Jan Antonissen

Flemish journalist Jan Antonissen travels through the rust-belts of the former European Coal and Steel Community, plus the UK, to meet the sort of people who vote for populist parties, whose voices "we" (i.e. the middle-class political mainstream) normally don't get to listen to, precisely because we write them off as people who vote for populist parties. The book is laid out as a series of nineteen interviews, framed by a prologue and epilogue in which Antonissen talks about his grandmother and her experience of social change in the Antwerp neighbourhood of Borgerhout — a friendly working-class district when the family moved there, depressed and mostly immigrant by the end of her life (but currently being marketed as "vibrant and multi-culti"). It's a little bit reminiscent of Geert Mak's monumental survey In Europa, but on a much more manageable scale.

The people Antonissen talks to are a mixture. A few are individuals who have been involved in recent news stories, like Alessandra Verni in Rome whose daughter was murdered, apparently by Nigerian drug dealers; Jörg Sartor, director of an Essen food-bank which got into the headlines when it temporarily stopped accepting new non-German clients; Michel Catalano, the printer taken hostage by the Kouachi brothers after the Charlie Hebdo attack; and Jayne Senior, the whistleblower in the Rotherham child-abuse scandal. But others seem to be "just" ordinary people he happens to have met — unemployed men in Bergamo and Gelsenkirchen, a truck-driving couple in Hasselt, a former call-centre worker in Enschede, a candidate for the local council in Sittard, and a retired farmer on the French-Flemish border. In Wallonia, just for a change, the people he talks to are all supporters of far-left parties — a couple of former shop-stewards and a communist radio journalist.

The interviews are short, and don't always explore as far as we might like, but they do bring out a lot of interesting material about the ways that life is treating working-class people in Europe and the sort of difficulties they face. In particular, the difficulty of earning enough money to be able to do anything other than stand still in life. For a lot of them, getting back to where they were after something like a health setback is simply not achievable, and they don't have the sort of employers who support them through difficulties. Although most could have grounds to resent immigrants, Antonissen rarely finds them using explicitly racist language. Most seem to have sympathy and understanding for their immigrant/refugee neighbours as individuals, but complain about the social problems caused by the arrival of so many in so short a time.

Another book about the importance of talking to each other!… (meer)