Class Consciousness and Racial Scapegoating: Two Paths from the Estate on Mosher Mag

Growing Up Working Class in the UK

It always starts the same.

Your first steps are on cracked concrete and potholes deep enough to fall in.

Your first fight is in a corner shop car park.

Your first big dream dies in a Year 9 maths class while your supply teacher gets called a nonce by a kid who’s already been excluded twice this term.

If you grew up working class in the UK, you already know the score.

Free school dinners and your mum crying when the electric runs out.

The smell of weed in stairwells and piss in lifts that don’t lift.

Overdue bills and bailiff letters piling up by the front door.

Neighbours who scream through the walls and still hand you a can on Friday.

You were born with debt wrapped around your wrist like a hospital tag.

You grew up in austerity’s stomach.

You learned early: no one is coming to save you.

The one thing you will never forget is the weight in your parents’ faces when they think you’re not looking.

And that knowledge? That pain? That class rot?

It does something to your head. It bends the way you see the world.

Until one day, when your job falls through, or your rent doubles, or your mate OD’s in a piss-soaked alley behind the chippy, you snap. And then the system offers you two paths:

One leads you to understand that you were never the problem, that the system was. That the invisible hand of class has always been a boot on your neck, pressed harder depending on your postcode, your accent, your parents' education, or the number of bedrooms you shared.

The other path? It tells you someone else stole your chance.

Not the rich. Not the landlords. Not the banks or politicians.

But immigrants. Refugees. Foreigners. “Others.”

Britain loves a class story it can package.

The plucky council-estate kid who became a TV chef. The bricklayer’s son turned footballer. The working-class girl who made it to Oxbridge. That one-off lottery win that the middle class loves to parade as proof the system works- if you just "work hard enough."

But most of us don’t make it past the estate.

Because the truth is, meritocracy in Britain is a myth with a tie on.

Where you start often determines where you end up.

A kid born in Surrey doesn’t just get better schools. They get safety, stability, structure, and a family that knows how to game the system.

Meanwhile, in Sunderland or Salford, you’re raised by a single mum trying to survive on Universal Credit, and a school with ten-year-old textbooks and a different maths teacher every term.

You’re told you’re lazy. Told you’re violent.Told you’re broken.

And that ache curdles into rage — into the need to blame.

There are two kinds of working-class upbringing.

There’s the kind where you grow up hearing that the system’s rigged, where you learn that your parents weren't lazy, just exhausted. Where the idea of solidarity isn’t abstract; it’s survival.

You grew up around unions. You knew who Thatcher was without being told. You heard your gran call the Tories scum without blinking.

And then there’s the other kind.

The kind where every Sunday paper on the coffee table was The Sun.

Where your dad said “bloody immigrants” with the same tone he used to describe a pothole.

Where racism wasn’t screamed, but breathed — casually, muttered, inherited.

And if you were lucky, you grew out of it.

If not, you doubled down.

You joined Facebook groups called “Real Brits First.”

You voted UKIP because they “said what you were thinking.”

You started believing you were poor because someone darker than you got a grant you didn’t.

What you didn’t realise is that you were being played. Weaponised.

Your pain, your anger, your resentment, turned into votes.

It’s easier to blame a neighbour than a billionaire.

Because the billionaire is invisible.

But your neighbour — brown, Black, Eastern European — is right there.

Buying bread. Picking up their kids. Existing.

It's everywhere. Social media. The telly. Your distant relative posting on Facebook in all caps.

And when the tabloids scream:

“Refugees get £40k in benefits!”

“Immigrants stealing council homes!”

“Your job taken by a foreigner!”

It sticks.

Suddenly, it’s not the landlord who doubled your rent.

It’s not the company that laid you off to “downsize.”

It’s not the MP who hasn’t visited your area since 2011.

It’s the Somali family next door.

It’s the Romanian nurse.

It’s the brown guy at the chicken shop who’s been up since 5 AM and still sends money home.

You start to feel like a victim of invasion.

