Indeed, the war has already claimed its first casualty in this field: the US budget airline Spirit, which went bankrupt at the start of the conflict. It’s true that Spirit had been plagued with problems for a long time and wasn’t exactly a healthy company, so the massive increase in fuel costs was only the final nail in the coffin. Then again, most airline companies aren’t very healthy. During the Covid pandemic, much of the global airline industry had to be bailed out by national governments in order to avoid collapse. In the US alone, Congress authorized roughly $54 billion in direct payments to the big carriers; many more billions were spent in Europe and elsewhere by governments intervening to save their own flag carriers from fiscal ruin. Beyond the pandemic, however, there lurked a real and serious issue with the airline industry itself. Over the years, commercial air travel has become harder and harder to run at a profit, mostly for reasons that are out of anyone’s hands.

The decline of affordable air travel may herald a far greater historical and economic shift: the decline of the Western middle class itself. Not that long ago, even a humble Swedish or British working-class family might have found the occasional charter trip to Mallorca or Ibiza affordable. In 2026, those kinds of luxuries are growing more distant.

There is, of course, no rule that human society must have a middle class to begin with. Indeed, most societies throughout history have consisted of farmers and laborers at the bottom and a thin slice of rulers and nobles at the top. Clerks, bureaucrats, merchants, crafters and artisans formed tiny minorities in and around the towns and manor houses, usually with very little in the way of cultural, social, or political power. The state of affairs that we consider normal today is really anything but.

Only in the 20th century did the West experience the rapid growth of the first truly majoritarian middle class in human history. Consider John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, Grapes of Wrath. The Joad family in that novel are certainly not part of the middle class — they are poor, uneducated tenant farmers without indoor plumbing, who are made homeless by economic forces far beyond their control. But indoor plumbing and higher wages were coming even for the Joads. The integration of Tom’s children into the post-1945 American middle class is essentially a foregone conclusion before Steinbeck’s novel even begins. 

This massive social transformation was only made possible thanks to the rise of what we can call “technologies of mass affluence”. Luxury, of course, is as old as civilization itself. But until the 20th century, practical limitations meant it was enjoyed only by the few. Ice cream was eaten in the Middle Ages, and various recipes for sherbet go back thousands of years. But until the advent of modern refrigeration, getting fresh ice in the middle of summer involved cutting out a huge block from a suitable lake during winter, before stuffing it in a purpose-built, insulated cellar, where it would then melt slowly enough to still be intact half a year later. A medieval duke who wanted to impress his dinner guests might press-gang enough peasants to perform the massive amounts of labor required to serve iced desserts. But few others could. With the advent of the freezer, though, what was once an impossibly decadent luxury became accessible even to the poor.

Commercial air travel is one of the youngest technologies of mass affluence. The Wright brothers flew their first successful prototype airplane in December 1903, but it would take until after the Second World War for the aviation industry to start truly flourishing. Boeing’s iconic 707, the first “modern” commercial jetliner, appeared in 1957. In the four decades that followed, air travel and international tourism would go from being the preserve of the very rich to something even a working-class family could save up for.

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Today, however, that picture looks set to change. Many oil refineries across the Middle East have been shuttered or hit with missiles, and the Strait of Hormuz is likely to remain closed for the foreseeable future. Many European airlines are already hiking ticket prices or grounding planes and cutting capacity. But again, the airline industry’s woes did not start with the Iran war, nor with the Covid pandemic; this is an industry that has been structurally weak and hard-pressed to make decent profits for years. 

The primary culprit here is energy. It’s not just that planes require fossil fuels to fly, though that is certainly a part of it. On a societal level, the more energy there is available, the easier it will be to perform most kinds of economic activity. The airline industry saw its golden period of explosive growth in the United States during an equally explosive growth of per-capita energy production and consumption. But that period of growth is now over. US production of conventional (read: cheap) oil peaked in the Seventies. The much-touted shale revolution has brought the total level of US oil production back to where it was 50 years ago, but it has done so by replacing cheaper and better grades of oil with worse grades that cost many times more to extract from the ground. And regardless, the shale revolution itself is now ending, with US unconventional production set to peak in the very near future. 

More dramatically, the total amount of energy produced and consumed in the United States has actually been stagnant since the turn of the millennium. But because the population of the United States has naturally continued growing since then, energy per capita has begun to decrease. If we’re talking purely in terms of access to energy, the last time the average American grew richer was sometime in the Seventies; since the 2000s, people have been getting significantly poorer with every passing year.

This is an economic shift with huge implications, but its effects on people have been surprisingly easy to hide from view. Like most other parts of Western society, the way the airline industry dealt with this reality of stagnant or shrinking energy availability was by becoming vastly more efficient. Once, the list of major airplane manufacturers included names like Convair, McDonnell Douglas, Vickers-Armstrong and Fokker. Now, the civilian industry is essentially down to two big survivors: Airbus and Boeing. Similarly, the airlines themselves have undergone a big process of consolidation, cost-cutting, and efficiency-maximizing. The big trend in plane design ever since the Seventies has been to chase fuel efficiency and cost savings above all else. But as with every process of slow starvation, there comes a time when the body actually runs out of fat, and all that’s left to consume is muscle.

For airline companies, and for the two big remaining aircraft manufacturers, the slow-rolling economic crisis unleashed by the Iran war looks akin to a perfect storm. Consumers around the world are already struggling to deal with increased prices on everything from groceries to rent to energy. They have very little spare capacity to pay higher ticket prices, even as airlines themselves are facing much higher operating costs. Nor can they meaningfully cut costs, as the low-hanging fruit in that department has long since gone; Spirit airlines was the best cost-cutter on the American market, and it was also the first airline to go.

The aircraft manufacturers, for their part, can barely justify making new models of planes anymore. The costs of trying to launch a new plane are astronomical, meaning that even a single model with bad sales — like the Airbus model A380 — puts you at serious risk of bankruptcy. And even if you do well, the airplane industry had truly atrocious profit margins to begin with; Boeing currently struggles to make a net profit at all.

Air travel is also expensive for the state. In 2025, the US saw its worst aviation disaster in more than two decades, when a military helicopter crashed into a regional jet approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Though the investigation found that the helicopter had used to a dangerous route, the major contributing factor in the accident was plain overwork: too much traffic, too few air traffic controllers to handle the workload. This story is becoming increasingly common at airports in the US: last year, much of the equipment at Newark Liberty Airport malfunctioned, leading to massive delays and problems but thankfully no accidents. The FAA, though it has acknowledged there is currently a huge lack of air traffic controllers, recently slashed its recruiting targets by nearly 10%, justifying it by saying that modern data-driven tools allow fewer people to work more than was previously thought possible (or safe). Given the current economic situation, with Europe rapidly deindustrializing and America edging closer to bankruptcy, chronic underinvestment in airport infrastructure will likely grow worse in the years ahead.

