You might begin your quest here:
“The problem is not that white workers are desperate to protect their ethnic identity. It is, rather, that in the absence of political mechanisms and social movements that can challenge their wider marginalisation, such identity is all that many have to lean upon.
However low one caps immigration, it will not affect austerity policy, or the atomisation of society, or the crisis in the NHS, or the neutering of trade unions. The immigration debate cannot be won simply by debating immigration, whether from an economic or a cultural viewpoint. Anxieties about immigration are an expression of a wider sense of political voicelessness, abandonment and disengagement. Until those problems are tackled, the anxieties will remain.”
That working-class lives are more fraught is not down to immigration | Kenan Malik
“Too many who rightly bemoan the corrosion of working-class organisations see the problem as too much immigration. Too many who have a liberal view on immigration are willing to accept attacks on working-class living standards. Until both those blinkered approaches are confronted, there will be no real challenge to the populists, nor to the erosion of the influence of the left.”
THE WORKING CLASS, IMMIGRATION & THE LEFT
“The forms of social organization that once gave working class lives identity, solidarity, indeed dignity, have disappeared. Much the same developments can be seen in many other European nations. ‘One of the biggest failures’ of contemporary mainstream political parties, the American philosopher
Michael Sandel has observed, ‘has been the failure to take seriously and to speak directly to people’s aspiration to feel that they have some meaningful say in shaping the forces that govern their lives’.
The result has been the creation of what many commentators in Britain call the ‘left behind’ working class. In France, there has been much talk of ‘peripheral France’, a phrase coined by the social geographer
Christophe Guilluy to describe people ‘pushed out by the deindustrialization and gentrification of the urban centers’, who ‘live away from the economic and decision-making centers in a state of social and cultural non-integration’ and have come to ‘feel excluded’. Both these terms are, in my view, problematic, but both also give a sense of the social, political and existential changes that have been wrought.
Immigration has played almost no part in fostering the changes that have left so many feeling disaffected. Immigrants are not responsible for the weakening of the labour movement, or the transformation of social democratic parties, or the imposition of austerity policies. Immigration has, however, come to be a means through which many perceive these changes.
The so-called ‘left behind’ have been left behind largely because of economic and political changes. But they have come to see their marginalization primarily as a
cultural loss. In part, the same social and economic changes that have led to the marginalization of the ‘left behind’ have also made it far more difficult to view that marginalization in political terms. The very decline of the economic and political power of the working class and the weakening of labour organizations and social democratic parties, have helped obscure the economic and political roots of social problems. And as culture has become the medium through which social issues are refracted, so the ‘left behind’ have also come to see their problems in cultural terms. They, too, have turned to the language of identity to express their discontent.
Through this process, the meaning of solidarity has transformed. Politically, the sense of belonging to a group or collective has historically been expressed in two broad forms: through the politics of identity and through the politics of solidarity. The former stresses attachment to common identities based on such categories as race, nation, gender or culture. The latter draws people into a collective not because of a given identity but to further a political or social goal. Where the politics of identity divides, the politics of solidarity finds collective purpose across the fissures of race or gender, sexuality or religion, culture or nation. But it is the politics of solidarity that has crumbled over the past two decades as social movements have eroded. For many today, the only form of collective politics that seem possible is that rooted in identity.”
POPULISM AND IMMIGRATION
-- the Sunday just gone was when I read the Obs version, not last week.
- the general hero worship/under criticism of Macron in the Guardian.
, honest 
, attacked Macron fair and square the other day
