No Great Expectations

This disconnect between the jobs people hold and their class allegiance is a phenomenon that the researchers called “working class of the mind.” It helps explain that while only a small minority of Britons share the real insecurity and poverty of workers like Mr. Hewlett, many others feel they are getting a raw deal — and want to stick it to those in power, whether in Brussels or London.

“I don’t think a lot will change. But we have to give it a chance,” said Mr. Hewlett, 61, sitting next to his wife, who has Alzheimer’s disease, in a cluttered front room, its faded walls plastered with photographs of their six children and 14 grandchildren. Life, he said, has “gone to the dogs,” and meddling from outside is to blame. “I don’t like people telling us what to do from miles away.”

In just three years, Mr. Hewlett explained, his take-home pay had crashed from more than $665 a week to just $318. Worse, he added, is that his previously secure full-time employment contract has morphed into a “zero hours contract,” under which his employer decides how much he works and how much it pays him depending on what it needs on any particular day.

“It is basically slave labor,” Mr. Hewlett said. He complained that an influx of eager workers from poorer, formerly communist parts of the European Union meant that employers now had no incentive to offer a fixed contract or more than the minimum wage for menial work.

The real number of immigrants living and working in Wigan is tiny, with only 2.9 percent of the population born outside Britain, compared with a nationwide figure of 11.5 percent, the Office of National Statistics says. Only 1.7 percent of those living in Wigan were born in European Union countries other than Britain. The unemployment rate, the local council says, is only 5 percent, slightly below the national level and half the rate in European countries that use the euro.

But this has not stopped even some of Wigan’s immigrants from complaining about there being too many foreigners, particularly Poles, in the area.