For a tiny island, the impact of British creatives on the world of art and culture is hard to overstate. Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, L.S Lowry, Caroline Ahern, The Beatles, Ken Loach, Punk, The Rolling Stones - the list could just go on and on and on. It’s hard to imagine what fashion, film, music, theatre, art would look like without the influences of so many from these shores.
But more than just being from towns and cities across the UK, all of those icons have something else in common - they were all working-class creatives. Like approximately 56% of the population, they grew up working-class. Going to state schools, sometimes paycheck to paycheck, maybe needing state support to get by. And whilst working-class people are by no means a minority in the UK, they absolutely were in the creative world they existed in.
A report by Diamond has shown that of creative workers born between 1952-1962, only 16.4% were working-class. Significantly less than the proportion of the population they make up. But, staggeringly, over twice as much as creative workers born between 1992-2002. 4 decades later and only 7.9% of creative workers are working-class.
When you talk to creators and purveyors of the arts about this, often you will hear people quite upset by this lack of access. You’ll hear us say that art should be a right of humans, not a privilege reserved for the wealthiest. And that is both 100% true and a conversation worth having, but it’s a conversation that I feel doesn’t go deep enough. What are the wider ramifications on society of a creative industry devoid of working-class voices?
To begin to imagine that, I want to take a look backwards, and talk about some of those names I mentioned at the start. To unpack some of the ways working-class creatives and working-class art movements have changed and shaped our world - in big ways and in small.
Art, in whatever form you like to consume it, is both influenced by the sociopolitical landscape, and has influence upon the sociopolitical landscape. Take the Punk movement for instance - it arose in a time not dissimilar to the one we live in now. The economy was stagnant, unemployment was high, a whole generation felt they’d been promised the world and left high and dry. They were disenfranchised, it felt like opportunities were gatekept and out of reach. And from that anger came a form of self-expression that completely rejected the established order.
Pre Punk, the British cultural economy was heavily gatekept by major record labels, London publishing houses, and established gallery systems. Punk proved that working-class artists did not need corporate backing or elitist approval to create, distribute, and monetise their work. It birthed the independent music scene, labels were founded by working-class creatives, independent venue networks were created in non-traditional spaces, creating a sort of DIY music scene that enabled people to use their voice instead of asking permission to.
Fashion changed - hello Vivienne Westwood - the sounds people were listening to changed, the idea of what was possible changed. Influenced by the sociopolitical landscape, artists birthed something new. And once they had, they used it to influence the landscape right back.
The late 1970s were rough, and as we well know, when people are stressed and struggling and looking for someone to blame, the conditions are ripe for fascism. In the 70s, this was the National Front. They were making aggressive advances into working-class communities and youth culture - harnessing anger and turning it into hate for their own gain. They tried to position themselves as the authentic voice of the white working-class, recruiting outside football grounds, schools, and pubs. At the same time, you had high profile white rock musicians making loud and dangerous public statements. Eric Clapton famously went on a drunken rant in Birmingham, urging the audience to vote for Enoch Powell to keep Britain White, and Bowie was saying some crazy things about fascism.
Working-class activists including Red Saunders and Roger Huddle wrote an open letter to music press, and in it they said “We want Rock Against Racism. Come on Eric - who shot the sheriff Eric? You did mate! We won’t let it happen. Keep pop pure, with anti-racist rock.” and Rock Against Racism was born.
They realised that political rallies and speeches weren’t going to galvanise working-class youth, but music and a shared dance floor might. They saw two subcultures that were both alienated, both made up of working-class youth, and they set about trying to bring them together. Black British Roots Reggae & Sound System, and White working-class Punk.
Reggae was inherently anti establishment, with lyrics talking about poverty, struggle, and the Black British experience - Punk shared that energy but from a white working-class point of view. Bands like The Clash recognised this, actively covering Reggae tracks, and inviting reggae sound systems to open their gigs, forcing white punks to engage with Black music.
