And my God it’s fun to watch. Though the polka dot dresses, Twilight Teaser lipsticks, and boil-in-the-bag cod mornays have survived in this second season, the dead wood of Cooper’s original novel — in which too many pages are spent on the ins and outs of TV production meetings, and not in a good way  —  has been radically pruned. What is left is a series of wildly Dionysian set pieces and no hangover. Copious shagging is mandatory, though rarely between husbands and wives. Fags are smoked constantly. Everyone is half cut from 10 in the morning, washing down dry martinis and bottles of Krug with glorious insouciance. Beautiful people are enthusiastically desired by members of the opposite sex; men rut with women half their age, and vice versa. There’s even the odd bit of light-hearted sexual assault, Eighties-style, dealt with afterwards only by an abject apology.  The tango music accompanying the titles sets the tone, overlaid with operatic warbling. Its composers have told BBC Music Magazine their aim was to create the “musical version of an orgasm”.

When I first heard that Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles were being dramatized for a new audience, it seemed inconceivable that such enthusiastically heteronormative novels could survive 21st-century focus groups. But by some miracle, the politically incorrect attitudes expressed in the books have arrived on screen largely intact. And there is no heavy-handed prompting of the audience to rouse their disapproval, either. Though there is — of course — a degree of distancing camp, it is judicially applied, and doesn’t overwhelm the production. The viewer is treated as an adult with a functioning brain, which only adds to the nostalgia.

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Another unfashionable element is the naked classism, transferred straightforwardly from the books. Cooper’s fictional world is divided up into three kinds of people: sympathetic ones who know their place; ghastly upstarts who don’t; and unreadable foreigners who can provide a love interest. In Rivals, the former group includes the arrogant aristocrat Rupert Campbell-Black; the upper-middle class romantic novelist Lizzie Vereker (a stand in for Cooper herself); and working-class Freddie Jones, a self-made Essex millionaire played by Danny Dyer. It also includes various pasty-faced Gloucestershire yokels, milling anonymously about the grounds of stately homes and looking suitably gormless.

Ghastly upstarts include Freddie’s wife, Valerie, whose gauche attempts to fit in with the Cotswolds smart set make her a laughing-stock; and the book’s chippy villain, TV mogul Tony Baddingham, a former grammar schoolboy “brought up behind net curtains in a boring semi in the suburbs of Cheltenham”, according to the book. As Freddie hissed at Tony in the first series: “I hate snobs, Tony, and you’re the worst kind there is — the kind that’s forgotten where he came from.” Classless foreigners include the American Cameron Cook and the Irish couple Declan and Maud O’Hara, though these are imagined in terms of national stereotypes instead (respectively: androgynous ballbreaker and emotionally volatile drunkards).

Coincidentally, a day after the second series of Rivals launched, the Guardian published the results of a new class survey. Over a third of British people say they have changed social class since childhood, with those self-identifying as upper and upper-middles more likely to claim they are members of several classes as once. For these people, researchers have coined the term “polyclass”. Presumably Cooper, who died in 2025, would have been as scathing about the idea of polyclasses as she would have been about idea of polyamory, preferring the sort of marital infidelity that doesn’t require earnest discussion beforehand. Indeed, in 1979 she wrote an entertaining though somewhat sociologically unreliable book touching on both topics. It was called Class: A View From Middle England. It stayed on the bestseller list for 20 weeks. 

Class presents the reader with several caricatural families, each supposedly occupying a distinct stratum of English life. At the top there is the Hon. Harry Stow-Crat, formerly of Eton and the Coldstream guards, and his wife Caroline. They “love their dogs more than each other” — for upper-class marriages are made for status not romance — and Harry has numerous children “both regularly and irregularly conceived”. Then there are the upper-middles, Gideon and Serena Upward: “the most intelligent and highly educated of all the classes, and therefore the silliest and the most receptive to every new trend.” They went to minor public schools but now read the Guardian, are worried about the environment, and try to share domestic duties between them. Their children are called Zacharias and Thalia.

Lower down, there are the middle-middles (Howard and Eileen Weybrige, Surrey conservatives who haunt the golf club and the gardening center) and lower-middles (Bryan and Jen Teale, using “refained” accents, net curtains, and privet hedges to keep away the working classes just beneath them). Cooper’s own crashing snobbery gets more strident as she intrepidly descends the social scale and away from her own kind, culminating in her callous depiction of the lowest echelon: the people she calls the Definitely-Disgustings, who seem to be forerunners of Hillary Cinton’s Deplorables. They do manual labor and domestic work, stuff their kids’ faces full of sweets, watch too much telly, and mix socially only with members of their own vast families. She later claimed, very unconvincingly, that she chose the name only because of the working-class habit of calling everything it didn’t like “Disgusting! Definitely”.

But even with a politer name for the proles, it is impossible to imagine a book like Class succeeding nowadays. Class warfare goes in all directions, but there always was something distinctly unsporting in the fact that, in the Seventies and Eighties, the upper-middle Pandoras and Jagos who ran publishing and broadcasting could viciously caricature the working classes in books and on screen, while the latter group lacked the cultural resources and connections to fight back. Made uncomfortably aware of this disparity, today’s Pandoras and Jagos have responded, not by relinquishing much of their cultural grip on the discourse, but by moving instead towards warmly sentimental depictions of working-class people — authentic, Northern, gritty, jocular, and so on. A huge group with many different stories is now largely reduced to a reassuringly down-to-earth voiceover during a teabag advert.

