On the evening of 23 September 2026, the Dialogue Society held the third in its series of conversations on polarisation and extremism at BRIG Café on Allison Street in Birmingham. The title was “Can we unite the Kingdom when money and class continue to divide us?” The panel brought together Dr Nathan Kerrigan, Cherie-Louise Waddingham (the Reform UK councillor for Weoley and Selly Oak), Professor Ann-Marie Bathmaker and Ranjit Sondhi, followed by questions from the floor. The first session in the series examined the idea of progressive patriotism. The second took on polarised attitudes towards immigration. It made sense that the third should turn to money and class, because both earlier themes lead back there.
For me the evening had a personal dimension as well. It was the first time in around thirty years that I had sat in a room with Ranjit and heard him speak. He remains one of the clearest voices this city has produced on questions of race, class and belonging.
This piece reflects on the ideas that surfaced during the panel and the discussion that followed. It also covers some ideas that were missed, largely because time ran out before they could be taken further. Where I can, I draw on evidence from my own recent research. Much of it comes from the DRIVE Project, a multi-million-euro Horizon-funded study I coordinated with nine partners across five countries. It generated a survey of 5,501 people and 415 interviews in the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. Some of the evidence also comes from secondary analysis of the European Social Survey, the Evidence for Equality National Survey and other national datasets. The notes at the end set out the findings on which particular claims rest.
Class is not a single measure
The first difficulty is conceptual. We tend to treat class as a set of socio-economic indicators: education, housing tenure, occupation, and income. These matter, and they are what surveys measure. But class is also about distinction, taste, cultural habits, norms of speech and behaviour, and the social, cultural and political capital that people carry with them and that others recognise, or refuse to recognise. Class is a relationship before it is a category.
It is also never experienced on its own. Class has to be understood intersectionally, because it is itself racialised and gendered. A degree does not do the same work for a British Muslim graduate as it does for a white British graduate. Nor does neighbourhood poverty feel the same to a visibly Muslim woman walking home as it does to her white neighbour. Our analysis of twenty years of European Social Survey data shows this starkly. For British Muslims, and for no other group we examined, more education brings less trust in political institutions, not more.[1] The meritocratic promise is not simply unfulfilled. It is inverted. The same entanglement shows up in health. Financial hardship damages the physical health of British Muslims directly. It also does damage by wearing away the institutional trust and local belonging that would otherwise protect them.[2] What looks like a story about religion or ethnicity is, at its root, very often a story about class.
Poor next to poor
Birmingham makes this concrete. Weoley Castle is among the most deprived places not only in the West Midlands but in the country. A few miles away, parts of the inner city, such as Sparkbrook, Small Heath and Alum Rock, remain among the most disadvantaged areas in Britain, with large ethnic minority and Muslim populations. We therefore have some of the poorest white working-class communities living a short bus ride from some of the poorest ethnic minority working-class communities. Both face precarious employment, unemployment and underemployment. Both are shaped far more by their class position than by anything else.
Yet these two sets of communities are rarely described in the same language. In the dominant discourse, poverty in Muslim areas is explained through religion: through Islam, through visible Muslim identity, through supposed cultural difference. Poverty in white areas is explained through whiteness, as if whiteness were the opposite of ethnicity rather than one form of it. In both cases the question of class is quietly removed and replaced by something else. That substitution is not innocent. It divides people whose material interests have far more in common than either is encouraged to see.
The evidence supports this reading. In the Netherlands, Muslim identity does not in itself predict support for political violence. Its apparent effect runs entirely through experiences of discrimination, collective grievance and pessimism about the future, and exactly the same pathway operates among non-Muslims.[3] Across the four DRIVE countries, the perceived climate of one’s neighbourhood predicts acceptance of violence over and above personal grievance. This means how much tension people sense between groups and how widespread they believe local problems to be. Muslims are no more likely than anyone else to endorse violence. The neighbourhood pathway is, however, more than twice as strong among them, because they are the ones living with the worst of those conditions.[4] Policies that concentrate surveillance on Muslims while neglecting the places they live are therefore aimed at the wrong target.
Flags, memory and the making of grievance
One of the most revealing contributions came from the Reform UK councillor. She described the flag displays in Weoley Castle as rooted in local remembrance: a community effort, locally funded and organised, to honour soldiers who fought in the world wars. On her account, the so-called Weoley Warriors were concerned with memorials. The later Operation Raise the Colours campaign then took that local impulse out of its setting and turned it into something closer to a radical-right programme. She also pointed to pressures on housing. When the state places people in an area through rehousing schemes, she said, existing residents come to feel that the area is being “diluted”, and that its identity is being eroded by decisions taken elsewhere.
