What happens to journalism when working-class voices are silenced?

My fresher’s year at Edinburgh University offered a few rude awakenings. The first: learning the university had run out of self-catered accommodation. The next was that the uni’s solution was to have me share a small bunk-bed room with a stranger, in its poshest catered halls, with a 50% rent discount.

The biggest shock was realising how few people wanted to be friends with me. At pre-drinks they’d ask what school I went to, curious about my unplaceable accent, and then quickly wrap up the conversation when I told them – the local comprehensive in a ‘northern’ town called Prudhoe.

My saving grace was the fact I’d been placed on a corridor with several other young women sharing rooms – some, fellow ‘northerners’. There were Glaswegians, too, who took me under their wing, lending me their minidresses, teaching me to ceilidh on the dance floor, and usually paying for the taxi home. And there were allies who let me sleep in their own big rooms when I got bunk-bed fatigue.

This experience taught me class alienation is only survivable when you find community; a lesson that has served me well through my career so far in journalism too – and which, 15 years later, led me to curate a new essay collection on class, called Bread Alone.

Read more:

• Sam Fender: Culture wars undermine working class support for Labour
• Why does everyone keep getting the white working class wrong?
• Tish Murtha was a brilliant photographer who fought Thatcher with her camera. She deserved better

You may have seen recent calls to make class a protected characteristic, led by Nazir Afzal OBE and Avis Gilmore, authors of the Class Ceiling report on class, culture and employment, which also found that 50% of creative professionals experienced bias or bullying based on their background. In response, some wondered how we’d protect members of the ‘working class’ if there isn’t consensus on what that means.

And could that mercurial definition shift once again before we’ve even had time to chisel it into legislation? Meanwhile, the outrage machine churned out its usual gunk, such as one aristocrat-authored column in The Telegraph that argued we should extend any protections to “posh sorts” too, claiming they too were “repeatedly pilloried”.  

That’s what happens when we talk about class – the discourse drowns out plans for progress, all before those actually affected have even cleared their throats. Part of the problem is lack of platform. Like other underrepresented groups, writers from working-class backgrounds don’t have enough of a voice.

There’s simply too few opportunities, and too much noise pollution drummed up by writers from elite backgrounds who, last time the NCTJ checked, constituted 80% of all journalists. Those engaging with research in good faith, and from lived experience, go unheard.

That’s why I brought together over 30 different writers to tell their story in our anthology. Rarely do writers from working-class backgrounds get to congregate in books like this – it’s been seven years since Kit de Waal’s own stunning anthology of working-class voices, Common People. And in those seven years the wealth gap became a canyon.

Bread Alone features stories from those with lived connections spanning the UK, Ireland, Pakistan,
Somalia, Canada, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Singapore, the USA and beyond. Those included stories about how not just class, but also race, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, neurodivergence, grief, care experience, being unhoused, incarceration, substance dependence, single parenthood and beyond have influenced their experience as writers.

Global billionaire wealth jumped three times more than average in 2025, while nearly half the world’s population lives in poverty. And as living standards fall and the cost of existing increases, those who benefit from division seduce the public into believing there’s not enough to go round, that the only way to survive is hatred.

But Bread Alone is not here to tell any sort of misty-eyed tale of working-class grit against the odds, nor to provide fodder for the gratitude journals of the rich. Instead, it is here to remind writers in similar situations that clinging to their calling is their right. 

Working-class successes are usually built on luck: a single advocate, a transformative prize. The celebrated winners of Grammys, Emmys or the Booker exist – but as rare exceptions. So Bread Alone sounds the alarm: good writing needs protecting and passing down through generations. Particularly as AI continues to cannibalise culture, chucking it back up as a gluey, common-denominator gruel.

It’s time to reframe the idea that class inclusion is an altruistic extra, or a charitable afterthought. Instead, it’s fundamental to the preservation of the arts, publishing and media. And the essays within prove the wealth of talent ready to flood through the gates, just as soon as they’re prised further open. But Bread Alone is also a warning – about what will happen if those gates are left shut.

Bread Alone, edited by Kate Pasola, is out on 9 March (Indie Novella, £10.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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