The commercial airline industry is in some sense a microcosm of our broader cultural moment. The economic gravity that traps the airline industry is unrelenting, and it is basically unsolvable: for how are you supposed to keep offering more and better services in a world where resources are not, as it turns out, infinite? Today, we drill for ores that contain just a fraction of the metal content that earlier generations were used to; the really good ores were all depleted decades ago. So were most of the good and cheap deposits of oil, meaning that for every year that passes, we have to drill a bit deeper and pay a bit more just to get the same amount of oil out of the ground. Like Alice trapped by the Red Queen’s mirror, it takes more and more running just to stay in one place. Today, we hear innumerable stories of families approaching exhaustion, forced to borrow increasingly unsustainable sums of money to buy a car, to afford education, or just to pay for their groceries. But rarely do people stop to consider that entire industries, like the airline industry, are also stuck in the same miserable trap: that Boeing and JetBlue and Spirit Airlines have also been reduced to metaphorically maxing out all their credit cards at the end of the month just to make it to next payday.

This is not a problem that can be solved by voting for socialism, fascism, nationalism, or conservatism. Nor is it the end of the world. At the tail end of the current global economic crisis, what remains of the airline industry will pick itself up from the ground as best as it can. Tickets will still be sold, though they’ll be even more expensive; airports will still be open, though they’ll be more grimy than before. As the number of people who can still afford to travel slowly shrinks, the economics will keep getting worse, leading to higher prices, and so the vicious circle will continue. Fewer people will consider air travel to be something normal or expected, and life will simply move on. More than 1,000 years ago, an Englishman, reflecting on the woes of his own time, wrote thus:

Nearon nu cyningas ne caseras
ne goldgiefan swylce iu wæron.

“Today there are no kings, nor Caesars / nor gold-givers as there once were”. In time, the children of today’s children might write similar poetry: lamenting, or maybe celebrating, the demise of annoying charter tourists and globetrotting baby boomers.

Over the next three decades, those roles didn’t just fade — they completely reversed. Ozzy, far from the evil Svengali he was once imagined to be, re-emerged as the harmless, bumbling patriarch of  The Osbournes, a proto-Kardashian reality-TV show in which he muttered endearments to his dogs and struggled to work the remote. Meanwhile, Hulk Hogan’s legacy curdled amid sex tapes, lawsuits, and racist remarks.

What’s most striking today, however, isn’t how their reputations flipped. It’s that their reputations were considered important by serious institutions. The cultural gatekeepers who had once ignored or sneered at the two took them seriously once they passed from this earthly veil. A generation or two ago, Ozzy and Hulk were both largely considered lowbrow trash, the obsessions of the prime consumer of commercialized entertainment: the lower middle class. Yet after both figures died this month, The New Yorker ran an obituary for Ozzy, treating him as a misunderstood bard of evil with a heart of gold. PBS News, meanwhile, published a lengthy obituary that called Hogan “an icon to his ‘Hulkamaniacs.’”

Legacy media, the same outlets that looked down their noses at these men during their heydays, now solemnly reflected on their legacies. No one rolled their eyes. Perhaps it’s because Donald Trump, another cartoonish reality-TV patriarch who gained superstardom in the Eighties, has been handed political power twice now, and the old elite are now bending the knee.

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If this were the Eighties, this triumph of the lowbrow would be a moment to cheer. A common trope of Reagan-era comedies was the slobs versus the snobs, in which a ragtag gang of working-class kids or bros used their moxie to beat the aging establishment, the pretentious old-money types. But now we know how those stories really ended: the US class structure became even more lopsided, with the top 10% owning nearly 70% of all wealth, while 57% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The culture-industry slobs did not alter this trend. They just lent it a more vulgar veneer.

At the level of the culture, this turn of events does not represent authentic egalitarian progress, but a general decline in standards. The fact that the majority of Americans have lost economic mobility and security, combined with the mentally impairing effects of excessive internet and social media use, has transformed almost all of us into what was once considered lower middle class. Our reverential treatment of Ozzy and Hulk reflects our own childish sensibilities.

If that sounds snooty, look back and consider the breadth and mainstream popularity of elite and middlebrow institutions of the previous century, made possible by a specific set of conditions. The New Deal and the postwar economic miracle created an unusually stable and prosperous middle America comprising salaried professionals, civil servants, unionized workers, and strivers who had both disposable income and leisure time. Aspiration wasn’t just about the pure accumulation of wealth; it also meant pursuing intellectualism and cultural pursuits and democratizing them in the process.

Among members of the Greatest Generation, it wasn’t just the rich who subscribed to literary or political magazines, attended the symphony or opera, were card-carrying members of public libraries, or had museum and social-club memberships. My grandfather, a small-town mechanic with a formal eighth-grade education, once subscribed to National Geographic and Time, regularly tuned into 60 Minutes, and had a cultural and social diet that might now be called elitist.

Two factors changed everything. First, media technology has dramatically improved in fidelity and been integrated into almost every aspect of life, including both work and leisure. The shift from flesh-and-blood life to an internet-first version flattened all forms of entertainment and culture into a uniform sludge of content. Meanwhile, the economic foundation of the New Deal order crumbled, and neoliberalism became the dominant political philosophy. The downstream effects of the changes meant that the cultural standards of yore began to slip into oblivion.

To get a sense of how much has changed in 50 years, consider the historian Arno Mayer’s 1975 essay, “The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem.” In it, he described the lower middle class as literate but not cultivated, aspirational yet anxious, self-reliant yet highly individualistic, obsessed with their own property, terrified of downward mobility, and quick to mobilize politically only under conditions of stress. Too educated to be at home in folk culture, too economically precarious to claim elite culture, they became early adopters of the modern mass-media machine. “The modern opiate dispensers provided a heady mix of entertainment, distraction, diversion, and fantasy for a composite lower middle class that was characteristically insecure,” he wrote. As Mayer put it, “media and audience found each other.”

What Mayer is describing sounds less like a small slice of our nation’s class makeup and more like a blueprint for 21st-century American life writ large. Cable television may have given way to TikToks, but it’s still a culture where the defining class condition is not proletarian solidarity or elite professionalism, but a twitchy, consumerized in-betweenness. That psychic tension fuels both spectacle and political grievance.

In 2014, when actor Gary Oldman told Ted Koppel that “reality TV to me is the museum of social decay,” it was the last gasp of a dying worldview. By then, the reality juggernaut, the same genre of television once deemed brain-dead TV, had all absorbed Ozzy and Hogan and Trump into the maw of the spectacle. A decade later, when Trump clinched the presidency a second time, it was fitting that Hogan played a part as an Republican National Convention sideshow. The lowbrow shock and awe of the convention that ushered in Trump II was the culmination of a cultural reorientation that began in the Eighties.