There is something important in this account, and something missing from it. What is important is that it locates the grievance correctly. The grievance begins with decisions made by the state about housing and allocation, under conditions of acute shortage. It does not begin with newcomers arriving of their own volition. What is missing is what happens next. The radical right takes that grievance about the state and turns it into a story about invasion by migrants and minorities. In that story, outsiders simply move in at will, and the policy decisions and housing scarcity that produced the pressure disappear from view.
My research with Rohanna Bell on the flag campaign speaks directly to this. Operation Raise the Colours originated in Weoley Castle. The Weoley Warriors claimed the earliest displays in south Birmingham, and the wider campaign has documented links to Britain First and the English Defence League. Our focus groups and interviews with young people aged 18 to 25 show how the flags read on the street. Neighbourhood nationalism here is durably exclusionary, deliberately engineered and distinctly gendered. Radical-right symbolism has been translated into mainstream patriotic respectability. Flag saturation has damaged relations between neighbours. Muslim women in particular describe calculating the risks of moving through saturated streets.[5] Whatever the original intentions behind a memorial, the message received by those it excludes is plain. As one young woman put it to us, “they don’t want us here”.
Both things can be true. Holding on to place can be a way of asserting a separateness that feels under threat. It can also be the result of generations of downward social mobility, in which people seek recognition when their lives are falling apart in the most everyday sense: jobs, housing, schools, health. This is what the sociology of grievance helps us see. Class is highly racialised, and local white majorities faced with a sense of erasure take pride in place and reach for local narratives. Those narratives are then amplified and redirected by others.
My survey work across the four DRIVE countries adds a twist that cuts against common assumptions. When we separate dissatisfaction with institutions from the sense that one’s group is losing status, the two pull in opposite directions. Among majority respondents who feel their group’s status is threatened, the better educated are more hostile to immigration and diversity, not less. Younger people under status threat are more hostile than older people, which contradicts the familiar story about nostalgic older voters.[6] In London, nativist grievance feeds a sense of relative deprivation that is the main predictor of justifying political violence. That link is markedly stronger in the capital, where racialised gentrification, spatial inequality and insecure work frustrate the expectations of a younger, educated urban population. It holds across majority and minority groups alike.[7] Place is not a backdrop to grievance. It actively produces it.
A long crisis, accelerated
None of this is new, but it has been accelerated. The 2008 financial crisis led to austerity, and austerity helped lead to Brexit, because people were facing precarity as a consequence of who they were and where they lived. Across Europe, the divergence in attitudes towards immigrants over the past two decades has not been driven by changes in population. In Eastern Europe, rising education should on its own have produced modest liberalisation, yet attitudes moved the other way. What changed was the political and institutional context in which attitudes are formed.[8] Context is made, and it can be remade.
In Britain, that context has been shaped with great skill by the movement associated with Nigel Farage. With Parveen Akhtar, I have argued that Faragism is best understood not as a passing moment but as an adaptive hegemonic project. It has survived the achievement of its original goal by changing its enemy, moving from Brussels to Islam. In its current phase it incorporates minority figures into leadership while preserving an exclusionary core. It is durable, but it is also brittle, because the gap between its earlier racial politics and its performed diversity keeps reopening.[9] One consequence is that the language of restriction no longer belongs to one party. Labour and the Conservatives have borrowed it too, for fear of losing what remains of their white working-class base.
What has changed most is the medium. The idea of techno-feudalism captures something real. Individuals are stripped of their own capacity for judgement by social media platforms owned by a handful of global tech oligarchs. Those platforms reward division, derision and rage because rage is highly monetisable. Excluded individuals and communities are drawn into echo chambers and turned into mobilised political actors, and they are given a sense that a transnational movement stands behind them. The drip of misinformation and mischaracterisation is constant.
The evidence on alienation suggests where the real danger lies. Across the four DRIVE countries, feeling excluded is strongly associated with support for political violence. Political alienation, however, has no independent effect. It works as a conditional catalyst, and its direction depends on its form. Distrust of democratic institutions actually weakens the link between exclusion and support for violence. Feeling personally powerless and without a future strengthens it considerably.[10] It is the sense of futurelessness, precisely what an algorithm feeding on rage cultivates, that turns grievance into something more dangerous.
Education: ladder or sorting machine?
Education was repeatedly offered during the evening as the route out. It is not that simple. Education and class are deeply correlated: education drives class, and class drives education. Participation in higher education has expanded dramatically, but the relationship between class and elite outcomes has barely moved. Schools in wealthier areas have stronger resources, more motivated teachers and more competitive cultures, and these translate into entry to elite universities and the opportunities that follow. Privilege reproduces itself, and successive reforms have done little to change that.
