UK Immigration And Class

"opposing immigration, illegal or otherwise, is a class signifier in Britain, and most middle-class people—including most politicians—aren’t prepared to support a political cause that would see them associated with the lower orders." https://t.co/9RR2YgIby2

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) October 6, 2026

The post above raises yet again the class question in the UK that I keep puzzling over: the upper classes in the UK seem genuinely to resent, maybe even to hate, the working class. As I've noted here several times, this goes back at least to the General Strike of 1926:

The General Strike began on 3 May 1926 when the Trades Union Congress (TUC) called on workers across key industries to stop work in support of coal miners who were facing severe wage cuts and longer working hours.

After the First World War Britain’s coal industry was struggling. Mine owners wanted to reduce miners’ pay and increase working hours to keep their businesses profitable.

Miners’ unions resisted, warning that the proposals would push already hard-pressed workers into deeper poverty.

There was a general fear among the upper classes that a general strike was more than just a labor action, it was a threat of revolution. According to Wikipedia,

The leaders of the Labour Party were troubled about the proposed general strike because they were aware of the revolutionary elements within the union movement and of the damage that they might do to the party's new reputation as a party of government. During the next two days, frantic efforts were made to reach an agreement between the government and the mining industry representatives.

It appears that the Labour Party, which was the creature of the bourgeois Fabian Society, feared the potential revolutionary influence of the general strike, as did the TUC, which essentially lost control of it. At the same time,

the government put in place a "militia" of special constables called the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) of volunteers to maintain order in the street.

The volunteers, who were bourgeois, also tried to replace the unionized rail workers, although they had no experience at that type of work. Nevertheless, the attitude seems to have been that if the middle and upper classes coulld pitch in if needed, there was no need for the working class, and they saw the whole thing as a lark.

On 6 May 1926, there was a change of atmosphere. The government newspaper, British Gazette, suggested that means of transport into London began to improve compared to the first day with volunteers, car sharing, cyclists, private buses, as well as strikebreakers. A statement on the front page indicated 200 London General Omnibus Company buses 'on the streets'. Only 86 LGOC buses, however, were operating.

The TUC, whoch never had much heart in the strike, nevertheless made a show of "negotiation" with the governnment, but it eventually called off the strike without getting any deal, and the UK bourgeoisie came away with the idea it had won.

Labour gained its first full majority government in 1945, and in succeeding years, it instituted national health care and socialized the coal and transport industries. The problem, though, was that Labour never represented the working class; it was always a bourgeois movement that convinced itself it was promoting working class interests. Thus its first instincts were to keep working class wages down, and it did this by importing workers from the former empire to replace native workers in the newly socialized medical, coal, and transport industries.

There's now discomfort in Piddington, the upscale village that, reacting to the government's plan to locate 1250 male migrants in a nearby former military facility, voted symbolically to leave the UK and become part of the US. One one hand, they don't want to be associated with the working-class anti-migrant movement, especially

the arrival of Daniel Thomas, who prefers to be called Danny Tommo, the leader of the new balaclava-wearing anti-migrant movement Patriot Platform, with an offer to rally his masked supporters, if the site is opened, “to protect women and children” locally.

. . . Andrew Smith, a Network Rail employee from Bicester, was less upbeat: “We don’t want to see masked people like there were in Dover – that’s not really the view of the local people; we are concerned to do the right thing. These people have got to go somewhere, but it has to be properly resourced with the proper facilities.”

Thus bourgeois oppositiun to migration exists only insofar as the migration impacts their lifestyle directly; if the government wants to put them somewhere other than migrant hotels, that's fine, just not near upscale villages. That the government should on one hand stop the boats and on the other send the migrants back is a whole separate issue that doesn't concern Piddington.

It's hard not to conclude the UK will handle this issue no differently than it handled the 1926 General Strike. You can only kick the can so far down the road.