CONTRARY to the view expressed by Steve Jones in his letter, “Bright enough to make up our own minds” (April 23), my characterisation of working class political culture is not borrowed from Simon Colley, but drawn from my own experience, firstly of growing up in a working class environment as the child of a one parent family in a council house on the roughest estate in Carlisle, and latterly from a political lifetime of talking to and, more important, listening to working class people.

Enoch Powell and Nick Griffin may have been middle class, but the dockers who marched through the streets of London in support of Powell were emphatically working class.

Your correspondent was correct when he said that it was not the working class vote that supported “America’s illegal incursions into the nations of others”. No, but working class opinion was solidly behind British military adventurism at the time of Suez, and again at the time of the Falklands episode.

If the 1983 General Election proves anything, it surely proves that nothing gets working class adrenaline on the fizz quite so well as a successful expedition to bash the “fuzzywuzzies”.

Perhaps your correspondent should ask himself why Alf Garnett made us all laugh so heartily in Till Death do us Part. Yes, of course it was a grotesque caricature, but caricatures only ever work if they are based on a kernel of truth, and that is the unacknowledged fact that we dare not publicly admit.

Nor do I think that working class people are stupid.

The noble lord who led the Commission of Enquiry into the 1926 General Strike later commented: “It would be possible to believe that the miners’ leaders were the stupidest men in England, had one not recently had the experience of dealing with their employers.”

That sums it up, for me.

Peter Johnston, Kendal Road, Bolton