It's often said that working-class people back Reform because they're inherently racist. That’s nonsense, argues our Writer at Large Neil Mackay. The reason is down to the death of social mobility

The great and wicked irony confronting the working-class today is that everyone speaks on their behalf, yet nobody listens when they open their mouths.

There was a time when the working class had a powerful, nuanced voice. In the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing up on a working-class estate, there was no absurd belief that we spoke with one voice. It was as likely that working-class folk would be Thatcherite as socialist. It was accepted that working-class kids could become professors or plumbers. These differences surprised nobody. Some working-class folk were "politically correct", others were bigots – just like the middle class.

Today, the working class is seen as an amorphous blob, with one mouth, one soul. The notion is detestable and wrong.

The beating heart of this grotesque stereotyping, this monstrous limiting of human lives, is the claim that the working class is especially drawn to Reform through inherent racism.

That idea needs torched. It’s discriminatory and prejudiced. It assumes poverty equals racism, and wealth equals openness and tolerance.

Read more from Neil Mackay

Nonsense. I’ve met more racists in pin-stripped suits than in housing schemes. The people who fought hardest against racism were always poor. The people who cosy up to racists are more often than not wealthy and powerful. Check the interwar years for proof.

Evidently, there are working-class racists. There are racists in........

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