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Trump’s place within the unholy trinity is ironic. Unlike Ozzy and Hogan, both of whom were working-class heroes of humble origins, Trump was a man born into wealth but who spoke and had the cultural tastes of someone without a silver spoon in his mouth. He insulted people like a talk-radio caller. He loved McDonald’s and candy. His political base, MAGA Nation, shares cultural DNA with Hogan and Ozzy fandom. They love Trump not in spite of his crudity, but because of it. He sounds like them. He hates the same people. He gets the joke, and is the joke, and doesn’t care either way. And maybe that’s the point. The joke has become the organizing principle of American life. Once, the Ozzy fan or Hulkamaniac was a punchline for the old-school commentariat, a proxy for tastelessness, vulgarity, or low aspirations. Now, those very traits are recoded as authenticity for everyone on the political spectrum, Left and Right.

It’s no wonder, then, that in 2025, the Democrats are casting off the blinkered brand of elitism-dressed-up-as-non-elitism they were associated with in the previous decade — by which I mean identity politics — and disregarding the old Michelle Obama dictum “When they go low, we go high.” Their answer to MAGA is to accept the new rules of engagement and start making stupid memes and yelling the F-word. The liberals have even elevated Kendrick Lamar to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s old post as their symbolic poet laureate — the rapper who used his Super Bowl show as one loud and expensive roast of Drake. In a new profile in The Atlantic, congressional Democrat Jasmine Crockett is presented as the future (“A Democrat for The Trump Era,” runs the headline). Why? She has a big social-media following and went viral for describing Marjorie Taylor Greene as “bleach-blond, bad built, butch body” during a House Oversight Committee meeting.

Forty years ago, Hulk Hogan used to say, “Whatcha gonna do, when Hulkamania runs wild on you?” It was a threat, a promise, and a sales pitch all rolled into one. Today, American culture has yet to answer that question.

I’m referring to the Trump administration’s shock-and-awe campaign against the hard-to-define strata of college-educated Americans who perform “knowledge work”. They are often dubbed the professional managerial class, or PMC for short. This month, scribes at The Atlantic and New York published essays lamenting the Trumpian war on the professionals. PMCs are “being targeted for political, cultural, and perhaps economic extinction” by the White House, wrote Ed Kilgore. He’s got a point. Now that we’re entering the fourth month of Trump II, it’s clear that when the President repeatedly uttered, “I am your retribution” with comic-book-villain bravado on the campaign trail, he wasn’t bluffing.

Trump has mounted a multi-pronged assault on the PMC by eagerly siccing a rabid Department of Government Efficiency on vast swathes of the civil service, the scientific establishment, non-Trump media, the university system, and NGOs, while wielding executive orders like Thor’s hammer to smite these workers and their institutions.

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The story that liberal commentators tell is that the New Right hates the PMC due to their disloyalty or perceived treachery, or bloodthirsty hatred of the cognitive elite. They just hate the pencil-pushers who won the meritocracy game after American deindustrialization. Now the jocks have returned to power to stuff the nerds back in their lockers. But while this “they hate us because they ain’t us” analysis has a kernel of truth, it doesn’t tell the whole story, and I can’t help but think about how the Democratic elite were warned for years — decades even — that the establishment was rotting from the inside and was vulnerable to a sacking.

Ironically, critiquing the PMC was once the province of the Left. The conservatives say they hate globalists now, but in the second half of the 20th century, Reagan Republicans openly embraced neoliberalism and a strategy of globalization, free trade, and deindustrialization. The fortunes of blue-collar workers declined as those of the professionals climbed.

As far back as the early Forties, Trotskyite philosopher John Burnham identified the power of the PMC and predicted that the capitalist class would lose to them in what he called “the managerial revolution”. More than three decades later, in the late Seventies, the socialist intellectuals Barbara and John Ehrenreich first coined a more specific term for these ruling class managers: the “professional managerial class”. It originally described “salaried mental workers” — doctors, lawyers, academics, social workers, PR consultants, nonprofit administrators, and corporate middle managers — the knowledge workers and culture shapers who managed people, systems, and information and socially reproduced capitalism, even if they didn’t quite own it.

Admittedly, PMC is a clumsy moniker, but it’s better than “white collar” so as not to confuse professors and DEI executives with, say, nuclear technicians, radiation therapists, or civil engineers. (I also appreciate the term MANGOs, as in Media, Academia, and Non-Governmental Organizations, coined by writer Alex Hochuli). This third class, as the Ehrenreichs noted, caught between capital and labor, often expressed solidarity with the working class in theory, while undermining it in practice by opposing unions and imposing neoliberal reforms in health and education.

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Social critic Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites, published in 1995, argued that the PMC worshipped credentials and proceduralism, and like all priesthoods, believed itself immune from corruption by virtue of its own enlightenment. Ultimately, he said, they were responsible for dismantling the old society and civic life while preaching inclusion from behind the safe havens of tony suburbs and tenure-track appointments (or, we might add in our time, password-protected Zoom calls).

Their power only grew over the last three decades, as the Democratic Party evolved from the party of farmers and workers to the Party of the PMC. Its financial and philosophical bedrock became Hollywood, the tenured thinkers of academia, the mainstream media, and the itinerant members of what Richard Florida once breathlessly called the “creative class” (Silicon Valley used to be on this list but has been partially won over by MAGA).

In his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty explicitly predicted that working-class Americans would rebel against this arrangement. They’d eventually realize their government, including both parties, had abandoned them by allowing wages to fall and jobs to vanish without a fight. They would see that timid PMCs weren’t about to sacrifice their own comfort to help anyone else. When that moment came, Rorty warned, something would snap, and disillusioned voters from outside the suburbs would rally behind a strongman who promised revenge on the elites. Decades later, Rorty’s grim prophecy found its avatar in Donald Trump.

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That didn’t prompt the Democrats to change their tune and return to working-class politics. They went harder for the PMC. For a decade, starting roughly in Barack Obama’s second term, identity-politics-obsessed liberals led a top-down shift in culture that ranged from the stifling of speech (cancelling comedians, the overreach of #MeToo) to the forced symbolic diversity of entertainment, plus the pressure to put pronouns in email signatures. What we now call “woke”, a soft totalitarian ideology of cosmopolitanism and the elevation of identity over class, was prophesied about by Lasch. He described how the liberal elite were waging class war on the working class by creating “parallel or alternative institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all”.

The PMC label returned with a vengeance during this period of parallel institution-building, this time as a half-ironic slur from the old class-based Left critiquing the Democrats’ version of neoliberalism. Wokeness was anathema to many of the classic Marxists, like Adolph Reed, but when they pushed back against woke, they were lambasted by the PMC-heavy millennial Left. In 2020, the Democratic Socialists of America’s Afro-socialists and Socialists of Color Caucus called Reed “reactionary, class reductionist, and, at best, tone deaf”. Likewise, UnHerd contributor Catherine Liu’s 2021 polemic, Virtue Hoarders, whose subtitle was The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, was pilloried or ignored.

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The MAGA Right meanwhile, homed in on the crises generated by free-for-all of globalized free markets. It was just then, at the dawn of the MAGA era, that the PMC’s power in the Democratic Party solidified and the atomized working class began voting for Trump. This political realignment meant that when Left-wing essayist Amber A’Lee Frost wrote that the PMC “can — and should — be brought to commit to its own abolition”, it wasn’t in the pages of a Left-wing publication, but the vaguely New Right intellectual journal American Affairs.

