This change illustrates a strange paradox in British politics: while the public grows ever more socially liberal, politics appears to be heading in the opposite direction. Reform UK’s polling regularly hits 25%, far outstripping the popularity of hard-Right parties 40 years ago. And a newly ascendant Blue Labour movement speaks in increasingly sympathetic terms of Donald Trump and JD Vance.

Hence the EastEnders paradox. Four nights a week, viewers tune in to the BBC One soap, which now includes an LGBT club and a far more diverse range of characters and issues than in 1987. But come polling day, they opt for the nativist Right, which many Brits would never have dreamed of doing back then. In this context, it’s easy for liberals to feel an irresistible pull: if voters keep asking for the same thing, then surely politicians owe it to them?

Perhaps it is only TV producers who’ve become more liberal. Perhaps elites are imposing political correctness on conservative audiences, as the Right claims. Perhaps. But, for the most part, the numbers tell a different story.

In Britain, support for same-sex relationships doubled between 2000 and 2022, while support for abortion rights increased by 22 percentage points between 1998 and now. The proportion of Brits who are “very concerned” about the environment has nearly doubled since 2010. And the proportion “strongly disagreeing” that you must be white to be British rose by 29 percentage points between 2008 and 2020. The number of people who would mind a foreigner living next door is now negligible. Support for the death penalty is falling fast.

The headwinds, in other words, are blowing against Reform. And these headwinds exist, to some degree, across all social demographics and all political allegiances.

Many of today’s Right populists aren’t claiming to be socially conservative on every issue, of course — at least not in the ultra-traditionalist, religious sense. But it’s noticeable that the trend is especially marked on immigration — the signature issue of the Right. A 2024 report from the British Social Attitudes survey (BSA) — the UK’s gold standard in social research — revealed that the proportion of Brits saying immigration was good for the economy had risen from 17% to 40% between 2002 and 2024. The proportion saying it enriched our culture went from 33% to 43%.

A particularly notable finding here is that race and immigration have seen a de-coupling. The proportion of Brits who wanted inward immigration by white ethnicities cut to “none” fell 22 percentage points, from 35% in 2002 to 13% in 2021. But it fell by even more — 33 percentage points — when it came to non-white migrants: from 49% in 2002 to 16% in 2021. There is now virtually no difference. This pro-migrant sentiment appeared to peak immediately before the cost-of-living crisis set in, and has since fallen. But it remains much higher than a generation ago.

This implies that today’s immigration debate isn’t a proxy for nativist views. As polling expert Peter Kellner pointed out recently, voters are often positive about immigrants as people but negative about immigration as an idea. Antipathy stems from a fear that more arrivals put more pressure on public services, as well as from a specific frustration with the continued arrival of small boats, which implies to voters a broken system.

If the public is becoming more liberal, then how do we explain the drift towards the Right? The bleak state of the economy and low trust in politicians doubtless play a role — although there’s no reason why such factors should point in a Right-wing direction rather than a Left-wing one. But a large part of the answer lies, the BSA report suggests, in the differing pace of changes in attitudes, particularly over the past 15 years. The whole country is becoming more liberal, but at different speeds. And it’s this discrepancy that creates political tension and rewards parties like Reform.

The Silent Generation (born before 1945) became 12 percentage points more positive toward immigration during the 2010s (from 7% to 19% support for “allowing many” into the country), for instance. But Millennials (born 1986-1995) became 21 percentage points more positive (from 19% to 40%).

During the Brexit years, meanwhile, those with no qualifications became 16 percentage points more likely to say immigration made the country a better place (from 20% in 2014 to 36% in 2021). But degree holders became 23 percentage points more likely (from 50% to 73%).

The same goes for political allegiance. In the decade after 2011, Tory supporters became 20 percentage points more likely to say immigration was good for the economy (from 15% to 35%), but Labour supporters became 36 percentage points more likely to say so (from 29% to 65%).

To explain this, Professor Rob Ford, who co-authored the BSA report, describes a “two-speed liberalization”. The 2010s saw the mean average move in a progressive direction, but with a wider gap opening up between those making this transition quickly, from a fairly liberal start-point, and those making it more slowly, from a less liberal one.

This gap is the terrain on which Britain’s culture wars are often fought. And part of the reason they are often so unpleasant is because they frequently involve fast liberalizers accusing slower liberalizers of bigotry. The latter, who have usually witnessed and often themselves welcomed massive social changes during their lifetimes, take umbrage at this.

If you look at the generational gap over time between liberal and authoritarian attitudes, you can see it closing between the Eighties and 2000s, as older generations embraced more liberal attitudes during a permissive period. But this was followed by a resurgence of the gap in the 2010s and the era of social media: younger generations moved rapidly in more progressive directions, but older generations did not follow.

There are many causes of this two-speed process, several of which are described in detail by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford in their book, Brexitland. Growing regional inequality means the experience of living in large cities like London and Manchester has become increasingly different from that of living elsewhere. Higher levels of university education have also created more liberal norms — especially in these big cities.

Suggested reading

Why do we pretend to be working-class?

By Chris Clarke

Then there’s the fact that migration itself has led to more diversity. This has increased the size of the target for the radical Right, even if the strength of public feeling is milder.

Added to this, the First Past The Post electoral system has skewed politics in favor of slower liberalizers, who are more evenly spread across the country. And the presence of social media has amplified every difference within the population, making it easy to mischaracterize the view of others as either “snowflakes” or “gammon”.

If you take a step back, the reality is that the British electorate holds a remarkably moderate set of views, wherever you look on the political spectrum. The inference is not that “progressive elites” must reconnect with anti-migrant majorities. It’s that the pace of social change requires leadership, public faith in the system, and a shared sense of direction and control.

We have seen none of this in recent years — the belief instead being that loud mood music, tough rhetoric or promises to “slash” immigration numbers can win the day. Bad money is thrown after good.

Instead, the gaps which two-speed liberalization opens up must be reconciled, with coherent positions arrived at which are in the national interest. Some of these are thorny, requiring concessions from both sides to find common ground. Freedom of speech and equalities are two such areas. On the former, clear rules are needed about what’s sayable and what really is hate speech; within these parameters a less judgmental debate should be encouraged. On the latter, we need to be clear about goals and definitions.

On immigration, meanwhile, the most contentious of the lot, a position is needed which commands wide support. In my view this ought to combine higher migration with greater control. Britain could publicly promise more migration in key sectors — alongside a more humane asylum system — while also offering the control which would-be Reform voters and many others are clearly desperate for, such as through the introduction of ID cards to tackle illegal working. After all, control appears to be more important to the public than reducing the number of immigrants, and the hard-Right’s obsession with the latter should be challenged.