At the same time, education has been reshaped by neoliberal logic. It too often rewards conformity to the mean rather than critical and independent thought: jumping through the hoops of assessment rather than learning to think. The outcome is a growing precariat of degree holders who find that their credentials do not buy the security they were promised. This is increasingly true in a technology-driven labour market that is automating the lower rungs of professional and technical work.
Minorities, meanwhile, have invested heavily in education as a route to mobility. That investment is visible in the numbers of minority pupils now in selective grammar schools in cities such as Birmingham. Yet labour-market returns remain restricted, particularly for Muslim women. Our work on British Muslims captures what happens next. Trust in the state drops sharply at the moment of entering higher education and professional labour markets, as an immediate shock rather than a slow accumulation. The result is what we call “alienated competence”: faith in government and politics collapses while trust in other people remains intact. UK-born Muslim women respond with a strategically engaged realism. Among young men, the alienation runs deeper.[1]
A striking thread runs through all of this work. The person most at risk of turning grievance into hostility, or into sympathy for violence, is often not the poorest. It is the person whose rising expectations are thwarted. The educated British Muslim loses faith in the state.[1] The stably employed Dutch respondent is more supportive of political violence than the part-time worker or the unemployed.[3] The young educated Londoner is priced out of the city.[7] The educated majority citizen fears the loss of their group’s status.[6] Status incongruence, the gap between what people were led to expect and where they have ended up, may be the defining class experience of our time. It cuts across the lines of race and religion that are so often used to divide us.
Integration, multiculturalism and the long shadow of 2001
The ideas that once organised public thinking about diversity have been hollowed out. Integration has quietly become assimilation again: minorities alone are expected to adapt. Multiculturalism has become a dirty word, even though its founding philosophy of unity within diversity and diversity within unity remains sound. What collapsed was not the philosophy but its operational commitment. That collapse followed the disturbances in the northern mill towns in the summer of 2001, and then the War on Terror and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, after which everything was viewed through the lens of security.
Muslims have borne the brunt of this. Many came to Britain as post-war workers, invited to fill jobs in the most declining sectors of Western European economies: textile mills, foundries, and car manufacturing. Those industries have all but disappeared over sixty years of globalisation and the internationalisation of capital and labour. Their descendants now carry both a poor class position and a securitised religious identity. I have argued that this is no accident. The techniques of surveillance and control applied to Muslims in Western metropoles were first developed in colonial rule across Muslim-majority societies. Having been refined at home through programmes such as Prevent, they are now re-exported, with Israel and Palestine serving as a laboratory.[11]
Hostility towards Muslims is also not always the crude kind. In the Netherlands, a country long celebrated for its tolerance, around one in eight people endorse diversity in principle while regarding Muslims as incompatible with national values. We call this forbearance tolerance, and it is most pronounced among educated urban groups.[12] In Britain, a fashionable claim holds that non-religious people reject crude prejudice but harbour an intellectual concern about Islamic doctrine. The data do not support it. Non-religious Britons are more tolerant than Christians on every measure. Doctrinal concern is concentrated among those who see religion as a force for good, which suggests rivalry between religious traditions rather than secular liberal anxiety.[13] In France, twenty years after the headscarf ban, Muslims defend the principle of state neutrality while rejecting its use to police Muslim visibility. Visibly Muslim women carry the heaviest burden.[14]
It is also important not to cast Muslims only as victims. Across Europe, Muslims have built a thriving halal social sphere: halal food, Islamic finance, modest fashion, charities and digital media. I read it as neither separatist withdrawal nor assimilation but as an alternative form of integration, whose shape depends on how hostile or cooperative the state is.[15] Agency persists even under constraint.
All of this unfolds against a darkening geopolitical backdrop. There is a slow-burning WWIII between Russia and Ukraine and a war involving Iran. There is also what is widely regarded as Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians, which has proceeded largely unchecked and unpunished, with a complicit political and media class. These are not distant matters. Gaza did not directly bring down Keir Starmer, but it made him legible, first to his own party and base, as a leader without conviction. Once that perception hardened, every domestic stumble read as confirmation.[16] Foreign policy is domestic politics for many communities in this country, and nowhere more so than in cities like Birmingham.
The “white working class” question
The latter part of the discussion turned to definitions. The term that caused the most consternation in the room was “the white working class”. The objection is a fair one. The phrase risks an essentialism that implies the working class is white, while everyone else is merely an ethnic minority or a Muslim, as though minorities were not also overwhelmingly working class.
