people according to race, then does championing the ‘white working class’ not constitute a continuation of the same toxic politics?

So, are the white working class a forgotten demographic? Can their disadvantages be acknowledged without turning them into another identity group? If grievance has become a form of political currency, is the answer to give the white working class a greater claim to it, or to reject the politics of grievance altogether?