Such a position would require both fast and slow liberalizers to take certain elements on the chin. But it would be reasonable, fair and in the national interest. It could be defended in good faith.

I don’t doubt that some people, looking at the rise of the populist Right, will see a term like “two-speed liberalization” as a piece of progressive jargon, designed to evade tough questions. But the goings on in EastEnders’ Albert Square over the past 40 years tell a different story. If the Left is to engage with Reform’s appeal, we need to start by seeing the British people for the social liberals they are.

Two explanations are offered for this trend. The first has its roots in 2010. Since then, this theory holds, we have seen the end of Education Maintenance Allowance, the doubling of student fees, the growing inaccessibility of the housing market to those without inherited wealth, and, of course, Brexit. The under-50s neither voted for this Tory policy platform nor stand to benefit from it. They are unlikely to reward a party that appears to want to prolong their insecurity; their refusal to drift Right with age, then, is a result of their material conditions.

The second explanation is longer term and comes down to shifting values. Its roots are much deeper, dating back to the battle for Hampstead during the general Election of 1966, when the north London constituency returned a Labour MP for the first time. “In an earlier era, it would have been unthinkable that Labour could win so middle-class a seat,” writes the geo-demographic expert Richard Webber in The Predictive Postcode. In the 50 years since, “there has been a huge growth in the size, confidence, and influence of this particular geo-demographic group. A radical minority, once fabled for its eccentric habits — shopping at Habitat, reading Private Eye, wearing sandals, eating muesli, and supporting human rights — … has now come to dominate large swathes of inner London.”

The academic study of values looks at the underlying motivations and unmet psychological needs which drive individuals across societies. A range of different models exist, but all identify a similar long-term pattern: as economies grow and education levels rise, the values of the population edge towards some variation of “post-materialism”. This term was coined by Ronald Inglehart, founder of the World Values Survey, to describe the tendency to prioritise principles such as self-expression and personal autonomy over financial considerations. The 1966 Hampstead result was an early indicator of post-materialist values taking root in the UK, and since then, they have become far more widespread.

What does this shift mean in practice? Those with post-materialist values often place ethics and inner fulfilment ahead of more obvious economic interests at the ballot box. Their values are expressed through concerns about equality, freedom of speech and the environment; through a dedication to larger-than-self causes and to internationalist or universalist ideas about national borders; and through a tendency to agree with statements along the lines of “ideas are more important than money”.

Suggested reading

Why do we pretend to be working-class?

By Chris Clarke

The idea here is not simply that everyone who reaches a certain level of resource security will immediately move towards post-materialism. People’s values are rooted in both psychology and life experiences, and they change only slowly, over time. A pensioner raised in an era of poverty and rationing may see politics in terms of protecting and conserving resources, despite now having the material security of home ownership. Conversely, a graduate who has spent their formative years in social circles which emphasise ethics and freedom of expression will usually retain these values, even as they struggle to pay the rent.

Even so, post-materialists now comprise a large part of the electorate — rising, according an IPPR paper from the early 2010s, from 19% of the population in 1973 to 38% in 2012. This has created a headache for all mainstream politicians, but especially for those on the Right. Of course, post-materialists are not all social justice activists, nor are they all explicitly Left-wing; they may not even be that exercised about party politics. But progressive parties do represent a far more natural home for them, and so Right-of-centre movements have to work harder to win their votes.

David Cameron’s Conservative Party appeared to acknowledge this. And while few post-materialists will have had much love for the coalition government, there was a concerted effort in to keep them on board. Mainly this came down to tone, but it was also clear in specific policies, such as support for gay marriage.

The Leave vote in 2016 changed this. The Tories realised they could use the large and highly visible presence of post-materialists as populist leverage. They could aim their guns at liberal elites or “woke” youngsters and build a new voter coalition, containing everyone who felt abandoned or confused by the post-materialist shift. Strategists such as Dominic Cummings reasoned that post-materialists were an electoral minority, and an inefficiently distributed one at that, prone to congregating in cities. There was little to be lost by antagonising them. Indeed, getting a reaction was part of the point.

Suggested reading

The secret millennial class war

By Chris Clarke

This plan had no immediately obvious downsides from a Conservative perspective. And it was easy for them to exploit it thanks to the antics of some on the progressive Left, who were often happy to take the bait. Their success was such that the average post-materialist will have spent the past decade feeling that their values were in decline rather than in ascent.

But this Faustian strategy could not last. To begin with, post-materialist values are becoming increasingly common, and so attacking them will bring diminishing returns in the long term. The harder the attacks, the more ground the Conservatives will ultimately have to row back on. If they have nothing positive to say to post-materialists, then they are building in their own obsolescence.

Moreover, there will have been a significant group of more cautious post-materialists who, up until a few years ago, were willing to vote for a liberal or One Nation iteration of Toryism. The loss of these voters since 2016 appears to have been treated by the Conservatives as collateral damage. But this means they have had to lean even more heavily on Leave voters and other groups who, while culturally at odds with post-materialists on issues such as crime, will have been just as horrified by raucous lockdown breaches followed by a Budget which caused the economy to collapse.

The plot against the post-materialists, then, now seems to be reaching its endgame, and many are doubling down. Tory MP Brendan Clarke-Smith’s recent call on voters to buy own-brand beans is a perfect illustration: it speaks to the most basic concerns about resource protection and scarcity, and ignores the big picture altogether.

Ultimately, the rise of post-materialism is a gradual, organic process, taking place in most developed countries as societies become more materially comfortable. This is not to say it doesn’t come with challenges. Helen Lewis’s excellent radio series, The New Gurus, illustrated that a society where everyone is in search of meaning rather than money carries perils of its own — and may not always be an especially nice place to live. But this doesn’t mean the rise of post-materialism is an elite plot or an institutional “capture”, as figures on the populist Right such as Matthew Goodwin have interpreted it. Nor is it a mass surrender to “Marxism” or “paganism”, contrary to what some of the speakers at the recent National Conservatism Conference reportedly believe.

Can the Right tempt young and middle-aged voters back into the fold? Policies which improve childcare provisions, fix the housing market, or create economic stability could, hypothetically, make a difference. There are few people so concerned about inner fulfilment as to not care about paying the mortgage. But if you look at the age gap data, what is striking is that the voting divide really kicked in after 2015, when the Tories began to signal at every opportunity that they were not just opposed to liberal and post-material ideas, but, in many cases, that they actively hated them.

From Suella Braverman talking about an “invasion” of migrants to Lee Anderson backing the death penalty, the Tories have used language and taken positions which have damaged their brand far more than the sum of their individual policies ever could. Starting to back policies which advance the interests of younger voters would of course be a start. But if the Tories continue to go to war with the values which many younger voters hold, then this “lost generation” will be the first of many.