It is also true, however, that some parts of Britain are monocultural, monolingual, overwhelmingly white, poor, angry and frustrated. Places like Weoley Castle fit this description, and so do many wards in smaller towns and cities where the white population is the overwhelmingly dominant group. In those places we are talking about working-class communities that have experienced decline and are white. Many white people are suffering in ways they would not have imagined two decades ago, in communities that are cut off from the rest of the country. Minorities, meanwhile, are concentrated in the larger cities, sometimes locked into their own neighbourhoods by downward mobility and racialisation. The challenge is to name white working-class decline honestly without letting it become a story in which working-class minorities, and the class interests they share, disappear.
The evidence suggests these communities need many of the same things. Among British Muslims, a sense of local belonging and connectedness is the single strongest protective factor for health, stronger than trust in institutions or religious observance.[2] Neighbourhood climate shapes attitudes to violence among majority and minority residents alike.[4] The case for investing in places is a case for everyone who lives in them.
What might be done
The panel’s view was that grounded, bottom-up mobilisation offers the best route to challenging these power dynamics. It will always be constrained, because elites know how to keep it so. Divide and rule is the classic model of capitalism, including racial capitalism, and for all the goodwill and energy of good-minded people across society, privilege remains a narrow space. Models such as Citizens UK can hold power to account and restore agency in a real sense. But their successes tend to be conditional, constrained and limited to a few test cases. Those cases work, and they must, but they are not yet a movement.
The deeper problem is political economy. There is no trickle-down economics, only trickle-up. The market cannot solve social problems; it tends to create them. It cannot replace the services that public goods provide, because profit must always be extracted for shareholders. In many of Britain’s privatised industries, that profit flows to overseas firms that pay far less tax than they should. People who need basic utilities and services cannot afford them, and alienation deepens. The communitarian has been displaced by the libertarian since the 1970s, and the loss of community experienced as loneliness, atomisation and alienation is its human cost.
Politics at the top has only recently shown signs of grasping this. Andy Burnham has been Prime Minister for barely two months. He is only a few months older than me, and I want to give him a chance. I think he understands these issues in the way that many of our generation do, and that we are the generation that can act on them now, before things fall apart very quickly. The evidence offers him some direction. It points away from surveillance and towards everyday conditions: decent housing, public space, community institutions and inclusive local governance.[4] It points towards rebuilding people’s sense that they can shape their own futures, which matters more than restoring abstract faith in institutions.[10] And it points to investment in the local social infrastructure that holds communities together.[2]
Identities today are more precarious and boundaries more fluid. It is important to think of humanity as one, and of human beings as human beings first. Tribalism, however, can always break through again when geopolitical and technological forces constrain what national political leaders can do. That frustrates those on the ground who are willing to work for change. The alternative is more alienation, disenfranchisement and disillusion, and eventually further breakdown. Agency has to be normalised.
We need a more human sociology. Sociology emerged from the industrial society we built two centuries ago, on the promise that this way of organising economic life would serve everyone. The working classes never really gained from it, just as they never gained from empire. Ethnic minorities were brought in to do work that others would no longer do. Racialisation divided working-class communities from one another, reinforced the domination of capital and undermined the unions. We are now more (digitally) connected than at any point in human history, yet socially, culturally, emotionally and politically we could hardly be further apart.
Unless we get this right, we will go on holding seminars about what divides us. We already have a good understanding of the causes. What is missing is not knowledge of the solutions. It is people in positions of power who have the understanding and the will to act on them, rather than interests that lie elsewhere. The rest, as they say, is academic.
Notes (all these papers are open access and free to share)
[1] Abbas and Onay (2026). Using European Social Survey data for the UK from 2002 to 2023, higher education erodes institutional trust among British Muslims but not among the White British majority or other minorities. The penalty appears as an immediate shock on entering higher education and professional labour markets. It produces “alienated competence”: declining political efficacy and trust in the state alongside intact interpersonal trust. UK-born Muslim women show strategically engaged realism that offsets deeper alienation among men.
[2] Abbas (2026), Wellbeing, Space and Society. In the 2021 EVENS survey (1,940 Muslim respondents), discrimination has no direct effect on self-rated health once mediators are included. It works through eroded institutional trust and weakened local belonging. Financial difficulty has both direct and indirect effects. Local belonging carries more of the indirect effect than institutional trust or religious observance. Religious observance is not eroded by discrimination but is weakened by material hardship. The pattern replicates among Pakistani and Bangladeshi respondents.
[3] Abbas (2026), Politics, Religion & Ideology. Using a Dutch survey of 1,896 respondents and 32 interviews with young adults, the effect of Muslim identity on endorsement of political violence is fully mediated by discrimination, collective grievance and future pessimism. The same pathway operates for non-Muslims. People in stable full-time employment report higher endorsement than those in part-time work or without work, which suggests status incongruence.
