His first feature, A Kind of Loving (1962), was a low-key but effective exercise in the "kitchen-sink" school of drama that was grounded in working-class characters, industrial locales in northern England, and naturalistic performances, filmed with gritty cinematography.
The battleground consists of who the novel can be about, with a reluctance in a certain readership to accept that profundity can be found in working-class as well as middle-class experience.
And the town's changes in family structure follow a trend that is particularly pronounced in working-class communities — more divorce, more single mothers.
And looking back, I think it belonged to that time in the Seventies when there was that working-class confidence; wages were going up, so you were getting better off, and we felt as if we had power in our hands.
Mostly privately educated, they evinced an air of superiority that grated with Mr Birt, who seldom lets us forget that his roots are in working-class Liverpool.
It is in working-class small-town Britain that Labour faces its greatest challenge.
It is in working-class Ardoyne that hundreds of Catholic girls have the misfortune to go to a primary school, Holy Cross, on a Protestant-controlled street.
It is the latter that tend to be observed less frequently in working-class families (Périer 2005; Millet and Thin 2005).
The archetypal amusement was that of white working-class visitors kicking back in the boardwalk's famous wicker rolling chairs while black people did the pushing — a "public performance of racial dominance," notes the historian Bryant Simon, in "Boardwalk of Dreams".
What I've tried to show in my books is that, while working-class people seldom speak openly about being left out or left behind, they feel invidious comparison and personal exclusion deeply - and this is where politics enters the picture.