Like Blair, Sunak has become party leader relatively young. Like Blair, he is still fairly new to the political frontline, and seeks to distinguish himself from his predecessors. But the rest of the political context is dramatically different. Whereas Labour at that time were in opposition and hungry for power, the current Tory Prime Minister fronts a party which has held office for 13 years. His focus on law and order, polling would suggest, is more a case of holding a line than of ploughing new terrain. So, what was it that made “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” such a compelling turn of phrase for New Labour? And can “tough” rhetoric boost the prospects of Rishi Sunak in the same way?

The work of US psychologist George Lakoff is useful here. An interdisciplinary academic, originally specialising in linguistics, Lakoff sought to understand why Left-wing and Right-wing thinking often falls along clear and predictable lines — even in policy fields that ostensibly have little in common. “Why,” as Lakoff put it, “does being anti-government fit with wanting a stronger military? How can you be pro-life and for the death penalty?… What does owning guns have to do with denying the reality of global warming?”

One of Lakoff’s conclusions, in answer to these questions, related to cause and effect. He set out two ways of thinking. “Direct” causation, he argued, emphasises immediate actions and consequences: A + B = C. This approach is favoured by conservatives; Trump’s proposed wall with Mexico, for example, is “direct” reasoning on steroids. In the other corner, preferred by progressives and the liberal Left, is “systemic” reasoning. This looks upwards, to an ecosystem of structural and societal factors; it concludes that these are the true catalyst for the social ills we face.

Apply this to law and order, and you get a clear overlay. Is the “scourge of anti-social behaviour”, as Rishi Sunak calls it, a “direct” problem, best solved by stronger policing and harsher punishments? Or is it a “systemic” one, created by the lack of opportunities which an economically unequal society creates? Should we be tough on crime or tough on its causes? Most of us will have at least some “direct” instincts when it comes to crime. Getting pick-pocketed or happy-slapped might leave even a diehard “society’s fault” liberal wanting to see some form of comeuppance. Indeed, if we think about why criminal justice is so emotive for people — and why it remains a political football in a comparatively safe country like Britain — it’s partly because it presents such an instinctive call to action for “direct” reasoning.

More from this author

Who will win the gentrification wars?

By Chris Clarke

If a person has killed someone else with a knife, for instance, an intuitive response is to believe both that we need to be protected from them and that they need to pay. The “systemic” argument — which would instead look at the wider contextual factors that led them to offend — will often seem beside the point. It may only be possible to make it from a safe distance away, once the immediate threat has been addressed. Indeed, George Lakoff describes how automatic “direct” causation can be:

From infanthood on we experience direct, simple causation: if we push a toy, it topples over; if our mother turns a knob on the oven, flames emerge. Picking up a glass of water and taking a drink is direct causation… Punching someone in the nose is direct causation. Throwing a rock through a window is direct causation. Stealing your wallet is direct causation… When causation is direct, the word cause is unproblematic.

“Systemic” thinking, by contrast, “is more complex and is not represented in the grammar of any language”. As Lakoff puts it: “It just has to be learned.” This partly explains why the Left so often feels it is playing away from home. Progressive tonics may be correct, in a technical or philosophical sense. But they come to human beings less naturally.

This brings us back to Blair’s Nineties strapline. “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” was so effective because it told voters you did not need to choose between “direct” and “systemic” causation. The police can get on with stopping crime while somewhere, in a classroom on the other side of town, a teacher equips their pupils to avoid it in the first place. Blair’s “tough on crime” rhetoric was an attempt to rid Labour of its reputation as a party built on “systemic” reasoning alone. The soundbite thus bridged the blank-slate logic of the liberal Left with the more common-sense approach of Labour’s traditional support and of swing voters. In the run up to 1997, this formula provided the reassurance which both groups needed.

Suggested reading

Boston and the tragedy of Brexitland

By Jacob Furedi

What is the relevance of all this, when it comes to Sunak’s current electoral predicament? In a report for Progressive Britain last year, I argued that Boris Johnson’s success in the Red Wall came down to his bish-bosh-wallop mastery of “direct” logic. The Tories had historically accepted elements of “systemic” reasoning and attempted to straddle the two. But, from foreign policy to immigration to the economy, they slowly re-styled themselves over the course of the 2010s as a “no-nonsense” party, whose purpose was to provide “direct” answers to every policy question you could care to mention. According to Sebastian Payne’s book, Broken Heartlands, Dominic Cummings told 2019 Tory strategists to frame their pitch to the Red Wall as “Blairism without caring about the causes of crime”.

By doubling down on one side of Lakoff’s equation, the Tories won the 80-seat majority which Sunak now presides over (against a candidate, in Jeremy Corbyn, who appeared to embody woolly “systemic” thinking at its worst). But they also left themselves badly exposed — especially following Boris Johnson’s very “direct” and obvious breaches of his own rules. They now find themselves adrift from any voter of a vaguely “systemic” bent, reliant on an electoral pool whose geographical spread makes them efficient in terms of winning seats, but whose age profile makes them increasingly rare. To have any hope, the Conservatives now find themselves in a position where they need to continually stimulate this group’s fear that wishy-washy, “systemic” thinking has taken over. And they need to present themselves as the guardians of “direct” solutions to every problem — from small boats to laughing gas.

More from this author

The secret millennial class war

By Chris Clarke

Social mores have also changed significantly since Blair’s early days as Labour leader — partly due to the expansion of higher education which his governments subsequently presided over. Support for the death penalty, for example — as good a proxy for toughness as you’ll find — fell from over 70% in 1993 to under 50% today. Third Way politics did not have to contend with such a broad values spectrum as now exists. Conservative strategists may regard the small but growing cohort of ultra-“systemic” reasoners on the Left as a gift, allowing them to galvanise their “direct”-thinking base against a phrase such as “defund the police”. But they perhaps miss, in the course of this, that the mean average of public opinion has moved too. The typical voter, I suspect, is readier to blame an issue such as anti-social behaviour on social conditions than they were in the Eighties and Nineties. In this context, policy announcements based on “direct” reasoning may bring diminishing returns as time passes.

Ultimately, Sunak’s focus on crime derives from a fundamentally different place from the young Blair’s. Whereas the latter was trying to marry two electorates and retain both, the former is seeking to hold onto one — at the expense, very likely, of further haemorrhaging votes within the other. If the Tories lose the next election, then some greater reckoning with these questions will surely be required, by Sunak or his successor. In a curious reversal of New Labour’s dilemma, the UK’s growing tribe of “systemic” reasoners will at some point need to somehow be won back — through a public demonstration that the Tories are serious about the “causes of crime”. Who knows? They may even wind up resuscitating Blair’s full slogan.

