The Coalition Problem

The working class in Britain is not white. It is not homogeneous. It contains communities with different histories, different relationships to the state, and specific tensions with each other that class analysis alone cannot resolve. Building the coalition is the hardest political problem in these interviews - and the one on which the most depends.

Marcus Johnson has spent fifteen years building anti-racism coalitions across Birmingham’s working-class communities. The Jamaican community in Handsworth. The Pakistani community in Sparkhill. The Bangladeshi community in Ladywood. The white working-class community in Erdington. These are all working-class communities with genuine shared economic interests. They are also communities with specific tensions and specific histories with each other that are not reducible to those shared interests.

MJ: Building the coalition requires holding both of those truths simultaneously. After fifteen years I’m still learning how to do it.

Still learning after fifteen years. Johnson is not being falsely modest. He is describing a genuinely difficult problem that does not have a stable solution - one that requires continuous renegotiation as conditions change, as new tensions emerge, as the specific histories between communities are activated by specific events. The class analysis gives him the shared interests. It does not give him the specific histories. He needs both, and holding them simultaneously is the work.

What class analysis misses

The accounts of race and class in these interviews are not a set of arguments about the relative priority of different forms of oppression. They are practical accounts of what happens when class analysis is applied to specific situations and proves insufficient - when the framework that is supposed to explain the pattern fails to explain it fully, or explains it in ways that miss the most politically consequential features.

Rizwan Ali, who has been organising among gig economy and taxi workers for fourteen years, describes the specific misuse of class analysis he watches for in left organising spaces. His father drove a taxi for twenty-two years. Ali uses class analysis constantly. He is also alert to a specific way it gets deployed that he finds politically harmful.

RA: Class can be a genuine analysis or it can be a deflection. People use it to avoid talking about race, about Islamophobia, about immigration. ‘It’s all really class’ becomes a way of not engaging with specifics. So I watch for how it’s being deployed.

‘It’s all really class’ as a deflection. The theoretical move that subsumes race into class - that treats racism as a superstructural expression of economic relations that will be resolved when the relations are transformed - is not simply wrong as a proposition. It is also, in Ali’s experience, a rhetorical strategy that allows people to avoid the discomfort of engaging with racism specifically. The class analysis is not wrong. It is being weaponised as an escape route from the harder conversation.

Dwayne Richards, who has been organising against policing violence in Brixton for eight years, makes a related but distinct argument. The Black working class in Brixton is working class. The class analysis is necessary. It is not sufficient.

DR: There are specific things that happen to Black people in this country that aren’t fully explained by class. The way I get looked at by police. The way Tottenham gets talked about in the media. That’s class and race in a way where I don’t think one fully contains the other.

One does not fully contain the other. This is not a claim that race is more fundamental than class, or that class analysis is in principle inadequate. It is a claim that the specific historical processes that have produced the class position of the Black working class in Britain - the Windrush recruitment, the geography of settlement, the specific policing of those communities across decades - cannot be read off from the class structure alone. The class structure is real. The racial structure is also real. They interact in ways that neither can fully capture.

Leila Hussain and the narrative problem

Leila Hussain grew up in Sparkhill, Birmingham, and has spent nine years working on anti-racism media and narrative. Her account of the class problem adds a dimension that most class analysis misses: the question of who gets to tell the story of working-class communities, and what that story does to the communities being described.

The grooming gangs coverage of 2012 and 2013 is her case study. She was fourteen or fifteen. She watched the coverage and understood immediately what it was doing: taking a real crime that had to be reported and prosecuted, and building around it a narrative about Pakistani-Muslim communities specifically - about all Pakistani men, about Islam - that served specific political purposes and that bore very little resemblance to the community she was actually in.

LH: Nobody from the community was getting to speak. Nobody from Sparkhill, nobody from the Pakistani working class communities of Birmingham, was being asked what they thought about what was happening or what they wanted. The story was being done to us, not by us.

Done to us, not by us. This is the class problem in representation: working-class communities, and specifically working-class communities of colour, are consistently the objects of narratives they do not control, produced by people who do not live in them, serving purposes that are not theirs. The class analysis of the media is usually about ownership - who owns the means of production of narrative - but Hussain’s account goes further: the absence of working-class voices from the public sphere is not only a problem of media ownership. It is a problem of who is treated as a legitimate narrator of their own life.

