Underdogs: The Truth About Britain's White Working Class,
by Joel Budd
 
'Essential reading' - Telegraph
'Thoughtful and nuanced' - The Guardian
'A calm, sensitive, soothingly sociological book' - The Sunday Times
'Will change the way you think about Britain' - Robert Ford, author of Brexitland

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No large group of people in Britain is as badly understood as the white working class.

While Brexit helped to turn the group into a social and political force, in its aftermath one-third of the population has been reduced to a cartoon. Britain’s white working class has been caricatured as grumpy and backward-looking, as incorrigibly xenophobic, even racist. It’s a tired and simplistic narrative, perpetuated by both politicians and the press.

The truth is entirely different.

Economist journalist Joel Budd has spent years travelling around Britain, from the shores of Teesside to the Isle of Wight, from the Valleys of South Wales to the fields of Lincolnshire. He talks with people about their jobs, their families, their neighbourhoods, and their feelings about the state of the country.

In conversations with a hugely diverse group of people who are not just grumbling about British society but are actively driving social and cultural change, and rewriting their role in our nation’s story, Underdogs is a sharp corrective to the familiar stereotype.