The release of 2021 census numbers helps to explain why, for millennials in our core cities, the “G” word has become so politically charged. One recent data-blog showed the steeply rising number of residents in professional jobs across London and Manchester. The changes will have been plain to see if you have lived in these places over the past decade, with estate agents popping up on formerly run-down high streets and artisan bakeries appearing in railway arches.

Long-term residents and those on the public-sector frontline often see the shift as a mixed blessing at best. But anxieties are most acute, in my experience, among those doing the gentrifying. The term, after all, describes a moneyed caste pushing out “authentic” locals. Ruth Glass, the formidable Marxist sociologist who coined contemporary usage of the word, described the phenomenon as “displacement”. And many of those doing the displacing — whose politics tend also to be Left-leaning — feel a deep unease about their role.

This guilt is sometimes absorbed internally, but on other occasions it’s deflected elsewhere — at everyone from oligarchs and developers to hipsters and yummy mummies. At the real gentrifiers. And this imagined class is easily illustrated, such as through the Nine Elms Sky Pool, the Dalston Cereal Cafe and the Deptford Job Centre bar. These developments represent the most decadent aspects of modern urban renewal, and encourage people to conclude that it’s something only ever done by other people. (Curiously, the above feelings rarely dampen the appetite for craft beer and sourdough, or spur people to become regulars at the nearest flat-roofed pub. But that’s a debate for another day.)

I am a gentrifier myself. That is: I’m a former young professional who moved to London for work in the early 2010s. I haven’t felt especially flush as I’ve bumped around London’s private rental market over the past decade. But I guess, without realising it, I have been able to pay higher rents than previous waves of residents in the same areas. In this sense, I am “part of the problem”. But I increasingly wonder if this mood of penitence is helpful. This isn’t to downplay the absurdities of the London housing market. Or to deny that such absurdities bring with them an often-ugly social reality, with visible affluence a stone’s throw from homelessness. It’s more that the way gentrification is discussed, as an urban cancer wantonly infecting hearty postcodes, seems very narrow.

I first questioned my attitude to the phenomenon a few years ago, when I heard a parliamentary candidate in an economically struggling town mention the possibilities of gentrification. As the only Londoner in the room, I looked around incredulously, expecting people to be on their feet in anger. Yet the audience gazed back with interest. The candidate did not talk of it as a catch-all solution, and no one broke into spontaneous applause either. But I was struck by the fact that, in an area that had seen its high streets boarded up and its economy ravaged after the 2008 crash, gentrification was not the dirty word it had become in London.

More from this author

Why do we pretend to be working-class?

By Chris Clarke

To extend this thought, let’s revive the reportedly abandoned slogan, “levelling up”. The need to rebalance the national economy is acknowledged, in principle, by Left as well as Right. And addressing regional inequality will require, most agree, the attraction of skilled sectors to the places which currently have the fewest opportunities. Hence, the “left behind” towns which successfully level up will be those who persuade their younger populations that they don’t need to move to the nearest metropolis to advance their prospects. If they manage this, then they’ll start to attract skilled workers from elsewhere, too. House prices will rise, as the demand to live in the town increases. And cultural and commercial changes will follow, to cater for the new resident base. The area will begin to gentrify, in other words, once it “levels up”.

Writing in 2017, Dave Hill, a critic of the anti-gentrification zeitgeist, pointed out that ending gentrification in London is not difficult: “Boroughs could stop collecting rubbish…and let packs of dangerous dogs roam public parks, snarling, biting and defecating freely on the grass,” he wrote. “Southwark could close Borough Market. Lambeth could rip out Windrush Square. Sadiq Khan could…launch a campaign called London Is Closed. [This] would soon limit the capital’s attractions, deter foreign investment and eventually bring its population down.” Hill’s argument, acidly put, is that gentrification is a problem of success. Londoners should be careful what they wish for. His contention is underscored by a recent MRP poll, which found that only 11 of the UK’s 367 council areas say their communities have improved in recent years. Ten of these are in — you guessed it — Inner London. The remaining one is Manchester City Council.

At what cost, some might ask? How many people have been pushed out to achieve these polling results? Indeed, even if Hill is right and regeneration is a net positive, you could argue that central London has, in the past 20 years, become a victim of how sought after it is, experiencing “gentrification overkill”. In the late 20th century, boroughs such as Lambeth or Brent benefited from an influx of additional social capital and spending power; from groups who’d once have been too scared or snobbish to live in inner-city areas that had become hollowed out. But, by the 2010s, this had reached a tipping point. If we compare 2011 and 2021 census data for non-UK born populations, we find that much of Inner London is bucking both the national trend and its own history. Boroughs are either getting less diverse or flatlining, with newer waves of migrants settling in parts of the UK where housing is affordable. For Londoners who pride themselves on their city’s multiculturalism, this will be worrying.

Another piece in the puzzle is social class. Gentrification reflects the unromantic fact that more and more Brits do desk jobs. If our cities are gentrifying then that’s partly because our whole economy is, and has been for decades. The true history of the capital is like that of a room repeatedly wallpapered, as its inhabitants move “up” in the world. The road names in the Square Mile — Poultry, Cheapside, Milk Street — reveal a gentrification process going back centuries. And, like the increasing tendency to renounce middle-class identities, the anxiety about gentrification comes from changing material circumstances. The very term “gentrification” insinuates membership of a new nobility, of modern-day squires and duchesses. Few, in a country which aspires to meritocracy, welcome this association. But the reality, however squeamish some feel about it, is that a larger and larger proportion of the population do non-manual roles — and that these people need to live somewhere.

Suggested reading

Poundbury and the English apocalypse

By Fred Skulthorp

The rising number of middle-class jobs does become an issue if it’s happening faster in some places than others. And this, according to the data-blog cited at the start, is in fact the case. While the blog found that “the professionalisation pattern is clearly visible [beyond] big cities like London”, it also revealed that different areas are professionalising at different speeds. Of the 30 local authorities becoming middle-class quickest, for example, 13 were in Greater London or Greater Manchester. The rest were mostly commuter towns around the capital, or university cities such as Cambridge, Bristol, Warwick and Exeter.

The issue, then, if we’re talking about the increasing number of white-collar jobs, is not necessarily gentrification itself but the uneven spread of gentrification. You could argue — and perhaps there’s an undergraduate essay question to be set on this topic — that the goal of policy-makers should simply be that every UK classroom contains a representative economic and demographic cross-section of the population. If that’s not happening, then governments must intervene.

Does the above question matter, to anyone except gentrifiers already beating themselves up? The debate, I’d say, has wider implications. For one thing, it reveals the extent of geographic polarisation. Very different conversations are happening in different parts of Britain. One analysis I conducted in 2021 looked at parliamentary seats according to various deprivation metrics. The 100 English seats with the highest housing deprivation were almost exclusively in London. The 100 seats with the highest employment deprivation were, in most cases, a long way from big cities. Just eight seats featured on both lists (most of them, interestingly, in Birmingham). To put it bluntly, deprivation in half of the UK means you can’t get a decent house, and deprivation in the other half means you can’t get a decent job.