The problem is that while the New Right has adopted and tweaked the Left-wing critique of the PMC, its support for the working class has been largely rhetorical. Taken together, Trump II’s domestic policies surely represent a class war of sorts, but not one you’d easily recognize in a textbook. This fight isn’t the proletariat pitted against the capitalists or vice versa. Instead, Trump versus PMC is an asymmetrical clash involving a billionaire president and conservative PMCs and techno-capital attempting to excommunicate a subset of the liberal bourgeoisie, all in the name of the “War on Woke”. It’s less Marx and more like a mirror world version of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, with the purge of Left-leaning meritocrats. The philosophy is A Great Leap Back — to restore nationalism and capitalism as the nation’s civic religion.

As for the working class? They’re just collateral damage in this intra-elite class war.

…[The middle classes] are the new proletariat, like factory workers a hundred years ago…

…Anyone earning less than £300,000 a year scarcely counts. You’re just a prole in a three-button suit…”

These lines from J.G. Ballard’s 2003 novel Millennium People were thought-provoking, yet not wholly convincing 21 years ago. They have, however, become more and more plausible with the passing of time. In a development whose causes and significance have been obscured by the reign of identity politics, the middle classes have been struggling to resist downward mobility and proletarianisation. It’s felt especially by the young as graduates have found themselves saddled with increasingly oppressive debt burdens while education and housing costs are soaring. Meanwhile, offshoring and automation have meant that middle-income jobs have become scarcer — resulting in something referred to online as “the overproduction of elites”. It’s a trend in which, according to a 2019 OECD report, “the middle class looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters”.

None of this would have surprised Ballard. Right from the beginning of his career in the mid-Fifties, he was a close observer of the bourgeoisie: “society’s keel and anchor”. His typical protagonist is a doctor, psychiatrist, architect or TV producer — a comfortably middle-class professional. Ballard was among the first to note and analyse a significant change to middle-class life: the flight to the suburbs; the rise of an intensely moralistic illiberalism among some middle-class youth; the importance of home video, the camcorder and later the internet to the isolated suburban lifestyle; the bunkering of the upper middle class in gated communities.

By the early 2000s, Ballard was seeing evidence of increased disgruntlement and straitened circumstances among sections of the middle class — portents which he examined in Millennium People, his tale of a middle-class uprising in England’s capital. With a strong dose of black comedy, it represented a welcome return to the London terrain he’d mapped so evocatively in the Seventies. But the more realistic, “sociological” fiction of his late period was more concerned with “what is just about to happen in a given community”, and “trying to find the unconscious logic that runs below the surface”. As he put it: “there’s something odd going on [in society], and I explore that by writing a novel.”

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There are certainly odd goings-on at Millennium People’s fictional estate of Chelsea Marina. What began as a dispute over rising maintenance fees has developed into something bigger and stranger. Now scores of residents, professionals of every stamp, are joining the rebellion — going on marches, disrupting events (an Earl’s Court cat show is ruined) and refusing to pay their bills. They seem to be protesting the ongoing impoverishment — both material and spiritual — of bourgeois life.

Into the estate, the police infiltrate psychologist David Markham: a deep-cover spy, so deep he’s unaware of his assignment. Markham has personal reasons for investigating the rebellion. Clues point to a connection between an unclaimed bombing at Heathrow, which killed his ex-wife Laura, and the middle-income insurgents of the Marina.

Markham strikes up an ambiguous friendship with the leader of the revolution, the troubled and messianic Richard Gould. This pallid, dishevelled paediatrician is one of Ballard’s driven visionaries, characters the author said reflected his own dark side. Gould is preoccupied with the cruelty and apparent meaninglessness of the world and believes, at least initially, that destroying symbols of middle-class culture — video rental stores, the National Film Theatre, Tate Modern — will spur the docile English bourgeoisie into revolt against a hidebound and exploitative Establishment.

Later he arrives at a more radical view, seeing attacks on wholly meaningless targets as propaganda of the deed of a more disquieting, and thus more effective, kind. It will take this more extreme philosophy, a nihilistic kind of mysticism, to truly liberate the middle classes. Markham notes this change: “From now on, only meaningless targets should be chosen, each one a conundrum that the public would struggle to solve.” Gould hints gnomically at the purpose of such puzzles and mysteries: “There are bridges in the mind…They carry us to a more real world, a richer sense of who we are. Once those bridges are there, it’s our duty to cross them.”

This being a Ballard novel, the morally dubious but seductive Gould isn’t exactly a villain, nor even really an antagonist. And as Markham embraces the suburban guerrilla’s cause he seems to be in two minds about their methods — thrilled at the destruction, alarmed and later appalled at the harm done to innocents. As the campaign intensifies, Markham seems uncertain what level of violence he can countenance.

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Reading it today, Millennium People strikes me as doubly prophetic. First, the methods of the revolutionaries mirror the activism of today. The attacks on art carried out by Ballard’s rebels uncannily anticipate the soup-throwing stunts of Just Stop Oil, while Gould’s preference for meaningless targets likewise finds its echo in the spray-paint attack on Stonehenge. Secondly, Ballard’s vision of a middle class beginning to struggle financially, even facing proletarianisation, has clear relevance today. In Britain and elsewhere, substantial numbers of middle-class households can be numbered among “the precariat”, oppressed by chronic insecurity, only one large unexpected expense away from serious trouble. The days when middle-class status guaranteed economic security are receding into the past.

This disquieting state of affairs has been deftly analysed by Joel Kotkin in The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. Focusing on the present-day struggles and future prospects of the bourgeoisie in the United States, Kotkin argues that ever-widening inequality threatens to transform the democratic social order into something resembling medieval feudalism. Social mobility will all but disappear and we shall witness the dwindling or even disappearance of the middle class, or as he calls them, “the yeomanry”. Under neo-feudalism, the majority will live under serf-like conditions, surviving on gig work and handouts and with next to no opportunity to improve their station. Wealth, property ownership and independence will be the near-exclusive preserve of a new gentry enjoying de facto hereditary privilege.

For Kotkin, the lineaments of a neo-feudal future can already be seen in the urban and suburban landscape where “elite communities are surrounded by urban poor and by small towns that are fading and becoming destitute”. He draws on the French geographer Christophe Guilluy who believes that globalisation has “revived the citadels of medieval France”. Given the ever-starker contrast between such secure enclaves, which are “like the castle towns of Japan or the walled cities of medieval Italy”, it’s clear Ballard was right to highlight the spread of the gated community as a highly significant, and worrying, development. In interviews, as well as in his later novels, he commented on how “the way in which the gated community is springing up all over the world now is an ominous sign”. “People aren’t moving into gated communities simply to avoid muggers and housebreakers, they’re moving into gated communities to get away from other people. Even people like themselves.”