Permissible vituperation, meanwhile, has shifted towards the aristos just above the upper-middles on the ladder. And so toffs have become synonymous in popular fiction with being selfish and grasping, and also — to compress a devastating character assassination into a single phrase — “Right-wing”. Whenever some fox-hunting posho appears in a BBC drama, there is a strong chance he will turn out to be the show’s evil antagonist. It’s ironic when you consider that 32% of the corporation’s highest earners went to private schools.

Social climbing has also changed since the Seventies. In Class, the worst culprits are the “Nouveau-Richards”, prone to being rude to domestics and asking loudly “whether gold plate will spoil in the dish-washer”. Rivals’ Valerie Jones is another such grotesque parvenu. In old sitcoms, lower-middles used to be depicted as frightful social climbers, since the implication was that they were working-class, but giving themselves fake airs and graces. Their famous archetype was Hyacinth Bouquet in Keeping Up Appearances. 

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In the present, there is less need for the lower-middles to be seen to escape their roots, because working-class identity is positively desirable — or at least, the sentimentalized version of it. This has been going on for a while: indeed, arguably it started in the Seventies, when there was a short phase of thinking “working class is beautiful”, according to Cooper. She observes that the timing of this trend explains why Prince Charles sounds just like his mother but Prince Andrew sounds more common.

But to properly blend in with the all-powerful upper-middles these days, it’s all about the morals. You can’t be seen to be obstreperous or sharp-elbowed like Valerie, and must be kind and empathic to the oppressed instead. Where there used to be a crocheted cover on the loo roll, there now should be unbleached bamboo toilet paper; where a gay son used to be a disgraceful secret, you should now throw him a coming-out party. And where pressuring your offspring to do well at school used to be a reliable route up the ladder, it’s now the private diagnosis of mental disorder that’s really chic. Even in 1979, Cooper was noticing this emerging trend, observing that “pediatricians are coining it in testing middle-class children because they aren’t coming top of the class”.

Thankfully, she kept this distinctly modern sounding observation out of Rivals; and the program-makers didn’t break the spell either. To watch this series is to bathe in a world where the 21st Century is blissfully absent. Class war is out in the open, with no covert operations or feigned surrender. Competition between individuals is pursued openly and energetically, not passive-aggressively behind a kind face. Heated arguments about language are not about pronouns, but concern “swimming costume” over “bathing suit” or “teacher” over “schoolmistress”. The only mental disorders come from aristocratic inbreeding. The only kind of surrogate mother anyone has ever heard of is a nanny. Do yourself a favor and open some booze, have a cheeky fag, and take a holiday to the sexy, sybaritic Eighties — whether or not you get a happy ending there, you’ll return feeling strangely rejuvenated. 

On the sense side, there is Rob Henderson’s Troubled: the story of the author’s turbulent childhood in America’s foster care system. Removed from a drug-addicted, criminally neglectful mother, Henderson ultimately escapes the delinquency to which many of his peers succumb, to become a highly educated member of the media class. On the sensibility side, there is Molly Roden Winter’s More — in which the author, a middle-aged writer and musician who lives in upscale Brooklyn, ruminates about the ups and downs (and ins and outs) of her open marriage.

More, which was released last month, was fortuitously timed — or, possibly, the catalyst — for a surge of public interest in polyamory. The question of what form romantic and sexual commitment should take, or if it should be taken at all, has been visited and revisited countless times through the years, often in rhythm with evolving questions about how women should live, and love. Freely, perhaps — but how so? And at what cost?

The polyamory discourse, including Roden Winter’s memoir, circles these questions in much the same way Austen’s Regency-era heroines do. When Elinor Dashwood cautions her younger sister that what is pleasurable and what is proper are not always one and the same, Marianne protests that of course they are: “for we always know when we are acting wrong, and with such a conviction I could have had no pleasure.” This vaguely hedonistic notion — that if it feels good, it must be good — is echoed in the conviction of contemporary polyamorists that having multiple partners is the path to not just sexual satisfaction but a more enlightened state of being: a commitment “to the journey of the truth of my own soul”, to quote one polycule participant from a much-discussed article in The Cut. One imagines these 30-something Brooklynites confronting some poor, monogamous schmuck with the same earnest indignation that Marianne aims at her stoic sister: “Always resignation and acceptance. Always prudence and honour and duty. Elinor, where is your heart?”

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If 17-year-old Marianne Dashwood had lived in contemporary Brooklyn instead of late 18th-century England, perhaps her marriage to the older, honourable Colonel Brandon would have seemed like less of a compromise: perhaps she would have ended up like the heroine of More, bed-hopping her way across the boroughs in middle age, wondering why, if this is the path to self-actualisation, she feels so damned miserable all the time. “This is supposed to be about my fun, my pleasure, my freedom,” Molly laments, after a partner stealthily removes his condom and then ghosts her immediately after sex. “How have I arrived at this point?”