Another interesting element was party politics. Seats with high housing deprivation tended to swing towards Labour between 2010 and 2019. Constituencies with the fewest barriers to housing shifted Tory — including places which are deprived according to most other metrics. And a recent study by Ben Ansell showed a more specific consequence of this. It estimated, at constituency level, support for house-building — a topic that’s become especially charged over the past year. Enthusiasm was greatest in Labour-held city seats with high housing deprivation: places with transient communities, a precarious rental market, visible street homelessness, high internal inequality and pressure on services thanks to overcrowding. Constituencies where gentrification is, as we like to put it these days, “a thing”. Londoners may feel betrayed by the lack of enthusiasm outside the big cities. But is it really a surprise that those with a completely different experience of the housing market are less convinced about the need to build?

More from this author

The secret millennial class war

By Chris Clarke

The gentrification debate can feel myopic. To those living in places where well-paid work is in short supply, it may look like navel-gazing from people who’ve had too much of a good thing. Those in its midst, on the other hand, feel the claustrophobia of rising rents, or see their local economy becoming prohibitively expensive over just a couple of years. The fallout from the Liz Truss mini-budget, which affected home owners and private renters alike, has created an intense focus on the housing issue. Young residents in cities have become vocal critics of Nimby-ism by older generations, and planning — not an especially sexy subject a few years ago — has become a wedge issue in some areas. The risk, for mainstream politicians, is that house-building becomes the next big culture war topic, splitting the country along generational or geographical lines.

There is a temptation for politicians to throw their all behind this, attacking the gilded lives of those in one area or another. But those who successfully bridge the electoral divide will be those who identify the thread that links the two. Gentrification is proof not that our authentic urban centres are being invaded, but that exceptionally high levels of regional inequality benefit no one.

The slang-words describe two teenage tribes. One wore Reebok Classics, brands like Ellesse or Diadora, and (often Burberry) baseball caps. They smoked straights, drank alcopops (if they could get hold of them), liked football, and listened to the charts. The girls wore large earrings and carried drawstring bags from sports shops. The boys gelled their hair.

The other lot wore Vans and DC skateboarding shoes, baggy jeans, and Billabong hoodies or rucksacks. They smoked roll-ups and cannabis (if they could get hold of it), liked skateboarding or hacky-sack, and listened to rock or reggae. The girls had heavy eye make-up, and sometimes a nose piercing. The boys did not gel their hair. Read Mods and Rockers, but for pubescents growing up at the turn of the century.

This was a culture war played out in miniature, in an era of relative prosperity and peace. But it’s one which I think, as I’ll explain later, helps us understand modern political divides.

At my secondary school in Norwich, the two clans were omnipresent and — to start with, at least — mutually exclusive. I was ushered into the former tribe, when it became clear that I liked football and had never stood on a skateboard in my life. Each UK region had different descriptors for the groups, I later learnt, but our area used “townie” and “pikey”. “Pikey” being a derogatory term, albeit used to describe something completely different, I’ll use the word “mosher” in the rest of the article, to describe the skater tribe’.

As well as a general mood of sectarianism between the two groups — a “mosher” girl in my class was beaten up by “townies” from another school in Year 8, and retributions followed — there were political differences, too. Those who marched against Iraq were mostly of “mosher” heritage. And “mosher” saw themselves, more generally, as upholding social liberalism. This largely involved mimicking the other side’s use of the word “gay” (an all-purpose “townie” insult at the time) by grunting “Yer gay” in the broadest Norfolk accent they could muster. This backfired, in progressive terms, as many “moshers” discovered a liking for the term “gay” once they’d sampled it, and were soon chucking it about just as casually as their “townie” peers.

By age 16, affiliations had weakened. The clans had discovered common ground — or common enemies. People mixed and matched. And every now and then a “mosher” would surprise the “townies” by revealing themselves, under the big shoes and pocketed trousers, to be good at football. In particular, the ubiquitous desire for marijuana, alcohol and cigarettes made it necessary for the identities to mingle. A large group of smokers in our year — of both “townie” and “mosher” vintage — took to loitering in a circle at the end of the field, furtively imbibing cannabis or tobacco, and hocking phlegm into a huge, symbolic puddle of shared mucus.

Yet a duality remained. Many former “townies” left school at 16 or 18, and went to work — sometimes earning decent salaries and getting on the housing ladder, sometimes not. They had more money to spend and went out in different clubs — the sort where local footballers frequented the VIP area. And they learnt to drive.

More from this author

Why do we pretend to be working-class?

By Chris Clarke

“Moshers”, meanwhile, morphed into hippies or indie kids. They did not want to be known as “geeks” any more than the “townies”. But when the moment came, they were more likely to stay on at Sixth Form — and then, often, to leave the city to study or travel. As economic inequality moved into focus post-2008, some will have learnt to see terms such as “townie” and “chav” as marks of bigotry — little better than racial slurs. Many former “moshers” may now, in fact, be more offended by these words than those they once used them against.

The phenomenon I describe — evident across many parts of Britain, and especially away from big cities — ran far deeper than hobbies and fashion. Its roots were social. Where I grew up, “townies” mostly came from houses built this side of the Second World War. Some lived on the council estates which formed part of the school catchment. Many others lived on newer developments further out, or in expanses of owner-occupied suburban semis. We lived in a city and were proud of this status, but the “townie” strongholds — as their label, I suppose, implies — tended to be the areas which were least urban or least urbane.

The “mosher” spirit, by contrast, emanated from — although was not unique to — the Victorian or Georgian terraced houses closer to the city centre. These had bay windows and smaller gardens, and were en route to the university, in and around an area known as the Golden Triangle. This neighbourhood was characterised by its shabby chic tastes, strong social capital and high house prices. It was not super-rich, by any means, and may not even be much more affluent than “townie” dominated areas further out. But its sense of itself was quite different.

So, what does this nascent identity politics, conducted on the playing fields of Blair’s Britain, tell us about the UK in 2023? It would be daft to overstate it, but I think some contemporary fault-lines are evident.

The first is about what I’d call “the glossy and the matte”. This is a political distinction for all the ages; between those looking to advertise their social status and those looking to disguise it. Dressing up and dressing down, new money and old, gaucheness and “good taste”. Even George Eliot’s Middlemarch, set in the 1830s, touches on the same theme. It’s telling, I think, that my school, comprised as it was of a pretty ordinary economic intake, devised an alternative caste system on the basis of glossy and matte preferences.