Though troubled by it, Ballard was also fascinated by this new phenomenon. In particular, the psychology of gated communities intrigued him. In his novella Running Wild, the adult residents of an “exclusive estate to the west of London” have been massacred by persons unknown, and all the children have disappeared. The narrator reflects on the unusual psychological conditions that prevailed on the estate prior to the unexplained eruption of violence: “The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity they existed in a civilised and eventless world.”

For me, Ballard puts his finger on something crucial there. Today, the rich are arguably the people most alienated from the past, most severed from its values and traditions. Hence the rise of “luxury beliefs”, the new political radicalisms of the Left and Right whose natural habitat is the upper echelons of society. There, DEI and degrowth Leftism competes with the sort of hyper-capitalist vision promoted by Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land.

Of course, it’s true that the new radical Leftist beliefs win plenty of adherents from the working and lower middle classes. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that, for those supporters, such beliefs are a form of self-harm. Or, to use a term Ballard was fond of, a “mass psychopathology”.

The partition line would seem to run through the bourgeoisie. The middle class is dividing. Those fortunate enough to already belong to, or be ascending to, the upper middle class will find themselves rising still further. They will grow more disposed towards luxury beliefs, whether of the Left or Right. Their children can even look forward to joining the rarefied ranks of the elite.

Prospects for the rest of the middle class, and in particular their children and grandchildren, look less rosy. Compounding the problems associated with steeply rising costs, Boris Johnson’s controversial reform of the immigration system has made middle-class Britons much more exposed to foreign competition for professional jobs and quality university places than before. And longer term, proletarianisation will see the former middle classes competing with migrants for lower-paid work, housing and social services in much the same way as the working class is now. That, of course, is likely to greatly increase ethnic tensions and opposition to immigration, and these, as the protests and riots of the past few weeks have powerfully demonstrated, are already at crisis point.

If Millennium People has a message, then, maybe it is that, if the decline of a greater part of the middle class is to be arrested, organised and sustained action of some kind is required — though probably not the torching of the Southbank or the blowing up of Tate Modern. There are more than a few obstacles to this action, and for the most part, they are to do with the ways of thinking and perceiving particular to today’s middle class: the lack of class consciousness and the hegemony of identity politics; a culture dominated by presentism and trivia; the withering of the traditional bourgeois values of prudence, forward-planning and self-reliance. Clearly these obstacles are formidable, perhaps only to be crossed by means of Richard Gould’s enigmatic bridges of the mind.

51 years later McCluskey, now the leading trade unionist of the last decade, shows no regret as he reveals this scam in his memoir, Always Red (published to coincide with the annual conference of the Labour Party he helped to ruin). Indeed, he seems almost proud of getting away with it — his account mentions no comeuppance for the con. That’s fitting for a man whose career in politics and public life has been defined by two things: indifference to the consequences of his own actions, and the power of money.

Other people’s money, that is. Until recently, McCluskey headed Unite, and his liberal use of the union’s funds is a motif of this book. Even if you’re familiar with the grubby business of political party funding, there’s something startling about McCluskey’s lordly accounts of committing vast sums of his member’s money to whatever politician or campaign he’d chosen to favour. When Tom Watson spends the £50k Len handed him for a campaign, Len casually tosses him another £20k. When Alan Johnson calls about a donation to the Remain campaign, Len agrees £250k — the legal maximum — in one phone call.

The impression of McCluskey as a feudal lord, treating Unite as his fiefdom, grows with his account of using its resources to look after his own affairs. He criticises various adversaries for using expensive lawyers to fight their cause: when a challenger to the Unite throne seeks legal advice “from a top QC” it’s a sign of his “bottomless pockets” and “establishment” backing. Yet McCluskey recalls making repeated use of Unite’s in-house lawyers to threaten journalists who sought to report — accurately — his relationship with Karie Murphy, a close aide to Corbyn. If that relationship was a wholly private matter, why did the union spend members’ money concealing it?

All this is chickenfeed, of course, compared to the millions McCluskey spent propping up the man who would lead Labour to its worst defeat since 1935.

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For a book over-heavy on meetings, deals and chatter among and about politicians, there’s no clear explanation of why McCluskey thought Jeremy Corbyn was right — or just right for Unite. He backs Corbyn because he’s not a “Blairite” or from the “Labour Right”, a group that seemingly includes Ed Miliband — whose leadership campaign he backed — and any other Labour figure who doesn’t agree with Len. Indeed, McCluskey’s primary aim here appears to be to insist that he was right about, well, everything, despite the dreadful consequences of his choices.

Tony Blair gave Labour 13 years in power in part by breaking the unions’ grip on the party — a political success for which many in the Labour movement will never forgive him. McCluskey, interested in power as well as money, appears to see the primary job of a union leader today as reversing those changes. His aim, he writes, was to give Unite more “influence” over Labour. That influence is an end in itself — how it might be used, in the interests of Unite’s fee-paying members, is never explained. All that matters is that Len has senior Labour people at his beck and call. At least Corbyn was consistent in his principles; McCluskey offers far less ideological clarity. His politics are those of the back-scratching backroom deal.

Inevitably, then, McCluskey’s memoir reveals some stark inconsistencies. He expresses interest in Blue Labour, and its regard for traditional “family and flag” values. But without pause, he showers praise and cash on Corbyn, whose internationalism, pacifism and sympathy for identity politics is diametrically opposed to those values. He privately supports Scottish independence in 2014 while funding the No campaign. He thinks EU membership is bad for British workers, but campaigns to Remain.

His post-2016 position — to my mind convincing — was that Labour should commit to accepting Brexit, dismissing a second referendum or other schemes to overturn the result. If his arguments had won out, Labour might not have lost quite so much ground with its traditional voters. Yet even Unite’s money can’t buy him enough influence to make that the party’s policy. He blames John McDonnell and Diane Abbott: “Corbyn now had his two closest friends in politics, one in each ear, telling him to move on the issue — and that’s what he did, committing to a second referendum in all circumstances.”

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Not all Labour MPs backed Corbyn’s position, and McCluskey reports meeting members of the group who wanted to support Theresa May’s deal and “get Brexit done” long before the slogan was coined. They ask for Unite’s backing to go against party policy and deliver the Brexit McCluskey says he wants. But he refuses. Then he blames them for obeying the leadership. “They talked a good game but, whenever it came to the crunch, almost all of them fell into line with the whip,” he writes, failing to note that he funds and supports that very whip.

As a major player in the Corbyn project, McCluskey needs an excuse for its shattering failure in 2019 — and Brexit, rather than the infighting he’s implicated in, is it. In his account, Corbyn’s muddled position on leaving the EU was the sole reason for Labour’s collapse, especially in its working-class heartlands. To support this argument, McCluskey offers some second-hand anecdotes about Unite members’ dismay over Brexit, including some quotes that to my weary ear sound about as convincing as his testimony about his youthful broken arm. “At a meeting of the stewards I was told: ‘Jeremy is regarded as a traitor over Brexit’,” McCluskey recalls, conveniently.