In 1977, the Anti Nazi League was founded to be an opposition to the National Front. They partnered with Rock Against Racism and together they worked to make antiracism exciting, enticing, and radical. They launched a fanzine that combined lyrics, photos, political essays, and letters from working-class youth exposing how fascism directly threatened youth freedom, culture, and solidarity. In 1978, there were two major marches - one through a National Front stronghold in East London ending at Victoria Park for a huge open air concert featuring The Clash, and another in Manchester ending at Alexandra Park featuring the Buzzcocks. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up to these protests dressed up as parties, and the movement grew.
From the merging of groups, a whole new musical style was birthed - 2 Tone. A marriage between punk and reggae, multiracial groups like The Specials and Madness started popping up with this new sound that became anthemic for 1980s working-class young people. And it wasn’t just music they shifted - in 1979 when the National Front ran 300 candidates in the general election, they lost every single seat. Working-class creatives had successfully framed anti-racism as cool, and fascism as outdated and anti-youth, and stripped a fascist party of its core demographic, completely changing the trajectory of the country.
The country saw something similar in the 90s with Free Party and Rave Culture. By the 90s, neoliberalism firmly had hold (thanks Thatcher) and as a result, individual profit was the name of the game, and London was the epicentre of culture. Free Party/Rave Culture emerged as a decentralised, un commodified counter culture, democratising access to art and space. DIY Sound Systems meant equipment had become cheaper and more accessible - working-class young people didn’t need classical training or record deals to make music happen. They just needed a generator, a sound system, and an empty space. Deindustrialisation meant there were plenty available - empty warehouses, factories, airfields and so on. Once they had that, they could party.
And it wasn’t commercial - the parties were free and for fun, the money gathered was just enough to cover diesel for the generators, not upfront cover charges to line the pockets of venue owners or promoters. They promoted themselves on pirate radio and underground telephone hotlines. It was by the people for the people, dissolving cultural divides across race, region, and class.
Like Rock Against Racism, it mobilised as a political tool better than any rally could. By creating shared physical space and a collective identity, they built community. They also rejected the era of privatisation that had come as a result of Thatcherite Britain. Public space had been brought into private ownership, and this subculture occupies that disused but privately owned land, asserting that space belongs to a community that uses it, not corporate landowners leaving it derelict until an opportunity for profit arises.
In 1992, Avon and Somerset police attempted to end the Avon Free Festival, and when the first bunch of new age travellers arrived for it, they got sent away from their planned destination and into surrounding counties. Eventually, West Mercia Police confined them to common land at Castlemorton. The media jumped on the story, and the Free Party scene said “We’ll have some of that thank you.”
What followed was a 7 day long, unlicensed, illegal rave, attended by 30-40,000 people. No one was injured, no one died, by all accounts the only issue was it was difficult to police. The government of the time immediately panicked - not because there was any actual reason to, but because John Major saw it as an existential threat to public order and state control. It led directly to the Criminal Justice Act 1994 which criminalised trespass, prohibited gatherings where music is played that “includes sounds characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”, expanded stop and search rights - effectively shutting down the scene.
Not as positive an outcome as the anti fascist defeat, but important nonetheless - working-class creatives had demonstrated an alternative economic system where culture isn’t bought or sold. They had shown that working-class people can organise complex large-scale cultural events entirely on their own terms, and it shattered the illusion that they needed state or corporate institutions to manage their lives. Politics relies on divide and rule, but working-class art so often unifies, and that was such a threat to the established order, that they found a way to stop it in that form.
Music isn’t the only art form that has changed the landscape - what if I told you that working-class creatives are in no small part why Scottish Parliament exists?
In 1966, The Economist wrote that 7% of the population owned 84% of wealth in the UK. That stat stayed with one working-class lad from Birkenhead named John McGrath, and in 1971 he, along with his wife Elizabeth MacLennan and her brother David, founded a new theatre company called 7:84. It was built on the premise that traditional theatre was an elitist, upper middle class institution designed to pacify audiences, John believed that working-class people didn’t need polite art bought to them from London or Edinburgh, they needed theatre that spoke directly to their lived experiences and struggles.
