‘Despised’ – Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class. ISBN13 978-1-5095-3998-7

When this book first was published, I knew that it had to be on my reading list. Having seen other examples of Mr Embery’s writing along with his media and social media interactions I agreed with him about how the Labour Party has lost the very class that it was set up to serve. It has, as both Mr Embery and others have pointed out, for much of its history a party melded from a mixture of the views of those in both Hampstead and Hartlepool, the theoretical Left and the Working Class Left. Now Labour has gone completely ‘Hampstead’. The Working Classes are metaphorically now the second or third class citizens in the very party that was set up to protect Working Class interests. It is indeed a shameful state of affairs.

Another reason for my interest in this book is that I wanted to read about the political experience of someone who had grown up in an area that I was very familiar with. A person who had followed a political path as a Trades Union activist that others whom I was acquainted with had also trod, but who came to different political conclusions than others in the Trades Union movement have come to. I also wanted to dig deeper into Mr Embery’s view of the various changes of the last twenty five years how he believes that they’ve affected the Working Classes and whose criticisms of Government policy came from the sort of working class led Left that I grew up with. I was looking for a refreshing voice from the centre-Left and I found what I was looking for in ‘Despised’.

I took a while to get the book as I wanted to wait for the more affordable paperback (too many hardbacks are definitely out of my price range) and be in a position to give the book the time and consideration I believed it deserved. I have now read this book and am in a position to give my personal opinion of it and I have to say that this book is not just as good as I expected it to be, going by my experience of Mr Embery in other media, but even better than I had envisaged.

The book opens with a description of the situation facing Labour supporters and the Labour Party regarding the 2019 General Election and the delusion that they had that the result of that election might be a hung parliament which would end up with Labour governing with the help of Welsh and Scottish Nationalists. Few Labour supporters said Mr Embery expected the scale of defeat that Labour experienced, the worst General Election result for Labour since the 1930’s. Mr Embery said that Labour activists could not believe that the Tories had gained an eighty seat majority as as far as they were concerned the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was popular and playing to ‘packed houses’ of Labour activists and therefore potential Labour voters.

But as Mr Embery pointed out Labour lost the General Election because its policies were popular with activists but not with the public as a whole. Mr Embery said that the 2019 General Election was one where the working class abandoned the party that had once been vociferous and steely in its defence of Britain’s working classes because it no longer represented them or put their interests first. I tend to agree with Mr Embery on this point as it’s been pretty obvious for many years that Labour had turned away from the working classes and instead had embraced many of the policies favoured by the middle class London metropolitan Left. These policies, which include EU enthusiasm and open borders, along with extreme minority interest policies such as those surrounding transgenderism, did not appeal to the sort of voters whom Labour needs to propel them into office. In effect Labour had been electorally punished by the very working classes that the party had abandoned.

Mr Embery said that the Labour Party that had embraced many aspects of neo-liberalism with its penchant for open borders, unfettered capitalism and globalism had instituted policies that had severely negatively impacted on Britain’s working classes and had failed to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the same class that it had for so long abandoned. Mr Embery said that since the Referendum on EU membership in 2016 politics had become ‘fractured’. He summed up this fracture by saying: ‘Our politics is fracturing. Liberal progressivism is in retreat as working class people seek to revive the politics of belonging, place and community as an antidote to globalisation’. He’s correct here.

In several parts of the book Mr Embery comes out with left wing based objections to the idea of globalisation. This for me was both very interesting and gratifying to see as so far the most vociferous objections to globalisation and the accompanying destruction of the concept of the nation state have come from the right and centre right. In Mr Embery’s writings we have some good and solid examples of the left wing objections to globalisation, especially economic and cultural globalisation that deserve to be read by those outside as well as inside the political Left.

Mr Embery is correct that globalisation has primarily damaged working class communities and has been a cause of deindustrialisation and the fragmentation of communities in the West. However Mr Embery draws in my view a correct distinction between globalism, which is an ideology that has primarily benefited the wealthy and internationalism including solidarity between workers in different nations. Internationalism has long been part of the thinking of the Left, both the sensible Left and the far Left that has in my view a more deranged and in some cases a very selective interpretation of internationalism. As I see it, internationalism is very much a bottom up movement as opposed to globalism that is quite plainly a top down ideology, one that does not grow organically but is imposed from above.

As I said earlier Mr Embery was born, grew up and came of age both personally and politically in an area, Barking and Dagenham, that I’m very familiar with having had relatives live there and who worked for what was once the area’s major employer, the Ford Motor Company. I also lived there myself with an ex-girlfriend for a short while. I know the area and I know of the rapid and unasked for demographic changes that occurred in that London Borough, changes that were explicitly created by the open borders policy of Tony Blair’s Labour Party. These demographic changes have almost completely destroyed what was once a solid working class area where concepts of place and class built a community.