He concludes with the bizarre claim that he and Unite were “vindicated” by the electoral catastrophe that he funded and “influenced”. Far from accepting any responsibility, he repeats a favoured Corbynite talking point about his man “winning the argument”, as if that makes up for reducing Labour to barely 200 Commons seats.

He also overlooks or cynically downplays the other major factors in that 2019 humiliation — most grievously anti-Semitism. “No evidence that antisemitism was more widespread in the Labour Party than in wider society has ever been produced. All the evidence that exists suggests the opposite,” he writes, dismissing the views of several Jewish Labour MPs, peers and members, and the Board of Jewish Deputies, and the Community Safety Trust, and the Jewish Chronicle. What, after all, do they know about anti-Semitism?

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Also dismissed is the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, which found that Labour, under Corbyn, had been “responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination”. Far more important to McCluskey is that accusations of institutional bigotry “demoralised” Corbyn and — worse — “devastated” poor Len himself. Will no-one think of the real victims here?

Besides, even if Labour was a little bigoted, voters didn’t care, in McCluskey’s telling. “I don’t believe antisemitism,” he writes, “was much of an issue on the doorsteps of Darlington or Doncaster in the 2019 general election.” Perhaps McCluskey, devoid of principles in politics, finds it hard to believe others might have them. Or perhaps this is just part of his wider habit of claiming the support of whoever he likes for whatever position he likes.

McCluskey has a habit of grandiosely speaking for the “ordinary workers” of Britain, the idealised grafters he allegedly represents. Despite a six-figure salary and a life spent in London offices and upmarket restaurants (as an aside in the book, he says he’s partial to Black and Blue in Borough Market, where a ribeye steak is £31), McCluskey insists that he retains a gut understanding of the workers, who, naturally, agree with him in all things.

But, strangely for a book by a union leader, Always Red pays little attention to trade unions and their members, at least in contemporary Britain. There’s lots of rose-tinted memories of earlier decades, and too many dull stories about the backroom politicking that saw McCluskey reach the top of the movement. But precious little about where unions stand now, and what their future might be.

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McCluskey led Unite for a decade, until this year. He proudly reports that under his leadership, its funds grew tenfold to almost £500 million, “more than all the other British unions combined”.  For him, financial clout is all — and apparently more important than the number of people who actually support him and his union. He fails to mention some other numbers. In 2007, when Unite was formed by merging Amicus and the TGWU, it had 2 million members. Its most recent official filing shows it now has just 1.1 million members paying into its general fund.

That’s in keeping with overall union membership, which remains in long-term decline. Today barely 13% of private sector workers are union members. Perhaps the most stunning figure on the unions’ decline is that members are now more likely to be university graduates (28%) than to have no qualifications (17%). Education is the dividing line of our age, and trade unions speak for those at the top, not the bottom.

Why have those workers least able to bargain for higher wages turned away from the Labour movement?  Could that trend be stopped or reversed? Union sympathisers like to explain the decline by pointing to legislation and the growing power of big employers, which makes “exploitation” easier. But if that’s the case, why haven’t supposedly exploited workers become more inclined to seek the unions’ protection? McCluskey offers a few cursory paragraphs about automation and technology, and a lot of blaming Thatcher and the Right-wing media — but makes no real attempt to answer such questions. He’s more interested in himself.

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And money, of course. He’s not the only one. Could it be that the unions, in search of members with solid and reliable wages to pay membership dues, have been more interested in representing public sector workers? Almost 52% are now union members. And the public sector now has twice as many high-skilled roles than the private sector, since many jobs — teachers, nurses, the police — now require a degree.

No doubt those workers need representation, in the workplace and Parliament. But a labour movement that focuses on relatively secure and affluent state employees, while neglecting those in more precarious positions, is a movement that has lost its way. The “Blairites” share some blame for that, but it’s been more than a decade since Ed Miliband disowned Blair’s “naive” faith in markets — and 14 years since the man himself left office. 2019 was the nadir of the modern Labour movement, and that’s the responsibility of those who led it at the time.

It was Corbynism that turned Labour into the party of the middle class. But he was aided and abetted by the man who was being paid to speak for British workers — who instead spent millions of pounds of their money trying to buy himself influence over a political project that repelled them. And McCluskey is about as sorry for it as for lying about that broken arm.

June and July are when the horse racing calendar reaches its peak, carnivalesque events which illustrate one of the great curiosities of English life: how so many social patterns are U-shaped — popular with the toffs at the top and the plebs at the bottom, with not much interest in between.

The most eventful day in the racing calendar is Ladies Day at Ascot, a term that dates back to an anonymous poem written in 1823 which declared: “Ladies’ Day… when the women, like angels, look sweetly divine.” Although this is the sport of kings, Ladies Day tends to be best known for the various drunken fights between women in expensive dresses, often while their menfolk lie passed out on the grass. This has become so frequent as to be almost part of English culture, like the Friday before Christmas where people are allowed to have a punch-up.

Horse racing sums up the point once made by the great Billy Connolly when he said: “The proper serious upper class are all fucking nuts and they are a great laugh. The working class are all fucking nuts and they are a great laugh. It’s just the middle that sucks. What I found when I was in the pub was the rich and the successful from millionaires’ row mixed very easily with the council house people — and it was the V-necked jumper Volvo mob who had the problem. They wondered why [the upper class] were talking to them fucking scrubbers.”

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Are we free on Freedom Day?

By Ian Birrell

The Army is the classic example of an institution popular at both ends of the social spectrum, with public school-educated Ruperts in the officers’ mess and squaddies in the ranks, still heavily recruited from poorer areas. Except during two world wars, no one in my family, bred by hundreds of years of reading-related short-sightedness and bourgeoise cowardice, has ever considered the military. It would be almost inconceivable for someone in the middle of the English class system to do so.

But that has always been the case. The late medieval satire Le roman de Renart le contrefait observed that: “When the vassals must go to join the host, the bourgeois rest in their beds; when the vassals go to be massacred in battle, the bourgeois picnic by the river.”

Fighting was the original role of the aristocracy, and it was not until the 14^th century that rich merchants like Michael de la Pole — whose father rather vulgarly made his money in wool rather than stabbing someone while riding a horse — began to enter the highest ranks. Even in modern conflict the nobility has made an outsized sacrifice, with the great public schools losing hugely disproportionate numbers in the First World War. (Old Etonians suffered twice the average casualty rate.)

Big families are another marker of class, with those at each end of the socio-demographic index having the highest fertility. True aristocrats, just like true proletariats, are also more likely to spend a great deal of time with family members, and they are both more likely to give their children wacky names, whether it’s Prince, Rara or Zenia.

Their surnames are often hard to tell apart, too. During the recent European Championship, Birmingham MP Jess Philips tweeted: “My youngest’s question for tonight ‘why do footballers never have double-barrelled names?’”