[4] Abbas (2026), Social Sciences. Drawing on over 5,000 residents in nineteen cities across four countries, perceived neighbourhood tension predicts endorsement of violence after accounting for grievance, humiliation, anxiety and pessimism. The effect holds in all four countries and is more than twice as strong among Muslim residents, who are no more likely to endorse violence overall. Marginalisation’s effect roughly halves after age 48, while the neighbourhood effect remains stable across the life course.
[5] Bell and Abbas (2026). Drawing on focus groups and interviews with 22 young people aged 18 to 25, conducted between December 2025 and February 2026, the study finds that Operation Raise the Colours originated in Weoley Castle and has documented links to Britain First and the EDL. It produces a neighbourhood nationalism that is durably exclusionary, deliberately engineered and gendered. The study traces the translation of radical-right symbolism into patriotic respectability, relational damage among neighbours, and the risk calibration practised by Muslim women.
[6] Abbas (2026), European Politics and Society. Among 4,275 native-born non-Muslim majority respondents in four countries, group status threat and institutional dissatisfaction moderate the education–backlash relationship in opposite directions. Education is positively associated with backlash under status threat. The pattern is clearest where high status threat combines with institutional satisfaction. Younger respondents under status threat show more backlash than older ones.
[7] Abbas (2026), Political Geography. In a UK subsample of 2,377 respondents, nativist grievance raises perceived relative deprivation, which is the primary predictor of justifying political violence. Both links are markedly stronger in London and hold across majority and minority groups.
[8] Abbas and van Mulkom (2026). Using European Social Survey data on over 300,000 respondents in 18 countries between 2002 and 2020, a decomposition analysis shows that the regional divergence in attitudes towards immigrants is not driven by compositional change. In Eastern Europe, compositional change alone would have produced liberalisation. The divergence reflects changing social and political contexts.
[9] Abbas and Akhtar (2026). The paper sets out a three-phase model of Faragism: anti-EU (1993–2016), civilisational (2018–2023), and “diasporic civic nationalism” (2023 to the present). It shows a hegemonic project that is adaptive yet contradictory, durable yet brittle.
[10] Abbas (2026), Psychology of Violence. Among 5,501 respondents in four countries, perceived exclusion is strongly associated with violence endorsement (β = .53), while political alienation has no independent effect (β = −.02). Alienation moderates the relationship instead. Efficacy alienation amplifies it (b = 0.31); institutional alienation buffers it (b = −0.25).
[11] Abbas (2026), Critical Studies on Security. The essay traces the colonial genealogy of techniques of surveillance and control applied to Muslims. It follows their return to Britain, France and the Netherlands through Prevent, banlieue policing and post-9/11 surveillance, and their re-export, with Israel and Palestine as a laboratory.
[12] Abbas (2026), Acta Politica. In a Dutch survey of 1,963 respondents, support for multiculturalism in principle (M = 4.60) coexists with negative attitudes towards Muslims (M = 3.22). Around 12 per cent display “forbearance tolerance”. Ambivalence is most pronounced among educated urban groups.
[13] Abbas (2026), Contemporary Social Science. In a nationally representative UK survey of 2,141 adults conducted in May 2025, non-religious Britons are more tolerant than Christians on both affective hostility and doctrinal concern. Doctrinal concern is most likely among those who see religion as a force for good. The results are robust to education and political values.
[14] Bruchhaus and Abbas (2026). Twenty-five interviews in Paris and Tours between 2023 and 2024 show participants defending the 1905 principle of state neutrality while critiquing its use to regulate Muslim visibility. Identity strategies divide by citizenship, generation and gender, with vulnerability concentrated on visibly Muslim women.
[15] Abbas (2026), Religion, State & Society. Comparing France and Germany, the halal social sphere takes a defensive, rights-based and commercial form under assertive secularism, and an institution-building form under cooperative models. It represents alternative integration rather than separation.
[16] Abbas (2026), The Political Quarterly. The article argues that Starmer’s procedural caution over Israel and Palestine crystallised a perception of a leader without conviction. Once that perception hardened, domestic setbacks read as confirmation of character.
References
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Abbas, T. (2026). Defensive secularism reconsidered: Religion, doctrinal concern, and anti-Muslim sentiment in contemporary Britain. Contemporary Social Science, 21(1), 2716726. https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2026.2716726
Abbas, T. (2026). Discrimination, grievance, and the endorsement of political violence in The Netherlands. Politics, Religion & Ideology, 27(2), 287–304. https://doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2026.2690367
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