More may read like a portrait of a life ruled by sensibility in the Austenite sense, but this looks very different on a frustrated mom in her forties than it does on a flighty teenager — especially given that the sensibility in this case isn’t actually the author’s, but instead belongs to her husband, Stewart, who both wants to sleep with other women and gets off on the idea of his wife schtupping other men. As other reviewers have noted, the idea of More as a memoir of sexual fulfilment à la Eat, Pray, Love is belied by Molly’s obvious unhappiness in her open marriage, which she agrees to more out of duty than desire. Polyamory is a pile of lemons from which she relentlessly makes pitcher after pitcher of barely palatable lemonade. She doesn’t want this life so much as she wants to be the kind of person who wants it, which turns out about as well as you’d expect it to. “I feel like shit,” she eventually tells her therapist. “I thought freedom was supposed to be fun.”

Meanwhile, Henderson’s Trouble puts in a good word for sense, rather than pure sensibility. His story is one of an unruly youth for whom prudence, honour, and duty were not just social graces but a path to a better life. The irony, as Henderson notes, is that he had to join the military to get the structure and stability he needed; meanwhile, people who’ve benefited from these things all their lives tend to performatively dismiss their importance.

The current vogue for polyamory is a prime example of what Henderson has termed “luxury beliefs”: the phenomenon whereby wealthy, educated progressives talk a big game in favour of prison abolition or permissive sexual norms to signal their political bona fides, safe in the knowledge that they’ll never bear the costs of the ideas they promote. His classmates at Yale, for instance, would privately acknowledge that they themselves planned to get married, have kids, and practice monogamy — but only after loudly decrying the practice as old-fashioned, outdated, and unnecessary. “We now live in a culture where affluent, educated, and well-connected people validate and affirm the behaviours, decisions, and attitudes of marginalised and deprived kids that they would never accept for themselves or their own children,” he writes.

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Prior to writing his book, Henderson was best known for his concept of luxury beliefs, and his tart critiques of America’s ruling class — from a guy who fought his way into their spaces but nevertheless dissents from their orthodoxies — have made him a thorn in the side of those who might have been otherwise sympathetic to him on the basis of identity alone. It’s not unusual to see progressives denouncing Henderson as the purveyor of a particularly noxious brand of old-school, bootstraps conservatism, while ignoring the fact that he is, by any definition, a marginalised person who has succeeded against enormous odds.

By some coincidence of the seasonal publishing schedule, Henderson’s memoir has ended up being not just an ideological counterpart to Roden Winter’s but a competitor in the same genre, which makes for an interesting exercise in the revealed preferences of the publishing community and readers alike. Roden Winter, who had virtually no public presence before More made her an overnight sensation, has been criss-crossing the country on a multi-city book tour while her memoir climbs the New York Times bestseller list. Henderson, who has a six-figure following on X, tens of thousands of Substack subscribers, and an extensive publication history including bylines in the New York Times itself, reportedly approached multiple bookstores about hosting an event, only to be rebuffed.

Henderson describes this as political snobbery, pure and simple: “If you grow up poor and aren’t willing to pledge fealty to the right causes, these places don’t want you. If you grew up poor, remake your fortunes, and then speak truthfully about the factors that fuel success (hard work, determination, sacrifice) rather than the factors elites speak about (luck, systemic forces, privilege), then these places don’t want you,” he wrote, before drawing a pointed comparison between himself and Roden Winter. “Maybe if I were a polyamorous upper-middle-class author with 94 followers and wrote a memoir of having an open marriage I would have better luck. Right background, check; right boxes, check.”

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But having read both books, I wonder if Henderson’s snubbing is a matter of pedigree and politics, or if it’s down to something more basic — the same thing that makes Marianne’s Sense and Sensibility storyline so much more exciting and compelling than her sister’s. Because in many ways, Trouble and More are meditations on the same issue, just from different angles and through different lenses. Both books consider the implications of a belief system which argues, among other things, that a fully actualised life must be lived in defiance of the traditional social strictures that sometimes place honour and duty above desire and passion. Henderson points to the benefits of climbing into that box, while Roden Winter disconsolately kicks at its confines. But they’re still talking about the same structure, the same expectations, and the same culture that suggests we stop at nothing to achieve authenticity, no matter the destabilising effects of that journey on everyone else.

On one hand, the freedom to love with wild abandon is also the freedom to make a trainwreck of your life; on the other, the rules that seek to protect us from harm and heartbreak can easily turn into a cage of decorum. This tension, between the yearnings of sensibility and the principles of sense, is not easily resolved; nor is the question of what sexually liberated women want, and whether what we want is good for us, which is why we continue to revisit it in memoir and novels, dramas and documentaries, political polemics and religious sermons. And yet everyone who tackles such tensions, from Jane Austen to Rob Henderson to Molly Roden Winter, tends to reach the same conclusion — or at least, to point their audience toward it. More may style itself as a memoir of self-discovery, and its author may even believe that it is, but those who read it are unlikely to conclude that an open marriage is the key to personal growth — or a good idea in general.