They were operating in the Scottish Highlands, and they decided to best meet their audiences, they should forgo a formal theatre building. instead, they toured in a transit van and set up in village halls, miners welfare clubs, crofting centres, and community canteens. John knew that to engage rural working-class Scottish people he had to speak their language. No quiet seated drama. He used a Ceilidh structure, combining dramatic scenes and political satire with live folk music, poetry, and dancing, with audiences drinking and talking alongside the performers.
In 1973, they premiered the play The Cheviot, the Stag, and The Black Black Oil. it was an epic play that traced 200 years of Scottish Highland history through three waves of economic exploitation. The first is the Cheviot, which looks at the period where 18th and 19th century crofting families were brutally evicted from their ancestral land by wealthy landlords to make way for their profitable Cheviot sheep in an event known as the Highland Clearances. The second is The Stag, which looks at the late 19th century conversion of the Highlands into private sporting estates, where English aristocrats and industrial tycoons bought up vast expanses of land for deer stalking and grouse shooting, keeping the region economically stagnant. The final wave is The Black Black Oil, which looks at the 1970s discovery of North Sea oil. McGrath saw this as being handed over to multinational American oil corporations, while local Scottish communities were left with temporary low-wage jobs and no long-term control over their wealth.
Through this play, he demonstrated that the Highland people were not suffering from bad luck or personal failings, but were struggling due to systemic and ongoing economic colonialism. It is regarded as one of the most politically influential theatrical works in British history, reframing how the Highland clearances were thought of and laid the ideological groundwork that eventually led to the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, which gave rural communities the legal right to buy the land they live and work on when it comes up for sale.
Historians also directly link the 7:84’s tour to the rise of modern Scottish political self-confidence through the 70s and 80s, which ultimately culminated in the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.
The way art changes us isn’t always as easy to define as political defeats, or new legislations. Sometimes, the shift is in the way society treats others, and who it allows to be seen and in what ways. Another working-class lad from Birkenhead illustrates that better than anyone.
Pre Lily Savage, drag on the TV, if it was ever seen, was laughing at the culture not with it. Simply men in dresses who were playing misogyny and homophobia for laughs, punching down on women and the queer community.
Lily was different. Crafted by Paul O’Grady with love and respect for the women he grew up around - the sharp tongued women of the Merseyside dockland communities. She was an unrepentant ex sex worker, a parolee, a smoker, a woman fighting off poverty - someone instantly recognisable with fondness by audiences. The warmth and authenticity that Paul presented Lily with stripped drag out of being alien or taboo, and gave people a drag queen to hold in their hearts.
And that was no small thing - when Paul was crafting Lily it was the 1980s. It was the height of the AIDS crisis, Section 28 was still law, it was truly a life-endangering risk to be openly queer. Lily used dark humour as political resistance without it being obvious that’s what was happening, and in doing so helped shift public attitudes to the queer community. She was one of the most beloved public figures on British television, and was absolutely instrumental in changing the way gay culture and gay people were viewed in the mainstream.
There’s no question then that Britain would not be the country we know it to be without the contributions of working-class creatives. They are the visionaries that strip away shame. Writers like John Osbourne, founding member of the Angry Young Men, came into spaces that used art to maintain high society and instead asked “what if this reflected us honestly without judgment?” They laid the foundations for a creative industry that has space for all accents, genders, colours, sexualities, classes, and disabilities, all people with a story to tell.
So if the foundations have been laid, why is the number of working-class creatives able to build upon it going down? Well, I answered this question at the start.
Because all art is political. Including who is able to access the tools they need to create art that can reach an audience. All the people we’ve looked at in this piece so far, they benefitted from the post war social democratic state. From 1945 - around the mid 70s, Britain was doing socialism lite. And it worked - funnily enough, a play on right now by working-class creative James Graham, The Standard of Living, explores Keynesian economics and how this period was the longest period of economic growth and stability the country has ever seen.