The connection to the coalition problem is direct. The left cannot build a durable coalition across communities of colour and white working-class communities if the narrative about those communities of colour continues to be produced from outside them, in forms that those communities experience as hostile or misrepresenting. The media environment shapes what each community knows about the others. The left’s capacity to build across that environment is limited as long as it has no answer to the narrative problem Hussain is describing.

Birmingham as laboratory

Johnson’s fifteen years of coalition work in Birmingham is the most sustained empirical account of what the coalition problem actually requires in practice. His account of the 1985 Handsworth riots is the starting point: a community reaching the end of what it could absorb, the uprising not irrational but rational given accumulated institutional failure, the aftermath producing the specific political formation he has been working with and through ever since.

The political problem the riots left was not simply one of rebuilding. It was one of building across communities that the riots themselves had brought into tension. The riots involved conflict between communities as well as between the communities and the police. The political coalition Johnson has been trying to build for fifteen years has to acknowledge that history rather than pretend it does not exist.

MJ: The coalition has to be honest about those differences to be durable. The unity has to be built around the overlap in interest, not around pretending the differences don’t exist. But if you start with the differences you never build anything. You have to start somewhere - and where you start is the shared material interest.

Start with the shared material interest, acknowledge the differences, build honestly across both. This is the method Johnson has developed from fifteen years of practice. It is not a formula. It is a set of practical commitments that require continuous renewal as specific situations change. The shared material interest is real - Birmingham’s working-class communities are all being squeezed by the same housing market, policed by the same forces, served by the same under-resourced public services. But the specific histories between those communities are also real, and a coalition that ignores them will not survive contact with the next crisis that activates them.

Jamal Grant and the generational question

Jamal Grant is twenty-two, from Tottenham, and has been organising in anti-racist politics since 2020. His account of the race and class relationship is honest about where the analysis breaks down for him.

JG: What I’m still working out is how race fits into that in a way that isn’t just ‘racism is a tool of capitalism.’ I know that argument. I find it - sometimes true and sometimes too clean. Like, there are specific things that happen to Black people in this country that aren’t fully explained by class. The way I get looked at by police. The way Tottenham gets talked about in the media. That’s class and race in a way where I don’t think one fully contains the other. I’m still figuring out the right framework for that.

Still figuring out. Grant is twenty-two and has four years of organising behind him. His honesty about the limits of the frameworks he has available is more useful politically than the confidence of people who have resolved the tension by subordinating one analysis to the other. The tension is real. It does not have a stable theoretical resolution. The political task is to hold it rather than dissolve it - to build across it rather than pretend it away.

The generational dimension Grant adds is important. His formation is specifically post-BLM: entering politics in 2020, shaped by a moment that centred race in a way that created new possibilities and new tensions within the left. The specific disillusionment he describes - ‘something that felt like it actually might matter, and then it didn’t, or not in the ways we hoped’ - is the disillusionment of a generation that experienced the promise of a race-centred politics and then had to work out what follows from that promise not being fulfilled. What follows, in Grant’s case, is not retreat but complexity: a more honest engagement with both what class analysis can explain and what it cannot.

What the coalition requires

The accounts gathered in this essay do not add up to a theory of coalition politics. They add up to a set of hard-won practical insights from people who have spent years trying to build the thing the theory describes.

Johnson’s insight is structural: build from the shared material interest, acknowledge the specific histories, sustain the coalition through the moments when those histories are activated by specific events. Ali’s insight is methodological: watch for how class analysis is being deployed, and refuse the version that uses it as a deflection from race. Richards’ insight is historical: the class position of the Black working class in Britain cannot be understood without the specific history that produced it, and that history is not reducible to economic relations. Hussain’s insight is representational: the coalition cannot be built without addressing who gets to narrate the communities being brought together. Grant’s insight is generational: the frameworks available are insufficient, and the honest response to that insufficiency is not to pretend otherwise but to keep working.

None of these insights is comfortable. Together they constitute something more useful than comfort: a precise specification of what building the coalition actually requires, derived from people who have been doing it rather than people who have been theorising it. The left has plenty of theory about why the coalition is necessary. It has less practice of the kind described here. The gap between the theory and the practice is where the coalition keeps failing. Closing it is the work.

MJ: The class analysis is necessary and insufficient simultaneously. Necessary because without it you can’t explain the pattern. Insufficient because the pattern is more complicated than any single framework accounts for. That’s where I am after fifteen years. I’m not done.