And what of Henderson’s book? It’s more straightforward, more prescriptive, and yes, more conservative, but its weakness is not in its message. It’s that the responsibility and restraint he advocates make a good soldier, a good student, and a good man — but not, as it turns out, a good story. Troubled lacks the shamelessness, the self-evisceration, the sordid drama that is the hallmark of so many compelling memoirs — and that More offers up in spades. Henderson’s trauma is in his past, and he holds both it and his audience at a remove; his memoir reads more like a TED talk than a diary entry.

Roden-Winter, on the other hand, straps her audience into the passenger seat of her life and then pilots the whole thing over a cliff, naked, screaming all the way down. And given the choice between two stories that beg more or less the same moral conclusions, of course people are going to want the one where someone gets to third base in a karaoke bar.

Rob Henderson will be discussing his new book at the UnHerd Club on 12 March. Book tickets here.

AI’s problems start at the top. Unlike the internet, which spawned a number of independent companies (including Google and Microsoft), AI seems to be controlled by existing tech giants, which are investing heavily in these new firms. ARM, for instance, the British-based chip designer whose IPO last week set Wall Street aflutter, is garnering huge investments from other Big Tech firms, including Nvidia, Intel, AMD and Apple. Elsewhere, Open AI’s largest investor is Microsoft, while DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014.

This pattern of collaboration between giants and upstarts suggests that the next tech revolution seems poised to empower the existing hierarchy. It also threatens the prospects of the classes below. Big Tech and venture capital executives such as Reid Hoffman promise that AI will serve the cause of “elevating humanity”, despite potentially wiping out hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide. Indeed, according to McKinsey, at least 12 million Americans will be forced to find new work by 2030. In other words, AI looks destined to warp our class structure in a similar way to feudalism, turning what has been a collection of Roman citizens into serfs.

But is this the entire story? Historically, humans have performed analytical tasks manually. They may have created tools, such as spreadsheets and surveys, to help them. But the tasks of optimising businesses have largely lain in the hands of human analysts who spend their days collecting data on the performance of businesses and markets. In the last phase of technological development, jobs for these “symbolic analysts” exploded: in the US, the number of workers in occupations requiring average to above-average education, training and experience increased from 49 million in 1980 to 83 million in 2015. Yet these tasks are now running into a buzzsaw with AI, whose underlying premise is that machines can learn to detect patterns and changes better than human beings.

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In his bestselling book AI Superpowers, Kai Fu Lee, a former Google and Microsoft boss who now runs one of the world’s most prolific AI venture funds, proposed a two-dimensional view of the future of work. His key thesis: that the social nature of a job and the discretionary nature of a job will be the key factors underlying AI’s impact. If, for instance, a job is highly formulaic and has few discretionary decisions, and people perform their tasks with little social interaction, AI is likely to displace it. So, while the CEO of an insurance company might be safe from being displaced by AI, one of his analysts is not.

And this is where the nuance is often lost. According to the US Labor Department, AI and automation could impact as many as many as 90 million American workers, with warehouse workers among the most prominent losers. What will really alter class relations, however, is the impact on more professional jobs. They have been the ascendent class for the last two generations, growing at an average annual rate of 2.2% since 2001 — well above the 0.4% annual rise for total employment. But whereas the computer revolution was a boon to those working as programmers and market researchers, AI does the job for them, often with more speed and accuracy. As Rony Abovitz, one of the pioneers of virtual reality and AI, has observed: “It’s the end of the white-collar knowledge work.”

In such a world, it is not hard to envisage a new kind of class conflict that extends beyond the traditional Marxist conflict between low-wage workers and better-educated owners. More than 82% of millennials fear AI will reduce their pay, and they are right to be worried. “We may be at the peak of the need for knowledge workers,” Atif Rafiq, a former chief digital officer at McDonald’s and Volvo, recently warned. “We just need fewer people to do the same thing.” As if to illustrate his point, tech firms such as Meta and Lyft have already announced major cutbacks in their white-collar workforce, while IBM has paused hiring to assess how many mid-level jobs can be replaced by AI.

What this means more broadly isn’t tricky to discern: a once-rising class that often embraced the oligarchy’s ideas now faces the same kind of marginalisation experienced by less-educated workers for generations. And it is not unreasonable to conclude this could eventually divide the current political alliance between progressively minded professionals and the AI-enhanced elite. Perhaps the most visible example of this is the writers and actors strike — drawn from a class traditionally aligned with the oligarchs — currently underway in America, where AI threatens to make the manufacturing of entertainment largely redundant.

Indeed, tech executives are already planning for the emergence of a vast, unproductive class made largely redundant by AI and robotics. After interviewing 147 digital company founders, the technology journalist Gregory Ferenstein has concluded that an “increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people”, while everyone else comes to rely on gig work and government aid. This is reflected in support for universal basic income by a number of leading tech oligarchs — Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick (former head of Uber), and AI guru Sam Altman (CEO of Open AI).

Of course, many might wonder what is wrong with this. Already, roughly half of all Americans support the idea of a guaranteed basic income of about $2,000 a month if robots put them out of work. UBI enjoys even stronger support in most European countries, particularly among younger people. Further east, the popular Japanese Marxist philosopher Kohei Sato sees re-distribution as a way to as achieve the green goals of “degrowth” and “net zero” without devastating the masses.

