The viewing figures for BBC 2’s documentary series ‘White’ about the white working class won’t be big by TV standards. Fragmentation of the audience with the emergence of digital has eaten away at the traditional terrestrial channels.

Top Gear was BBC2’s top show last time I looked with over 3 million viewers. This series probably got under 2 million. So it won’t have a huge effect, thankfully.

It would be easy to quote Ken Loach’s 1966 drama about homelessness, Cathy Come Home, which got 11.8m and then 12m viewers for the repeat and fall into the old mantra  “fings ain’t wot they used to be”.

Of course they aren’t. The past forty odd years have seen some victories and more defeats in the course of the class struggle. And related shifts in social life and consciousness. No more so than amongst the middle class and the media-ocracy. This is the more important significance of ‘White’.

A telling episode is taking place at the housing charity Shelter. The creation of this organization was largely triggered by the outcry over homelessness caused by Cathy Come Home.

In the past month Ken Loach has been outstanding in his support for Shelter workers in an industrial dispute with management. They are trying to impose an extra two and a half hours a week work for no extra pay so that Shelter is competitive with private companies in bidding for government legal aid contracts. Over 70% of the 468 Unite members voted for strike action.

The real story here is not primarily Loach’s political integrity and personal bravery – he won’t win many friends outside hardened trade unionists for this stand – it’s what it says about the social and ideological shifts in Britain over the last forty years.

The nostalgia brigade only sees one side of things. The high ideals which motivated the launching of a voluntary sector campaign have collapsed. We see the well-paid management of a £49.1m turnover charity cost cutting in order to win work which is contracted out by a Labour government to the cheapest bidder.

But the other side of the coin is that a largely graduate workforce who forty years ago would have been clearly separate from the working class, however idealistic, are struggling on the same kind of wages as other workers and fighting back through their trade union.

The proud industrial workforce of the 1960s, with its discipline and strong labour organizations was a pole of attraction for many middle class radicals and they mourn its disappearance. The renegades and the establishment celebrate it. Everybody is agreed on the demise of the working class.

What none of them see is that the disappearance of the old identifiable areas and lifestyles actually has exactly the opposite significance. The working class is less visible because it is now the overwhelming majority of the population – “between 80% and 90% by any criterion, with all the qualifications about intermediate layers and people in transition between classes.” (see British Perspectives, section 58 )

And another important lesson is that after all the reformers’ forty years of admirable efforts to help the individual homeless, and endless efforts to legislate the problem away, we are about to see the whole miserable nightmare explode again.

Thatcher sold off millions of council houses. The private sector has already failed to provide affordable housing for many and is now about to destroy the dreams of millions struggling to pay mortgages. Not to mention all the aspiring young home-owners desperate to follow their parents up the property ladder.