I was pointed in the direction of Raja Miah MBE, who is the chap who wrote the stunning set of articles about life in Oldham by a number of users of the Gab platform and I’d like to thank them for doing so. You’ve introduced me to a man whose views are interesting and well worth considering.

Mr Miah’s articles are extremely well written and he comes from a counter-extremism and community development background. However despite that background in work that is mostly carried out by local government, Mr Miah pulls no punches when condemning the ideological distance that exists between those who run local government and those who are being governed. Mr Miah is condemnatory when it comes to how badly the local politicians in Oldham have treated the white working classes. There is, Mr Miah said in Oldham, and I believe in a great many other local authorities  as well, a culture of parachuted in politicians and council officers who know nothing about the area they are administering and get all the information they need to govern not from talking to local people, but from reports put on their desks.

Here’s a small sample of Mr Miah’s work. I would strongly advise that readers of this blog take the time to read Mr Miah’s blog Recusant 9 as it is well worth reading.

There is without doubt a clear disconnect between the Civic Centre and the people of the town. In my experience, particularly with the white working-class people of Oldham. The first community I worked in was Sholver. At the time, fresh out of university, I was hired as a Community Development Worker for Oldham Council. It was the old Sholver, before the new houses (now not so new) were built. A time when the old rag & bone man still pulled his cart up and down the streets. At once, I felt comfortable and was made to feel comfortable. In many ways it was the place from my childhood.

Whilst working for the Council, I pretty much worked in all of the communities that are usually described as white working-class. If I’m honest, I didn’t really encounter racism in any of these places and if there was anger or frustration directed my way, it wasn’t because of who I was, it was because of where they were in their lives and the role played by who they thought I was representing.

Wherever I went, and whoever I spoke with, young, old, employed, unemployed, it did not matter. Their primary concerns were the same.

• the Council doesn’t care about people like us
• the Council doesn’t want to listen to people like us
• the Councillors do not represent people like us

Having since worked in other towns and cities, I found that self-serving politicians and out of town elite senior public servants (who have only spent an occasional night in the town they work in (typically after their Xmas party)), are not unique to Oldham. Unfortunately, this is a recurring trait of how Councils across the country are run.

The politicians and the senior policy officers are parachuted in. Requiring a sat nav to get around the place, the only experiences they have of the people that live there is through reading reports, the occasional interaction with the lower paid front of house staff and most troublesome of all, only viewing them through a lens where the white working-class are a problem that needs solving. Instead of seeing them as people, they are just statistics circled in red ink in their reports.

That the people who run our town are from elsewhere in itself is not why working-class white people should be worried. This should be a concern to all of us. Why working-class white people should worry though is because the situation for them in a town such as Oldham has got much worse over the last 25 years. The reality is that the Council and its machinery care even less about the white working-class than they did before.