Yet if history is our guide, such intellectual circles are surely plagued by a certain naiveté. In every stage of capitalism, the ruling class has offered promises of welfare and support. And in every stage of capitalism, they have only done so with the intention of strengthening their own position.

What is different this time, though, is that there is one class of worker who remains capable of opposing this neo-feudal structure: those with hands-on yet skilled jobs, such as the engineers refusing to work at Intel’s new semiconductor facility in Ohio. After all, even the infrastructure for AI requires tactile skills, and, as a result, technically capable blue-collar workers still have leverage and can shut down the whole infrastructure. This same class of skilled artisans were at the vanguard of the rise of democratic capitalism. Two centuries later, they may be our best hope for resisting a very different revolution.

But then, at one point through our winter in this toxic swill, our bathroom ceiling caved in. The cause was wonderfully disgusting. The upstairs toilet’s “out” pipe (that’s the one bearing the shit) had been leaking into our ceiling for some interminable length of time. The waste (the shit) had then slowly seeped into the plaster and terracotta above until it became structurally unsound. One day in January, a great yawning gash opened up, and the next it fell in. It then took our landlord around two weeks to clean and repair this mess, which meant washing and bathing surrounded by the debris: shit-saturated shards of plaster and terracotta. We gave our notice in those soiled days and moved out about a month later.

It was a dispiriting exit. But even in the moment, being shat upon from a great height spoke more effectively than any mountainous graph to what is unjust about the current housing crisis. People (especially young people) live in very poor conditions, kept there by private landlords who suffer from near-criminal levels of apathy, for which we are expected to pay handsomely (my annual rent in the shit-flat was around 40% of the London Living Wage at the time — just under £10k). But the problem is, since everyone has a similar story, you’ve probably already heard it, if not lived it.

The political gravity of this situation lies not in its specifics, though, but in its generalities. Over the past week, in its house journals and attendant think tanks, the Conservative Party’s leading intellectuals have been puzzling over the fact that young people hate them. And they intimate that this has something to do with housing. They have finally listened to the housing scientists, with their heavy dossiers of facts and figures. A narrative has been acknowledged: the privatisation of state housing, followed by the transformation of property into a financial asset, has made housing and especially renting cripplingly expensive. This is far too late to redress or ameliorate — the best it can become is a historical lesson. The question that the Tories should be asking is a deeper and more threatening one. What is housing inequality doing to the political psychology of those living through it? What has it already done to us?

My answer is look to the language; look at the language we use for those we blame. Landlords — parasitic, indolent, unscrupulous landlords. In our oaths and curses, we reduce property owners to an existence of pure economic extractionism. Even landlords don’t want to be called landlords anymore. At the National Landlord Investment Show, a kind of bizarre lettings TUC, they threw around some alternatives — “Property investor”? “Accommodation provider”? — designed to help them slip back into anodyne anonymity. This cultural slander, found at all levels of output, from TikTok to acclaimed non-fiction, is the linguistic wing of something more profound. It is the first, experimental stirring of something rather anachronistic in our hyper-political age: social, tribal solidarity. Something a bit like class consciousness.

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This isn’t class understood in the cod-Marxist sense, with society sliced like a layer cake between worker, owner and aristocrat. Such arbitrary categories have long been discarded. Instead, as E.P Thompson wrote in The Making of the English Working Class, class is something that “happens”. And it happens when “some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs”. Class does not pre-exist, but is spun in the language people live and create.

Since the turn of the millennium, the number of private renters has doubled to 11 million people. And this growth has been driven by the young. A third of those aged between 35 and 45 rent privately, as opposed to a tenth in 1997, a proportion which rises the younger you are. And many of those not renting are living with parents, which would make private renting their direct alternative. In other words, across income levels, private renting has become as near to an economic universality as one can find in our atomised society. But most important: under present trends, this is never going to change. High marginal tax rates, low wages and rising house prices mean that those who do not receive a large windfall from generous or dead family members will never buy a house. They will retire with a landlord, paying the bulk of their salary and perhaps their pension to a people they have spent their adult life despising. They who “love to reap where they never sowed” as Marx had it.

So much writing about our housing situation is self-pityingly childish, whinging over intrusive mezzanines and landlords’ disastrous DIY. It curries little favour with the older generation it is directed towards. But, left unchecked, the weight of sentiment is symptomatic of a more powerful force — the sense of existing in an unfair productive relationship. Like all great political vibes, it has the benefit of being both felt and true. And most transformative processes in British history have been the product of such a concoction, a wrong that can be mathematically proven and then communicably sketched.

Because the popular timeline of our past is one of political nightmares, stalked by political ghouls and monsters who provide a horror mask for our deeper concerns. Recently, our darkest dreams have been peopled by crooked Luxembourgian Eurocrats. Before that, we relocked our doors and windows, woken by the march of donkey-jacketed trade unionists. But reach back into the distant interwar period and a dynamic more like our own emerges. Between the pause of one world war and resumption of the next, Britain was learning to think of itself as a “democracy” for the first time. And in this age of new and nervous egalitarianism, two of the most repellent economic caricatures in popular culture were socially-useless mountebanks: the profiteer and the rentier. Like landlords in our housing crisis, both were linked to moments of social distress which they had somehow turned to their advantage.