Suggested reading

Will the working class strike back?

By Richard Vinen

Many of the subtler barriers to modern social mobility come down to the same distinctions. Amol Rajan’s documentary “How to break into the elite” depicts working-class graduates donning sharp suits for job interviews in the arts, only to find that the well-paid executives interviewing them are wearing t-shirts and trainers.

The second fault-line is between economic and cultural capital; materialism and post-materialism. It’s a while since I read Chavs by Owen Jones, but one thing that didn’t ring as true when I did was the idea that anti-“chav” sentiment sought to deride poverty. In my experience, at least back then, it was about a mutual contempt, between those who valued the signifiers of wealth or status and those who valued the signifiers of taste or intellect. It’s true that most of those in social housing were “townies”, but it’s also true that most of the “townies” I went to school with did not live in social housing.

I do think that the hierarchy which “moshers” sought to create was just as bad as that which “townies” were cultivating. But I don’t think it was quite as simple as “haves” mocking “have-nots”. Certainly, this isn’t what “pikeys” thought they were doing. Many regarded themselves as the underdogs, and their primary accusation was that “townies” were parochial — not that they were poor. In return it was they — the “dirty mosher” — who were disparaged for their lack of respectability.

The most obvious modern echo here is the Corbyn project. Scruffy and proud of it, the movement was contemptuous of what Tony Blair called “aspiration”. Corbyn and his team spoke primarily to post-materialist values and higher cultural capital, and appeared to see those who valued economic capital — “townies” and their ilk — through the lens of “false consciousness”.

Third, the fissure exposed a fault-line between mainstream and alternative. One interesting thing about my school’s dynamic was the fact that “townies” and “moshers” were so evenly matched in terms of numbers. A generation beforehand, “mosher” culture might have been peripheral, but by the time I went to school there were whole industries dedicated to “mosher” clothing and music. “Mosher” — ism was, at core, an act of rebellion — against suburban conformity and materialism. But, by 2001, striking out in this way was a popular pastime.

This links to a perennial question for those in the “alternative” corner: what happens when the identity you champion becomes mainstream? Many culture war debates relate to this. James Harris recently critiqued Stewart Lee, for example, for continuing to base his comedy on the idea that he’s part of a pioneering Left-wing vanguard. In fact, Harris writes, Lee’s liberal values are now very common.

More from this author

Should Martin Lewis be Prime Minister?

By Chris Clarke

Finally, as I’ve already touched upon, the “townie”-“mosher” split often ran along the fault-line between those who stay in the town and those who migrate elsewhere. Analysis from a few years ago cast this as a central tension in US politics, determining which way people voted in 2016. And Brexit may well have followed the same pattern.

Why were “townies” more likely to stay in the place they grew up and “moshers” to move to bigger cities? Beyond some of the socio-economic reasons, and those relating to access and expectations, there was a values dimension. Just as “townie” clothing was about adhering to the rules of contemporary fashion, the “townie” approach to life was commonly about succeeding within the framework of the place you lived. “Moshers”, by contrast, often styled themselves as misfits, for whom “every day was like Sunday”. They rejected the framework and were less tied to the place itself.

The upshot of this is that many “townies” and “moshers”, pulling in opposite directions from the very start, may have diverged more and more as the years passed. This applies to the age they had children, their experiences of the UK housing market and whether they cycle or drive.

So, what became of the “townies” and the “moshers”? They’re now in their mid-30s, and the world has changed shape since they were buying Nokia phone cases, watching Ali G, and half-listening to their parents discuss 9/11. The caps and skateboards have been retired, the gold chains and hacky-sacks decommissioned. But in a sense, I think, the confused conflict which they were engaged in lives on.

It governs how people define “success” in their own lives, and it explains why many of the polarisations which emerged after Brexit were so heavily rooted in symbolism, be it TV or food preferences. For millennials trying to make sense of all this, it’s worth taking a trip down memory lane, to the classrooms of 2000s Britain and the strange social eco-system which existed there.

Two major reports — from 2020 and 2021 — showed a major deterioration in how much the British people trust our leaders. Both analyses go back a long way — to 1986 and 1944 respectively. And, perhaps most alarmingly, both were published before Partygate and the chaos of 2022 — it seems inevitable that trust has nosedived since their release. One is reminded of the claim, by one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters, to have gone bankrupt twice: “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Cynicism about UK politics hovers above the fray — both more important and less urgent than the average passing crisis. But its role is entirely negative, reducing the public’s patience, goodwill, and readiness to “put into” the system — commodities which are vital if you want to change things in a long-term way. When disaffection reigns, the winners are the politicians who have the least integrity: those most willing to flatter the popular notion that bad people run the world.

This eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with those who genuinely lack scruples attaining high office. Hence the Prime Ministership of Boris Johnson, an abnormally unprincipled figure, who clambered the greasy pole through “boosterism” and “cakeism”, and ended up confirming the electorate’s deepest-held suspicions about the political class. Increase political trust, then, and you reverse the cycle of poor leadership. In the process you become better able to tackle the root causes of the energy crisis, the housing crisis, the refugee crisis, and countless other issues.

Yet before this is possible, we need to ask why trust is low in the first place. And for this to be meaningful, we must address two of the pat-answers often put forward. The first is that suggested by political partisans. This argues simply that the failures of the other side are to blame. In the case of the Left, the story might start with Iraq, and run through to the mishandling of Covid — taking in the lack of financial regulation pre-2008 and the Tories’ austerity and hostile environment policies. In the case of the Right, it may begin with “unchecked” freedom-of-movement and overspending in the 2000s, compounded by failure to meet the “tens of thousands” immigration target, deliver a radical enough Brexit or expel “wokery” from our institutions.

The problem with these explanations is that each pretends the failures they cite were forced through against a groundswell of popular dissent. Or that there was a perfect alternative. Or both. In a democracy such arguments rarely stack up. Many of the blows to trust listed either reflected the public mood or made sense based on the information at the time.

The second type of bromide comes from those who blame a lack of accountability. Preoccupations here usually involve the claim that our political class has become remote from those they serve. Start listening again and trust will return, the argument runs.

I have much more time for this view than for garden-variety political partisanship. Localism and devolution, in particular, are hugely important buttresses against disaffection. And serious, regular public engagement is vital. But the uncomfortable truth is that the UK has more locally-rooted politicians, more scrutiny and more opportunities for citizen participation than a few decades ago. Even before the Government announced its deal for the North East yesterday, significant powers were already devolved compared to in the past. Added to this is the additional transparency of a 24-hour news cycle and the Freedom Of Information act. And in 2016 we carried out the biggest experiment with direct democracy in history. The Westminster bubble itself is aware, to an unprecedented extent, of what the public thinks about every topic under the sun.