It was this social democratic state and the social safety net it provided that enabled some of our greatest creative talents to emerge. Higher education was free, there were an abundance of art school grants, and an accessible unemployment benefit (the dole), and affordable council housing all acted as a sort of informal state subsidy for working-class culture. It gave working-class creatives something that is almost impossible to imagine now - time. Uncommodified time to try, to fail, to experiment, to practice and grow.
Paul O’Grady was only able to become Lily Savage because he had the safety net of public sector jobs that didn’t require a university degree, and paid well enough for him to live on in London renting low cost rooms. Now, council housing is few and far between, private rent controls were abolished in 1989, and you’re competing with upwards of 100 applicants for every 1 job. Space and funds are not accessible, and it essentially forces working-class people out of creative hubs, rather than ensuring they are able to operate within them.
The Education Act 1944 and local authority grant systems made art colleges across the UK essentially free, and that meant working-class kids could actually go. working-class kids like John Lennon who attended the Liverpool College of Art on a local grant, where he met Stuart Sutcliffe, the original bassist for a little-known band called The Beatles. Or Ray Davies, founding member of The Kinks who studied at the Croydon College of Art and later explicitly credited his time at art school and the exposure to fine art, social satire, and observational drawing for his distinct lyrical style.
Or Keith Richards and Dick Taylor of the Rolling Stones, Pete Townshend of The Who, Ray Thomas of The Moody Blues, and Eric Clapton who all were art school grant beneficiaries.
When they finished art school, or they made it to the big city, they had a bustling network of venues to learn their craft. The Paul O’Grady to Lily Savage pipeline was only possible because of working-class spaces. The socioeconomic ecosystem that allowed Paul to experiment, fail, learn, and hone his craft no longer exists. He built his act over an eight-year residency at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern as well as on the pub and club circuit across the UK. That circuit is not there today. In the last 25 years, thousands of working men’s clubs, pubs, social clubs and queer venues have closed. The decline of industrial labour wiped out working men’s clubs, and the modern live performance circuit is dominated by commercial comedy chains and festival circuits like the Edinburgh Fringe that cost huge amounts of upfront capital, sometimes thousands.
And it wasn’t just about access to education or space - it was access to funds. In the 60s-80s, the UK benefit system didn’t subject claimants to hyper-surveillance, and immediate sanctions for not completing mandatory job searches the way it does today. signing on was fairly straightforward, and it provided enough of an income that aspiring musicians could buy guitar strings or rent rehearsal spaces or buy a beat up old van to go touring in. The Kinks, UB40 (who are literally named for the Unemployment Benefit 40 form) The Clash, Joy Division, The Smiths, Pulp, they all used unemployment benefits to fund their early years.
Affordable council housing also meant that families could support artistic dreams without the constant threat of eviction or outrageous rent hikes. That system has been dismantled. There’s no free higher education, there’s a huge debt to study, it’s almost impossible to access welfare support, and requirements went on it make it nonviable as a means to support creatives. Affordable housing is non-existent, and it all leads to a creative world dominated by wealthy youth who can rely on the bank of mum and dad.
And look, this is not to say that the wealthy creatives don’t also have something to say. I do not doubt they do. What I do doubt however, is just how much what they have to say challenges the status quo, or pushes us forward as a society. Just how much they are questioning the systems set out for them, and using their art to imagine more. How much what they say peels back shame that’s placed upon communities by the established order, and allows those communities to be seen with authenticity and intention?
We can all make art, but who gets to access the tools needed to get that art to an audience is increasingly narrowing, and that is something we should all be fighting against. Because some of the very best things about this tiny island, some of the greatest contributions we’ve made, have come from working-class creatives. And knowing who we are today because of them, where we could have been without them? I for one don’t want to be heading towards a future that doesn’t have working-class creatives shaping it.