John Maynard Keynes was obsessed with this plutocratic individual who in his conception lived off the national debt, furnishing his Depression with public money. And the cheater, the social swindler, was the constant villain of the era’s more politicised fiction. He crops up in the otherwise sunny books of J.B Priestley, but particularly in the works of A.J. Cronin, the novelist who was most representative of the Thirties mood. (His 1937 novel The Citadel is credited by some with establishing the emotional need for an NHS.) But in his earlier book The Stars Look Down, a contest is established between an autodidactic Labour MP and his double, a profiteer-chancer who avoids war service and cheats his way into arms-trading and factory-ownership through underhand business dealings.

It was not long before such evocations reached the lips of politicians themselves. In Clement Atlee’s 1945 election broadcast, he established his opposition to those who benefitted from “private enterprise, private profit and private interests”, and who demanded “more rent, interest and profit”. The dichotomy was clearly intended to appeal to a public already aware of the difference between its productive many and its exploitative few. That Labour government was the most ambitious reforming government of the century, and brought about the greatest programme of house-building and home-improvement the country had ever seen. The Conservative government that followed only imitated and expanded upon it.

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The strange death of Jeremy Clarkson's England

By Nicholas Harris

Language tracks the governing ideology of its day. After Thatcherism brought a halt to anything like the forward march of labour, Britain developed converse cultural neuroses. We gnashed at scroungers and skivers; we valorised the entrepreneur. As William Davies recently described, the working-class hero devolved from the punk, the disruptor or the organiser (Arthur Scargill), towards something more like the tamed yob, the capitalist-enthusiast (Chris Evans, Keith Allen). Britain, though, is more than capable of producing a culture that punches up. Think how harshly the word “banker” was hissed in the immediate post-2008 reconciliation. But despite the best efforts of the Occupy movement, bankers were fortified in their City towers, too lofty to organise against. Landlords, by contrast, inhabit a space much closer to home — our homes.

Today, millennials are approaching a sort of maturity. But in an arc that frustrates analysts of such matters, they stubbornly refuse to mature politically and shift Right-wards. Not only this — they are leaning markedly to the Left, especially on economic issues. Reared on a lifetime of economic vulnerability, of course they find redistribution appealing and resent the predatory potential of private ownership. Over the grim interwar, it took decades for this yearning to consummate itself. At the next election, millennials will predominate in the majority of constituencies. All those years of removal vans and disconcerting stains, of lost deposits and scratching mice, may finally find their voice.

Ten years on, the West is undergoing a furious period of labour militancy. Farmers are protesting in the Netherlands, in Germany, and in France. Rail workers are threatening the US economy with shutdowns over pay increases and a lack of paid sick leave. In Canada, truckers shut down several border crossings and occupied Ottawa for the better part of a month. British nurses and Canadian teachers are on the verge of mass walk-outs. In France, nuclear industry workers threaten strike action, while a strike among refinery workers earlier this year led to acute fuel shortages, with hour-long queues and rationing at petrol stations.

This wave of militancy displays no signs of cresting soon. If anything, given the general economic situation, things are likely to get worse: inflation is exploding, energy is in short supply, and the cost of living is rising. Workers will get angrier, and they have the ability to make their anger felt in painful ways.

Intriguingly, this revival of labour militancy has done nothing to alter the fortunes of the radical or populist Left. It has only revealed that the rift between them and the working class across the West has become more or less permanent. Six years after Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn saw their stock soar, legitimate worker anger often finds itself being dismissed as a tool of the “far-Right”, and labour militancy is feared and despised.

It’s easy to laugh at the Left in this situation — but its arc from enthusiasm to horror in the face of actual protests and labour struggles out in the street is fairly rational. The Left’s fear speaks to one of our era’s central political conflicts: a growing consciousness among working people that the biggest dividing line runs between the people employed in the “real” economy and those working in the “virtual” one.

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Over the last decade, a number of terms have been invented to describe this divide, from “Professional Managerial Class” to “the email caste”. None of these labels are perfect, but their growing popularity speaks to the fact that more and more people can now see that there really is a conflict at play here. The man driving a truck or a tractor and the revolutionary working for a billionaire-backed NGO are not only not natural allies, but their different roles in the economy increasingly make them real enemies.

It is no surprise that farmers end up on this struggle’s frontline. One absurd illustration of the deep contradictions in our debt-laden, de-industrialised Western economies can be seen — where else? — on Twitter and TikTok, where you can watch clips of young, radical climate protesters who want to “abolish farming”. Farming, as it turns out, is so very damaging to the planet in terms of CO2 pollution that we must do away with the industry altogether.

Put aside the ludicrousness of this wish, which if implemented would doom us all to starvation. Rather, consider the fact that we live in a society where having this position — fighting against farming for the sake of climate change — is not only possible but also admired. For young people in college towns, the question of where the food comes from is completely abstract; and as they plod along their chosen life path, from university radicalism to an NGO to government service and then back again, they need not encounter anything to make them change their opinion of the world. Their disconnect from material reality — from the farmers working hard to grow their crops, and from the truckers who make sure the food shows up on the shelves — is nearly complete. Student climate protestors do not seem to realise that food does not grow inside the supermarket.