It was interpreted as being a statement on the England heroes’ proletarian origins, yet it was a strange thing to write without checking — because countless English footballers have double-barrelled names, to such an extent that it’s a cliché. Double-barrelled names are a classic example of the class U-curve.

Today horse racing remains the great class uniter, but once upon a time there were a whole variety of “sports” — essentially animal torture — enjoyed both by toffs and peasants. As Ian Mortimer recalls in his entertaining book on the Regency period, the Westminster dog pit, where hounds would rip various other animals to pieces, was tremendously popular with both the upper classes and poor; when Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, the future tsar, came to London he absolutely loved it.

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Boxing was also a very upper-and-lower class sport, and fashionable gentleman known as “the Fancy” would attend London pugilist schools alongside scrawny cockneys. Poet Robert Southey said that “a boxing-match settles all disputes among the lower classes, and when it is over they shake hands, and are friends”, while the upper-class went for duelling instead.

Some aristocrats liked fighting so much they sought out the company of rough working men to give them a good scrap, among them Regency rake and eccentric, and Tory MP, “Mad” Jack Mytton. Mytton, a member of the Shropshire squirarchy, had attended Cambridge, where he drank 2,000 bottles of port and failed to graduate, before going on a Grand Tour and joining the Army. The perfect aristo.

Mytton was a great enthusiast of hunting, another popular sport among both ends of the spectrum, and when on one occasion a Welsh miner got in his way while out enjoying his favourite pastime, he dismounted and challenged him to a fight. The two men punched each other continually during 20 rounds of bare-knuckle boxing and when the Welshmen surrendered the Tory gave him 10 shillings for his trouble. A fun day was had by all.

Similarly, tattoos have historically been popular among aristocrats and the urban poor. Edward VII had a cross and George V a dragon, which he got while in the Navy, while Winston Churchill’s mother had a snake on her wrist. Tattoos are now ubiquitous and classless, but people’s social status can often still be marked out by fashion, an area where working-class men in their 20s have often aped the aristocratic look; the most famous case of this is Burberry, the brand which went from being a very Sloane Ranger/Country Life outfit to ubiquitous among football hooligans at one point.

But then perhaps the most obvious — and largely forgotten — product of upper-lower class cooperation is football itself. In Beastly Fury, his account of the birth of the national sport, Richard Sanders wrote how the football came about from a mixture of (extremely violent) public-school culture and peasant folk traditions. The game had been popular in medieval England, repeatedly banned as it invariably ended with disorder, until the custom was largely suppressed in the early Victorian period. (Remnants of the old game are still played in a few villages in England, if that’s your kind of thing.)

The aristocracy tolerated these anarchic events but the new industrialists were hostile, as were the trade unions, one union leader denouncing football as “barbarous recklessness and supreme folly”. They especially disliked how upper-class men would stand on the sidelines cheering it on as all great fun, one complaining “Your ‘Betters’ have been foremost in this fête, hallooing you like brute dogs to the strife”. Shrovetide football, often accompanied by widespread violence, was banned by middle-class campaigners who disliked the “barbarous and disgusting play of football”, as one called it.

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But the rural poor loved it, as did the toffs, with variations of football surviving in the great public schools where “the ancient folk sport was given a new lease of life in the mid-nineteenth century when it came close to dying out among the common people”.

From the late 1830s there was a football scene at Cambridge University, the only problem being that all the public schools played different rules, some vastly so (Rugby especially). Football came to be pioneered by the likes of former Harrow schoolboys John and Charles Alcock, yet the real hotbed of the game was in Sheffield, home to the world’s oldest surviving football club; Sanders suggests that this was because the local folk game had lingered in this part of Yorkshire in the hill villages of Penistone, Thurlstone and Holmforth. “Association football was now essentially a fusion of the Charterhouse/Westminster-influenced game played in London and the more folk-influenced game that had emerged from Sheffield.”

Eventually football would become a heavily working-class sport, only becoming truly classless from the 1990s, but its origins lie in Connolly horseshoe theory. Unlike rugby, however, football didn’t split along class lines, because the upper-class FA were willing to accept professionalism, whereas the RFA refused, leading northern teams to form the Rugby League. Significantly, Sanders attributes this to the aristocratic confidence of football’s founders. “It may well be that this reflected the newer, lower-status public schools many of the men running rugby had attended,” he wrote, “they were less secure socially than the Eton and Harrow men who ran football and therefore less comfortable compromising.”

And this has always been the case. Aristocrats and poor can act like each other, dress like each other or indulge in the same pastimes, partly because no one is going to mistake them. As Scott Alexander explained in his seminal essay Right is the New Left, most fashions try to signal that someone is a notch above their real status, while avoiding giving the signal of being the status immediately under.

But you’re never going to be mistaken for someone several notches above or below. A few children now have double-barrelled names but one reason it has not proved so popular among progressive middle-class parents may be the signal; if you’re the first person in your family to go to university and you’re now middle class, no one is going to mistake you for a double-barrelled aristocrat who lives on an estate; but they may mistake you for a double-barrelled struggling single mum who lives on an estate.

We also tend to resent or dislike those closest to us in the pecking order. Despite the folksy image, Jess Phillips, like many prominent Labour MPs, comes from the comfortable ranks of the bourgeoisie, her mother having been a senior NHS administrator. Their hereditary class enemies are the traditionally Tory-voting members of the aristocracy and squirearchy just above them — the double-barrelled brigade — and many a political or journalistic worldview was formed by class resentments at Oxford and Cambridge, against those toffs from the Bullingdon Club. 

But while people are more likely to feel hostility to people immediately above or below them on the social spectrum, those more distant may feel either irrelevant or a curiosity. We don’t compare our lives to people unlike us, nor feel our status threatened. That might explain why people across the country continue to vote for the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, almost caricature Old Etonians, because they feel that like them, they are properly fucking nuts.

Then at 11ish and 13ish, we arrived roughly simultaneously at the onset of puberty. Suddenly he was a lot taller than me and, seemingly overnight, noticeably stronger. Any illusions I had about boys and girls being equal in every way died in that moment, along with my title as All-Harrington Arm-Wrestling Champion.

If you’re a woman with a middle-class upbringing and career path, the fact that men are generally stronger than you doesn’t normally make much difference. Chances are you went to a school that discouraged bullying and punished physical violence. You probably now do an office-based job. So why care about arm wrestling?

After all, feminism is, as activist Cheris Kamarae put it, “the radical notion that women are human beings”: that means believing men and women are equal, sexism is bad, and being able to vote is good. What’s not to like?

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Feminists shouldn't have sex before marriage

By Mary Harrington

If you’re such a woman, you were probably delighted to see Kamala Harris elected as Vice-President of the United States last week. Harris broke new ground for diversity and equality, not just as the first female Vice-President, but as the first black and South Asian one, too. Sure enough, the magazine of the European Parliament, a reliable barometer of bland liberal orthdoxy, hailed Harris’ election as “a remarkable day for democracy and women”.