Mr Embery, like myself I need to say here, does not blame the individual migrants for moving to Barking and Dagenham and changing the character of the area. If you or I were presented with an opportunity to live somewhere less shitty then would not we make a similar decision to move? Mr Embery blames Blair’s Labour for the massive and rapid demographic changes and he also blames Labour and the rest of the leftist establishment for not listening to the locals worries about rapid and almost completely uncontrolled immigration. He said that local people who raised concerns about inappropriate levels of migration and about resource allocation had their concerns dismissed as a nothingburger and not treated at all well by the local Labour Party establishment that has been in political control of the borough since its formation in 1965.

Mr Embery goes into some detail as to what happened as a reaction to the dismissive attitude of the Labour Party to peoples concerns about excessive migration. Frustrated at the failure of the Labour establishment to listen to genuine and well founded concerns from local people about the migration issue, there was by now obviously an opportunity for a party that challenged the Labour Party’s attitude of ‘if you complain about migration then you are racist neo-Nazi’. Unfortunately it was genuine neo-Nazis in the form of the British National Party who stepped in and pretended to be the knights in shining armour that the locals needed to fight back against a Labour Party that had swapped allegiances from the working classes who had lived in the area for decades to the recently arrived migrants. At the 2006 local elections the BNP got 12 seats but the party and support for the BNP started to die off quite rapidly when both the extremism and incompetence of the BNP councillors became clear. I recall how one BNP councillor claimed that his drink drive stop was the result of a ‘Zionist plot’ against him and how a story got about how some other BNP councillors believed that the reading light switches on their desks in the council chamber was a game show style buzzer that needed to be pressed in order to speak. These councillors were not the cream of the intellectual and political crop.

My view is that the BNP cynically exploited local people’s concerns about excessive migration and being ignored by the local Labour Establishment and also let the local people down extremely badly. They did nothing for the local people and when they inevitably got turfed out of office because of their incompetence and extremism, the locals were left with a local Labour Establishment that was just as wedded to the national Labour policy of open borders and enforced multiculturalism as they were before. Over the last few years a lot of traditional residents, both white and non-white who had lived in the area left as the area no longer felt like the home that it once was. In Barking and Dagenham the old ways of permanence, community and solidarity that those who live there once had have been exchanged for new ways of atomised individualism and a population that is less rooted and more transitory than the one that came before.

Mr Embery concentrates a lot in his book about the Labour Party and its role in the current problems that we face today. He said it was the Labour Party under the guidance of Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson that opened the borders to such an extent that the demographic changes in places like Barking and Dagenham were almost inevitable.

Labour’s opening of the immigration floodgates in my view harmed the working classes as it brought in a surplus of labour that would undercut the wages of British workers. The party of the working classes did the bidding of the capitalist class by bringing in cheap labour that would be more than willing to work for lower wages and tolerate much poorer working conditions. Mr Embery also criticises the Labour Party for encouragement of a style of globalisation that would and could only benefit the wealthy whilst making the lives of the working classes far far more precarious than they would otherwise have been. In my view Mr Embery’s criticism of the Labour Party are not just valid but fully justified. Labour did indeed open the UK’s borders to such an extent that it impacted on the wages and quality of life of Britain’s working classes and has landed us with social problems that will take decades to heal and to deal with, if that is they can.

Despite Mr Embery’s criticism of the Labour Party he does not say that the Labour Party is lost. He believes that the Labour Party if it rediscovers the reason for its creation, campaigning for the British working classes, could again be a force for good in Britain. I would like to believe that this is possible and that Labour could once again be the party that put British workers first in its considerations. However looking at the Labour Party as it is currently constituted and observing how the party is behaving in both local government and on the national stage in Westminster, I don’t predict this happening any time soon. The party is still the party of the middle class Left and their obsessions rather than being the party of Britain’s working classes. I would like to share some of Mr Embery’s faith that Labour could reform itself into a party I could trust again but I can’t see this happening on any reasonable timescale. As long as Labour is the party of Abbot, Burgon, McDonnell and the like, the sort of reform that takes the Labour Party out of the hands of the identity politics obsessives and the academic Left, will I’m afraid be difficult if not impossible. It is difficult after all for a party that for decades had hated the very class that created it in the first place to turn about and change.

All in all I found ‘Despised’ a fabulous book. It’s well written and well informed about British politics and comes from a standpoint that needs a much wider audience than political anoraks such as myself and thankfully this appears to be the case. The fact that this book is on its third reprint already having only been released in 2021 shows that there is an appetite for books such as this.

If you can get hold of this book and read it then do so but I would also ask people to request their local public libraries to stock this book as it deserves to be on library shelves and available to as many people as possible and not just in people’s private collections of books. This book for me was one that I would thoroughly recommend not just for those people with an interest in politics, but for everyone who wants to know why we have ended up with many of the problems in British society that we have now. This is a first class read and in my view is up there with other books that have influenced my thinking such as Tammy Bruce’s ‘The New Thought Police’ about the censorious and societally damaging far Left and Nick Cohen’s ‘What’s Left’ which took a much needed dig at the so called ‘anti war’ Left and their penchant for giving their support to monstrous dictators.

Please read this book. If nothing else it will make you think whether or not the Labour Party as currently constituted is a fit and proper entity to run the country.