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More perniciously, a growing crisis of over-regulation created, then driven, by “the email caste” is also taking shape. This ever-growing body of ordinances only creates frustration and anger among the material workers who have to live by them. It is not that these rules are necessarily malicious. To take one example, the idea that we should make the internal combustion engine redundant by the mid-2030s is probably motivated by genuine concerns for the environment. The problem is that these laws are completely disconnected from reality.

Last year, the Canadian trucker Gord Magill asked a simple, radical question: “How essential are the ’email job’ caste?” Magill’s essay was one early example of a new class consciousness, slowly brewing in the West. It was an open acknowledgement that there is an “us vs them” divide that refuses to fit into the Left’s conception of the “99% vs the 1%”. For Magill, it is the farmers, the truckers, and the aeroplane mechanics who comprise the “us”. And it is the NGO employees, the activist regulators, and the managers who make up the more immediate foe.

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Whether you’re watching a farmer protest in the Netherlands or a trucker occupation in Canada, or even a wildcat airline pilot strike in Florida, there are growing echoes of this analysis everywhere. The figure of the enemy today is increasingly no longer the capitalist in the top hat. It is Klaus Schwab; it is the manager and the regulator. They hope to close down your farm, digitise your currency, and abolish private ownership. At one point during the 20th century, the figure of the “social engineer” was popular inside the worker-dominated social democratic parties of the West. In 2022, that same social engineer has now become a hated enemy. He is no longer seen as having any good intentions towards ordinary working people, nor can he even be trusted to understand how the real world works.

The 2020s, then, promise to be a decade filled with discontent and increasingly dramatic shows of worker militancy. Beyond inflation, beyond anger at the rising cost of fuel, heating and food, there is now a simmering political rage motivating people to take to the streets and the pickets. Like Gord Magill, workers are deciding that they’ve had enough of being ruled by an “email caste”. If email workers no longer care about the real economy they’ve left behind, why should workers care about them?

But I’ve not seen anything in our new PM’s utterances or parliamentary career to date to suggest that he will respect this post-Brexit “realignment” in British politics. Not even a homeopathic echo of it.

It’s commonplace to mutter at this point about how this proves British democracy is a sham. This isn’t true; but it is true that if you expect policies to be implemented based on how the public votes at a general election, you’re looking at “democracy” backwards.

Election manifestos and associated political programmes take shape based on the mobilisation of political influence by competing interest groups. The willingness of politicians to take any given view into account in this process is less a principled stance, than a pragmatic reflection of how much real clout interest groups are perceived to have. If the median British political standpoint isn’t well represented in our national politics, this reflects a calculation across the board that leaders don’t need to pay much attention to what the masses want — because they no longer wield enough meaningful leverage to insist on it.

Whether or not this is conclusively true, enough leaders now act on this assumption that it forms the core of running political battles across the West. And all these battles turn on an increasingly open class war between two populations with radically conflicting worldviews and interests: the reality people, and the ideas people.

The structure of this conflict is easier to understand by comparison with an earlier one: the industrial-era battle for dominance of Britain, between aristocratic landowners and an emerging mercantile and industrial elite. This battle came to a head in 1815 with the Corn Laws, a punitive tariff on imported grain intended to shield British farmers from overseas competition.

This policy had obvious benefits for the aristocrats and gentry who owned much of the land, and was perhaps the last time the old agrarian ruling class was able blatantly to use the tax code to protect their own material interests. But they had a powerful and rising coalition ranged against them. The mercantile elite, whose wealth was bound up with trade beyond Britain’s borders, objected to tariffs that cramped their business style. And they were supported, for much more pragmatic reasons, by a swelling industrial working and lower-middle class, who couldn’t grow their own food and just wanted to be able to afford a loaf of bread.

I take this detour into British political history to illustrate three points. First, that contra pop-Marxism, contests for power aren’t always between social classes arranged hierarchically — crudely, oppressors and those they oppress. They can also represent competing interests within a class.

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Second, not having a vote didn’t stop the industrial poor making their views known. There was huge grassroots opposition to the Corn Laws, which fanned demands for an extended franchise, and prompted mass protests that were sometimes brutally suppressed.

But — and third — mass mobilisation doesn’t accomplish much without leadership. And the leaders of mass movements don’t always share the masses’ motivations, a fact that also has lessons for us today. Richard Cobden, the politician most central to repeal of the Corn Laws, was a textile manufacturer and trader. Understandably given this, he was in favour of trade and hostile to aristocratic protectionism. He wrote several pamphlets on British foreign policy, in which he argued against then-settled 19th-century consensus on multipolar “balance of power”, in favour of an early vision of the modern globalist vision of growth based on free international movement of goods, money, and people.

Cobden was a brilliant organiser, and his successful campaign to repeal the Corn Laws serves to illustrate the way divergent elite and mass political interests can coincide in a single issue. The 1846 repeal signalled the decisive defeat of Britain’s Old Tory agrarian order. In its place, the new dominant order became an expansionist, mercantile Whig one, dedicated to Free Trade — the worldview, ironically, now most associated with the modern Tories.