You think your wages are low because someone else “undercut you.”

Not because your boss is paying everyone peanuts while he fucks off to Marbella twice a year in his leased Audi.

Never mind that those stories in the papers are lies.

Never mind that asylum seekers aren’t allowed to work.

Never mind that CEOs offshored your dad’s job to Indonesia, not Abdul down the street.

Racism is cheap. Class solidarity requires education.

Requires unlearning what you were taught by a system built to keep you down.

But then there’s the other lot.

The ones who saw the same filth, lived the same pain, but chose not to get fooled.

The kids who picked up Marx instead of Mein Kampf.

The teens who got politicised when the police beat their mates.

The queers who realised there’s no place in fascism for people like them, no matter how “British” they feel.

These are the ones who figured it out:

This isn’t about race. This is about class.

And class is the goddamn ghost that haunts every postcode in this country.

Because it’s never been you versus the immigrant.

It’s been all of us versus the landlords, the oil execs, the hedge fund freaks, the House of Lords crust fossils, and the billionaires whose kids will never know what it feels like to boil the kettle to have a bath.

We are where we are not because someone “jumped the housing queue,” but because there’s no queue anymore, just a trapdoor.

And someone’s getting rich every time you fall through it.

The media feeds you this idea of the “working class” as some proper geezer in hi-vis eating chips and voting Tory.

White, male, gruff. Bit racist. Bit sexist. Always down the pub. Always angry at the world. Votes Brexit. Loves St George. Thinks political correctness has “gone mad.”

But that ain’t us.

Not really.

The working class is Black, brown, trans, single mums, delivery drivers, students, carers, retail workers, and the bloke pouring your pint.

It’s the Filipino nurse wiping your nan’s arse.

The girl doing 12-hour Amazon shifts on her period.

It’s you, bleeding out on zero-hours, trying to survive another winter in a mouldy flat where the windows don’t shut.

Class isn’t a look. It’s not a vibe. It’s oppression.

And when you finally see it, really see it, you realise every time they fed you a story about immigrants being the enemy, they were buying themselves time.

This is the bitter truth: Britain will pit the working class against itself before it ever threatens the rich.

White against Black. English against Polish. Man against woman. North against South. Working class against working class.

Because as long as we’re fighting each other, we’re not fighting the machine.

As long as we’re calling each other scroungers, illegals, or snowflakes, we’re not calling out the landlords charging £1,200 for mouldy flats. The corporations dodging tax while foodbanks run out of pasta. The politicians who wouldn’t survive a week in a tower block with three kids and no heating.

Working class is about power. About who has it, and who never did.

And the moment you realise that, you start looking around differently.

You stop blaming your neighbour and start asking why there are four betting shops and zero youth centres.

You stop repeating what the headlines say, and start noticing the MP who hasn’t set foot on your estate since they got elected.

You stop swallowing shame and start naming the system.

Because the real threat isn’t the family from Syria next door.

It’s the ones who convince you to hate them, instead of hating the ones who kept you down.

Because if you ever looked up from your front step and asked,

“Why is the sixth richest country in the world full of foodbanks?” “Why did we clap for nurses just to gut the NHS right after?” “Why can we fund wars but not libraries?”

You’d stop voting for vultures in suits.

You’d stop blaming refugees who fled war with less than you’ve got in your pocket.

You’d start getting angry at the real monsters: the ones with clean hands, offshore accounts, and smiles like knives.

The longer you stay poor in this country, the more pressure there is to believe the lie.

To blame the wrong people. To vote against your own interests. To think dignity is a zero-sum game.

But there’s another way.

Learn your history. Talk to people outside your bubble. Ask questions you were told not to. Get angry — but aim it upward.

Because class doesn’t just shape your life.

It shapes your lens.

One path leads to hate. The other to resistance.

Both start in the same place: A council flat. A takeaway tea. A postcode written off.

Only one path ends in freedom.

For the freaks, by the freaks.

Thanks for reading. Stay strange.

✦ moshermag.com