Class and campaigns – posh toffs versus working class Walthamstow

9:24am Tuesday 19th August 2008

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By Simon Munk »

I've several times, by members of the public, councillors and council officers been told that the people fighting to save the EMD/Granada, the Stow, the market, the William Morris Gallery and Vestry House Museum and against a massive Primark on the Arcade site are middle class (and therefore somehow ignorable).

The latest anti-middle class attack comes from Mrs J. A. O'Sullivan in the paper who says: "I do not think anybody in Walthamstow cares about working class people." And you know what? She's right, but for all the wrong reasons in all the wrong ways.

It's really understandable but really sad that so many working class people who live in this area don't get involved in local politics – mostly, they've been ignored and shunted around by an uncaring council who just doesn't get community consultation over and over again already. When all that ever happens is you get told what's going to happen, then it's no wonder that you stop saying what you want to happen.

So, yes, it's mostly middle-class people on demonstrations (for the above, and a whole bunch of other reasons). But that doesn't mean those demonstrations don't genuinely reflect local feeling.

When I was collecting signatures on a petition a few years ago to "save the cinema" (the EMD/Granada, of course), it was overwhelmingly working class people in their forties and up who were most angry and upset about the cinema going. They had happy memories of the place.

Affluent, well-dressed twentysomethings and teenagers – middle-class kids – were a lot less interested until you told 'em a bit about the history of the building and how it could be used going forward. Then they nearly all signed and got their mates over too.

The picture on the EMD is far more complex than councillors and council officers who dismissed the protests as middle class waffle would have you believe Mrs O'Sullivan. And the Stow campaign certainly isn't massively middle class – it's working class folk who've kept that stadium running and who will lose out most.

Arguably the most class-related stick I've had is over my anti-Primark feelings. But it's also the working class who stand to lose most from its arrival. The market will surely be decimated (with loads of clothes, cosmetics etc. stalls) by the arrival of a mega-Primark right next to it. Take a walk down the High Street on a Saturday now – it's not exactly Islington's Upper Street. Poor families are the most obvious shopping group by miles. And market traders, not exactly a hoity-toity bunch, are very angry about the Primark plans.

Working class folks like Mrs O'Sullivan are being ignored by this council. But not in the way she sees. She says we need to change things "so that people who work buy do not have much money have somewhere to go and that people who live in horrible flats have somewhere decent to live". How does scrapping the Stow mean people will have somewhere to go? And what chance that the housing estate planned to replace it (judging by the council's other recent big housing projects) won't be horrible?

This council (councillors and officers) genuinely wants to tear down Walthamstow and replace it with Ilford, Stratford or Wood Green. The only problem? We're already next to Ilford, Stratford and Wood Green.

Weirdest of all, the council are desperate on one hand to attract more middle class people to Walthamstow. That'd mean higher spending in the borough's shops, more Council Tax in the coffers, more money to spend on regenerating areas that needed it. Yet simultaneously, the council are utterly dismissive of protests as a middle class vocal minority. The council listens to the middle classes barely more than it listens to the working classes.

If the council wants more middle class money and Mrs O'Sullivan wants Walthamstow to change for the better, tearing all the unique things about the area down and concreting them over hardly seems the place to start.

Mrs O'Sullivan, and the council, is wrong in trying to make a class war out of the current protests. Instead middle-class incomers and working class born-and-bred people should be working together to protect what's best about Walthamstow and get rid of what's worst (like the current bunch of idiots in power, probably!).