Today, though, the main contest is no longer between the landed gentry and mercantile elite. The goalposts have moved again, and the battleground is now between those whose power and material interests are grounded in the material world, and those whose wealth comes from the world of ideas. The political analyst NS Lyons characterises this as a class and culture war between “Physicals” and “Virtuals”: two outlooks that broadly correspond to the distinction David Goodhart drew between Somewheres and Anywheres in the wake of Brexit.

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What’s key is that the moral outlook is downstream of concrete material interests. Physicals work in sectors such as farming, construction, manufacturing, haulage, mining, and so on: occupations inextricable from the material world. Virtuals, on the other hand, work at a layer of abstraction apart from the physical world: think finance, academia, education, media, tech, and so on.

And Virtuals dominate the elite. For as the West has de-industrialised, Western money and power have drained from Physical occupations toward Virtual ones such as finance and tech. And, as a consequence, Virtuals today hold a near-monopoly on institutional power. Westminster occupational data reflects this: barristers, teachers, solicitors, and journalists are well represented among MPs. Conversely, you can trace the waning power of the Physicals in the total number of MPs who were previously farmers, miners or manual workers. This total shrank by a factor of five between 1979 and 2015, from 142 to a scant 33.

This class-inflected contest between the virtual and the real economies is the core of the class and culture war now being fought across the West. It also helps to make sense of how apparently unrelated issues, such as trans rights and immigration, can become bitter battlefronts in the same war.

Trans rights make sense as a proxy for the Virtuals’ core moral claim: that ideas matter more than the material world. When we consider what a person is in legal terms, do we prioritise the material fact of their biological sex, or their inner, abstract idea of who they are? Understandably, the Virtuals prefer the answer that places their class of work, their worldview and by extension their political interests at the top of the moral pile.

High immigration, meanwhile, is a material positive to Virtuals: more people means more growth. This material upside is then moralised in terms of “openness”, “culture”, “freedom” and so on. For working-class Physicals, though, high immigration means stiffer competition for jobs. This, far more than racial animus, was the central driver of the working-class Brexit vote.

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The anti-Corn Law movement has further lessons for the Brexit battle between Virtuals and Physicals, in that it followed the Cobden pattern: it was a mass movement that succeeded with leadership from elites with their own reasons for pushing it. Two mutually exclusive Brexits were promised: an open and globalising one for those such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and an immigration-restrictionist one for the Red Wall. The impossibility of delivering both has paralysed the Tories ever since.

For what complicates this class war is that it’s not a simple contest between “elites” and physical-world proles. Overall, Physicals skew more working-class, and working-class Physical jobs are generally low-status and precarious. But farmers, tradesmen and oil executives can be relatively well-off while still sharing broad cultural sympathies with working-class Physicals. And yet the latter can’t always rely on Physical elites to defend their interests: on immigration restriction, for example, factory-owners and farmers will swap culture-war sides in a flash when they can’t get seasonal workers from overseas.

Still, it remains to be seen whether the Virtuals’ dominance really is as complete as it appears from their stranglehold on government and the media. At the last count, Virtuals remain materially dependent on the real economy: without farm workers, shop workers, bin men and drivers, the laptop class are as helpless and useless as a snail without its shell. This was visible in those groups for whom lockdown rules were most blithely waived: despite often-cramped living conditions, for example, even those seasonal agricultural workers coming to the UK from high-risk countries were exempted from the 14-day quarantine rule.

What happens if the Physicals start weaponising this dependence more methodically? As Lyons observes, the Vancouver truckers’ protest at the start of this year offers a glimmer of what it might look like when the simmering class conflict between Physicals and Virtuals erupts into open warfare. Arguably the Yellow Vest protests in France, and recent farmers’ protests in the Netherlands form part of the same picture. And with rising energy prices driven by US foreign policy in Ukraine pushing German manufacturers offshore or into shutdown, we may presently see more German Physicals in the dissident ranks.

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But mutinous Physicals may need to learn from the truckers: Trudeau eventually ended the protest by freezing protesters out of their own bank accounts. Even the most capable Physicals can’t easily get by in the modern world without access to Virtual finance and tech.

Another possibility is a more thoroughgoing push to turn what’s left of working-class Physicals into the “useless class“ some predict will emerge if AI and automation replace human-powered jobs. This would represent the final Virtual victory: for without even the option to withdraw their labour, it’s hard to see on what basis such a group could compel elites to consider their political interests. This condition of political weakness would be even more pronounced should UBI replace earned wages: few adolescents, however rebellious, will do more than pull faces at their parents if they’re afraid their pocket money will be stopped.

Whether or not this is the future we get, the likelihood is that we’re in for a period of class conflict on a scale not seen since the early days of trade unionism. If history is any guide, the eventual outcome will be some kind of settlement — but before we reach that point, we can expect a great deal more mobilisation by the Physicals as a class, and a great deal more moral denunciation of that class and its interests by their Virtual class enemies. And whatever the eventual settlement is, formal democracy won’t be the vehicle for bringing it about. It’ll be the rubber-stamp for an exercise of political leverage that forces Physical political interests back onto (or definitively off) the table.

To exercise such leverage, working-class Physicals will need to find allies among dissident segments of the elite, all of whom will (like Cobden) have their own motivations for the bargain. And if this seems an ugly compromise, the alternative is a political process that continues to elect Prime Ministers who ignore their interests. Simply because they can.