The actual city centres buck the trend, as you point out, by attracting young, mobile, educated, affluent people who are more likely to be open minded and engage easily with people from other backgrounds.
But get out of the cities in the north of England and you find a place not dissimilar to America's Rust Belt: forcibly de-industrialised, full of lingering resentment. When I go back to my hometown in the north it sometimes feels as though time has stood still since the 1980s, and the steelworkers and miners who Thatcher put out of work now have children and grandchildren who have been brought up feeling hard done by, apathetic and with few aspirations, despite having access to free education, welfare and healthcare that other countries would kill for.
This is the white working class problem incarnate.
> despite having access to free education, welfare and healthcare
That's the rub. I think they'd prefer to work. There are few places left in the modern world to find meaning. Supporting one's self through productive work used to be a great one. Living off the largesse of the state is demoralizing.
The jobs their looking for are not coming back, and its not just trade and immigration, but technology as well. While poverty can be mitigated through the welfare state, it isn't an ideal solution in the long term.
> That's the rub. I think they'd prefer to work. There are few places left in the modern world to find meaning.
Yes. That's why I'm critical of Universal Income. I believe that UI would only push those people further down, making them completely unnecessary, without purpose at all, their tasks in society being relegated to merely being a consumer.
I'm totally in favor of having free education, welfare and healthcare, though. I do think we need a balance here.
The pr(o|e)mise of UI is that, since you no longer need to sit at a desk retyping TPS reports in order to put food on the table, you are freed to raise horses, or sell homemade candles and jellies, or study poetry, or teach gardening, or sail off to the Canary Islands and research birds, or even do freelance accountancy if that suits you. Or just devote all your time to raising your kids.
In other words, to pick your own purpose: to be able to contribute to society (and the economy) in a way that you actually might enjoy instead of whatever stupid job you can manage to find where you live.
I don't know that this vision of every mom-and-pop becoming an entrepreneur would actually work out that way -- few things work out the way they sound on paper -- but it sounds better than people getting so upset they just want to burn it all down.
But get out of the cities in the north of England and you find a place not dissimilar to America's Rust Belt: forcibly de-industrialised, full of lingering resentment. When I go back to my hometown in the north it sometimes feels as though time has stood still since the 1980s, and the steelworkers and miners who Thatcher put out of work now have children and grandchildren who have been brought up feeling hard done by, apathetic and with few aspirations, despite having access to free education, welfare and healthcare that other countries would kill for.
This is the white working class problem incarnate.