More from this author

Why do we pretend to be working-class?

By Chris Clarke

Some of these shifts will have stopped political cynicism from spreading as fast as it might, with politicians responding better to the public mood and corruption exposed more quickly. But the paradox remains: trust has continued to fall over the same timespan as many initiatives designed to enhance democracy or transparency have been rolled out. So, if a lack of accountability is not the answer (or is not the sole answer), then what is?

Low trust is ultimately down to social changes that are broadly positive: lower deference, a more informed electorate, a media aiming to speak truth to power, a diverse electorate (politically and demographically), the rise of Judicial Review processes to challenge decisions, the expectation that businesses publish executive pay, and the fact that politicians are cross-examined more often (via public enquiries and select committee grillings, with footage circulated on social media if they mess up). All of this points less to the absence of democracy than to a sort of hyper-democracy — a situation of relentless exposure, which decision-makers have not acclimatised to.

Meanwhile the public have learned, in the past decade or so, about MPs’ expenses, non-dom status, Partygate, phone-hacking, bankers’ bonuses, energy company profits and sexual misconduct allegations, to name but a few. These are not, for the most part, novel phenomena. But they might once have gone undiscovered. And even if they’re getting less common, all it takes is one high-profile example for us to conclude that they’re on the rise.

Suggested reading

Can Starmer break Labour's curse?

By Dominic Sandbrook

This mirrors the phenomenon dubbed Moynihan’s Law, whereby societies with stronger human rights perceive there to be more rights violations. The better the tools we have to interrogate the government — to probe, challenge or simply observe them in action — the more they will come up short. Fifty years ago, many parliamentarians only visited their constituencies a handful of times a year, for example. Yet a much larger proportion of the electorate trusted MPs’ motives.

Should we, therefore, accept low trust as a by-product of a more open society? As the price we pay for democratic vigilance? I’m not convinced. The first reason why is the one mentioned at the start: a country with rock-bottom trust, left to its own devices, will list towards populism and conspiracism. The poor conduct of those in office since 2019 is, I would say, a sign that this is already happening. Those best equipped for our hyper-democracy are the most brass-necked; those who believe that even a career-ending balls-up can be fronted out in a climate so fast-moving.

But the bigger reason why political trust matters is that it represents a social good in itself. It’s not just a metric to measure something else. A 2008 report by Demos explored this in detail, in relation to local councils. Deferring to sociologist Barbara Mistzal, it identified three benefits to trust. First, trust helps us to work with one another, creating legitimacy and toleration of shared decisions. Trust also brings people together, enabling social bonds. And finally, trust makes life certain and predictable, allowing us to form habits and routines. What’s striking today is how many of these things seem to be in short supply. Especially in a fast-changing, networked world. Especially post-Covid, with society atomised and online.

Suggested reading

How lobbyists captured the EU

By Thomas Fazi

How do you breathe trust into a political system which has so little of it? If I had the answer then I would long ago have fulfilled Boris Johnson’s childhood goal and become “World King”. So let’s look instead to someone who has become one of the most trusted figures in public life: Martin Lewis.

Lewis is apparently seen by many voters as the sort of person who would be an “ideal UK leader”. The Times reports that he is more trusted than the average bank. What has Martin Lewis, a TV presenter allegedly worth £123m, done to deserve his reputation as a man of the people? I can see why, if you were a state-schooled MP representing the town where you were born, you might feel a little aggrieved.

Yet the truth is that Lewis’s background matters less than his conduct; in my view, the trust people have in him makes a lot of sense. To begin with, Martin Lewis is studiously neutral — independent both from commercial paymasters and from obvious political leanings. People trust him just as they would trust a neutral to give them an account of a football match, over a diehard fan of either side.

Suggested reading

Boris Johnson broke Britain

By Aris Roussinos

His lack of commercial skin-in-the-game is obviously relevant to the trust people have in him. Much of the cynicism about modern politics stems from the sense that politicians are “on the take”. There have unfortunately been many recent examples to corroborate this — the Cameron-Greensill scandal, for instance — and while I suspect these are not as representative as many think, they fuel the idea of vested interests.

But Martin Lewis’s political neutrality is, if anything, more relevant. A big mistake made by some contemporary politicians — driven, I think, by the first of the two pat-answers for low trust described earlier — is to believe they will enhance their trust by showing how much they despise the other side. Recent ONS data shows how flawed this is, with the population even less inclined to trust “the political parties” than they are to trust “parliament” or “the government”. Complete political neutrality is obviously a non-option for a party leader or minister. But double standards or unnecessary partisanship clearly harms trust.

The other key reason for the high trust in Martin Lewis is based on his role as an educator. He unpacks financial systems and products, so that ordinary people can make decisions for themselves — navigating an increasingly complex world. Lewis’s approach here assumes maximum intelligence and minimum information on behalf of his audience. It does not browbeat; rather, it encourages people to understand both the bigger picture and the specific choices and trade-offs available to them.

Suggested reading

The American experiment has just begun

By Anton Jäger

This role tends not to sit within the average politician’s wheelhouse — the remit being to campaign rather than explain. And there is a fear, too, among decision-makers, of appearing to patronise. But perhaps the biggest way for our leaders to regain our trust is to provide context more regularly and show their workings more willingly.

Can you get the toothpaste back into the tube, when it comes to political trust? If my diagnosis is correct — and cynicism is partly due to a societal opening-up — then this might be harder than it looks. Yet there are reasons for optimism. For one thing, both our main parties now appear to be led by non-populists. For another, tracker polling of public confidence in different professions shows trust rising in many; it is not inevitable that the lines go down.

For UK politicians to rejuvenate, then, they perhaps need to see the decline in trust less as a blip to be reversed than as a phase to be moved through. Like a young person coming of age, and realising that their parents have feet of clay, the scales have — over recent decades — fallen from the eyes of the electorate. This has been exacerbated by several years of crisis, but we are at least now in a position where neither Labour nor the Tories are led by demagogues. As we enter a new year, the politicians most likely to earn back trust will be those who continue this break with populism, in the face of massive challenges. They must level with those they serve, and seek an adult relationship.

To understand why, it’s worth reading a paper by the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) from earlier this year, written by former YouGov president Peter Kellner. The report breaks the population into four subsets.

There are two “consistent” groups: those who are middle-class by occupation and say they are middle-class (26% of the population) and those who are working-class “on paper” and say they are working-class (31%). And there are two “crossover” groups: those in middle-class jobs who say they are working-class (31%) and those in working-class professions who say they are middle-class (12%).

The dynamic between the “crossover” groups speaks to some of the most interesting elements of post-war politics. Underlying it is an abiding non-sequitur — thanks to both segments believing themselves to be a member of the opposite class. Hence, these groups include some of politics’ most familiar stock characters, from the self-hating liberal to the bootstraps Tory, via the beret-wearing student and White Van Man.

Much commentary has been spent analysing the last of the four tribes — those who are working-class “on paper” but don’t identify as such. Described as “blue collar aspirational”, this upwardly mobile group were Tony Blair’s target market. Having been successfully courted by Margaret Thatcher, they were won back by New Labour in 1997, drifting away again after 2010. The progressive need to speak to these voters is, Blair says, “entirely familiar”. And he’s right that parts of the labour movement struggle to do this.

Yet less attention is paid to the other “crossover” group. Dubbed “white collar progressives” in the report, this section of society embodies the reverse of blue-collar aspiration. They are middle-class in professional terms but see themselves as working-class, and are the joint largest group.

This cohort has, I suspect, grown significantly in recent years — as both white-collar jobs and progressive values have become more common. It seems highly unlikely that they would have outnumbered blue-collar aspirationals five-to-two in the Eighties, as they do now. Peter Kellner himself conducted the same polling exercise in 2014, and even then there were fewer white-collar progressives. Since then, around a fifth of the ABC1 population seems to have switched to a working-class identity. Even among those earning over £62,000, half now say they’re working-class, according to the most recent poll.

The politics of Kellner’s four segments goes some way to explaining this discrepancy. White-collar progressives are the most straightforwardly Left-wing — the only grouping which backed Labour in 2019. They represent, in this respect, a set of progressive values which is on the rise in developed nations — something which drives, you could argue, their identification with those who have less.

Suggested reading

Can Starmer break Labour's curse?

By Dominic Sandbrook

Problem solved? Well yes, a bit. But although political leaning may explain why white-collar progressives vote “against their interests”, it doesn’t tell us why they see themselves as working-class. This matters, I think, and we’ll come onto why shortly.

The fact that so many do misidentify as working-class is frequently a source of ridicule, and this is often well-deserved. In his 2014 analysis, Kellner likened them to Dave Spart, Private Eye’s satire of a middle-class radical. The parody Twitter account Corbyn Superfan was Spart’s digital descendent: the privately educated son of a Berkshire executive, Corbyn Superfan was avowedly working-class and expected that his hardship would be alleviated under “Jez”.

We tend to treat white collar progressives — unlike the aspirational working-classes — as a nuisance more than a phenomenon, and rarely take them seriously. But look at the data and it quickly becomes clear that they’re not all hipsters and revolutionaries.

Do white-collar progressives wish simply to “descend” the social rungs — to perform aspiration in reverse? Do they want to get off the property ladder, as working-class Thatcherites aimed to buy their council houses and get onto it? This is the implication, if you invert the idea that a working-class person identifying as middle-class is evidence of “aspiration”.

There are, of course, some methodological factors we cannot ignore: the major role which our parents’ social class plays in how we identify, and the limitations of the ABC1/C2DE grading system in a service-based economy, which means that many non-manual jobs carry low pay or low status. But the blue-collar aspirational group are also prey to some of these caveats, and have remained smaller and more stable. So it seems there must be wider elements at play.

My own theory is that three factors explain the rise of reverse aspiration: a society which is increasingly egalitarian, an economy which is unequal, and a culture which is individualistic. Let’s begin with the first. Many of the assumptions which govern our politics and society are broadly egalitarian. All the main parties acknowledge the notion of equality, and the “on your bike” mantras of Thatcherism are largely unsayable — as Liz Truss can testify.

Different political strains apply this in conflicting ways, attacking different “elites”. The Right claim to speak for those who are truly self-made, while the Left wish to champion those who have overcome genuine oppression and hardship. But neither would be keen to admit to being born with a silver spoon, and both purport to “punch up”.

Suggested reading

In defence of class

By Justin Webb

Our political ethos, then, prizes humble beginnings, encounters with adversity and connection to the lives of ordinary people. This is so ubiquitous that it’s only when you read a Penguin Classic novel — when a Victorian character hides their “low” birth, or experiences the public shame of losing their fortune — that you remember it was not ever thus. Of course, today’s egalitarian norms are unquestionably a good thing. But they make people more likely to disguise their advantages, and to focus on the aspects of their identity which are untainted by privilege.

The second factor is economic. Despite the egalitarian mores described above, the UK economy is in fact — like many developed nations — deeply unequal and getting more so. This contradiction reflects the phenomenon of the past 70 years, whereby the Left have won cultural battles but lost economic ones. You’re more likely to hear a Geordie accent reading the news, but your economic prospects if you’re from the North-East are comparatively worse. An unequal economy leads to working-class identification, I think, because the human tendency is often to look upwards for comparisons rather than down. The presence among us of people with vast riches make us all feel poorer.

An economically unequal society also means, over time, that wealth — particularly housing wealth, often thanks to inheritance — begins to matter more than income. This compounds the importance of our parents’ social class, as a determinant of identity. Let’s take a working-class-born 30-something in a well-paid job. If this person cannot afford a property inside the M25 despite a good salary, they’ll probably feel more closely wedded to their upbringing — especially if they watch middle-class-born contemporaries gifted money from parents to buy a house.

The final factor is our individualistic culture. A study from a few years ago, for example, found that “language in American books has become increasingly focused on the self and uniqueness in the decades since 1960”. Each person, it seems, wants to feel that they have a distinctive merit and story of their own. This has surely accelerated in the age of social media, and nor is it necessarily a bad thing. A focus on the innate value of the individual can lead away from nativism, just as it can open the door to narcissism.

But it means that we put a greater focus on our own personal narratives. And these narratives usually need a hurdle or two to overcome, in order to carry meaning. Otherwise, you’re starting the book at the end. One effect of individualism, therefore, is that you get large numbers of embarrassed meritocrats, who feel they need to construct a reality in which they’re swimming against the tide.

Suggested reading

The return of class war

By Malcom Kyeyune

Given the deterministic quality of the above, one could be forgiven for asking: does any of it matter? But for those looking to advance fairness and equality, I believe it does. Part of the reason why concerns the political debate itself. Many elements of our modern culture war boil down, on both Left and Right, to arguments around who is truly privileged, who is pretending to be and who has the right to decide. These can never be resolved without a full audit of each person’s “lived experience”. But they cause a massive distraction and leave all parties feeling misunderstood.

The other aspect is particularly important for progressive politics. Policy-making gets a lot harder, from a Left-liberal perspective, if large numbers of society’s “haves” believe they are its “have nots”. The Corbyn project’s focus on free higher education was a good example of where this leads — to initiatives which pose as egalitarian victories, while in effect helping those who are already doing well.

During the Eighties and Nineties, political arguments on the Left were often about the need to understand aspiration. Maybe, two decades into a new century, we need to start thinking about how we handle its opposite.