During her victory speech, Harris herself rejoiced that every little girl watching now “sees that this is a country of possibilities”. She gave a stirring message to “children of our country regardless of your gender”, urging them to “dream with ambition, lead with conviction and see yourselves in a way that others may not simply because they’ve never seen it before”. And while it looks as though it just casually strolled into Harris’ speech as a polite euphemism for the word “sex”, the word “gender” is central to the brand of individualist feminism she now embodies.

Feminists have long argued that “gender” and “sex” are different. Gender encompasses the stereotypes and social expectations governing men and women, while sex is the biological stuff: dangly bits, gestation, hormones and so on. According to this narrative, men and women are basically the same apart from those minor physical details, and it’s mostly ingrained sexist stereotypes that keep women down.

So it’s become a standard feminist pastime to criticise passive or weak female movie characters: think of Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder in Dr No (1962), whose role mostly comprised wearing a bikini and being rescued from peril. Being depicted along such stereotyped lines, we’re told, normalises women’s sexual objectification, keeps women locked into second-class roles and deters us from seeking top jobs. In recent years, Hollywood has stepped up to its feminist duty by replacing these stock roles with strong, active and pugnacious characters, such as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games or Rey in the new Star Wars movies.

The dowager queen and princess of smashing sexist stereotypes are Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, who in 2019 published The Book of Gutsy Women, an anthology of inspiring female pioneers. The Clintons’ “gutsy women” include, for example, Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both US Houses of Congress, and Sally Ride, the first American woman to go into space. Let’s call the stereotype-smashing, freedom-chasing school of women’s liberation “Clinton feminism”: it’s a movement of strong female role models and stories about “the first woman to do [stereotypically masculine thing]”. Again: what’s not to like?

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Back in 2016, of course, Clinton feminists were busy cheering on Hillary Clinton herself, who looked like she might pull off one of the most high-profile “first woman” accolades still unclaimed: President of the United States. Only then it turned out that the new President would not only be another man but – worse – a man whose most famous remark on the subject of women was how he liked to “grab ‘em by the pussy”.

In response to this affront, millions of angry women donned knitted pink “pussy” hats and took to the streets in protest. And the demographic make-up of these marchers reveals something that is routinely swept under the carpet by Clinton feminism: social class. According to one survey, 43% of marchers earned above $75,000 per year – despite only 16% of Americans of either sex earning that amount or more. Meanwhile, 52% were graduates, compared to 35% of American women.

But this wasn’t just some freak of the Women’s March. When it comes to embracing feminism, there’s a well-established gap between working and middle-class women on both sides of the pond. One UK poll from 2018 showed that 31% of middle-class women think of themselves as feminists – a figure which dropped to a mere 20% among working-class women. And the numbers are broadly the same across the US; 16% of women educated to high school level identify themselves as feminist compared to 26% of graduate women. Why is that? Surely feminist liberation and equal opportunities are for all women? Well, kind of. When you look a little closer, it becomes clear that the Clinton feminism of “gender” doesn’t just sweep class under the carpet (or, perhaps, asks the cleaner to do so). It also hides what ‘gender’ refers to: sex.

The relation between class and sex becomes clearer when you remember that chasing workplace equality gets steadily easier the less physical a job is. It’s one thing to demand an equal right to earn hundreds of thousands a year as a lawyer, but there’s no feminist campaign for an equal right to become bin men. And everyone knows why. It’s because waste collection is arduous work, and males are – as I learned aged 11 – almost always stronger than females.

Gruellingly physical jobs are just less appealing, too. You’re bound to fight harder for a crack at the jobs traditionally done by men in your social class if those jobs have titles like “lawyer” rather than “sewage worker” or “bin man”. And even for lawyers, Clinton feminism can only ignore sex so far: what we call the “gender pay gap” is mostly an effect of the brutal fact that smashing the glass ceiling is difficult to combine with having babies. Although this is also easier if you’re rich, because along with doing non-physical jobs wealthy women can subcontract the work of raising babies  – and even, for some, gestating them. Seen from this perspective, the shortfall in working-class women identifying as “feminist” seems justified.

Because inasmuch as it refers to smashing stereotypes and celebrating CEOs and Vice-Presidents, at least in its mainstream usage, the word “feminism” has been colonised by the class interests of a wealthy elite. This minority of women have comprehensively liberated themselves from the constraints of female biology – whether it women’s relative physical weakness or the time constraints imposed by motherhood – and have achieved this at least in part on the backs of poorer women. That is, under Clinton feminism, the richer a woman is, the freer she is.

And it doesn’t stop there. Having freed wealthy women from their own biology, Clinton feminism has set its sights on abolishing biology for everyone – including those women still affected by it. On his inauguration day, Biden signed an executive order obliging federally funded institutions to interpret “sex discrimination” to include “gender identity” in the category “sex”. In other words, it’s now forbidden to discriminate against a woman for being male, if that male identifies as a woman.

From a Clinton feminist point of view, this is self-evidently feminist progress. It’s part of the great feminist project of ending all sexist discrimination – up to and including discrimination against people who identify as women, for not being biologically female.

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In a way, this is understandable. Katniss Everdeen and her ilk gave a generation of women the impression that men and women are broadly physically similar. And the more middle-class you are, the less opportunity you have to revise that view. If your understanding of male and female physical capabilities was shaped not by family members hauling bins for a living, but high-kicking action movie heroines, the idea of anyone’s choices being limited by something so trivial as “sex assigned at birth” just looks like the kind of bigotry feminism has been fighting since forever.

So an edict that forbids schools from excluding male competitors from all-female athletic competitions, provided they identify as female, may, as the Guardian put it, “offer hope for young trans athletes”. But it also abolishes at the stroke of a Clinton-feminist pen any possibility of fair sporting competition for girls and women. Meanwhile, according to radical feminist campaign group WoLF, it could also end any legal standing for sex segregation in domestic violence shelters or prisons.

This all leaves American supporters of women’s rights in a bit of a bind. Trump may have grabbed ‘em by the pussy, and bragged about it in a repulsive way. But is it really better to be governed by an administration that lacks even The Donald’s (apparent literal) grasp of female anatomy? This probably depends how you look at it.

For just as the perks of Clinton feminism trickle up the class hierarchy, its downsides sink to the bottom. It won’t be Clinton feminists who watch the athletic scholarship that was their only prospect of college funding be swept away by someone who went through male puberty. And it won’t be the Clinton feminists who get locked in prisons that are now effectively mixed-sex.

All but the wealthiest women know that you can’t just legislate biology out of existence. As the losses and indignities resulting from the Clinton feminist effort to do so multiply, outrage will build as well. I suspect we’ll see a feminist mutiny before long – and not the nice polite feminism of women who earn more than $75,000 a year. And I don’t think it will be directed at the patriarchy. It’ll be directed at the selfish elite who stole the women’s movement to feather their own nests, then tried to abolish females in the name of freedom.

Middle-class used to be about having some disposable income after you had paid basic bills, including rent and food. But in the current circumstances, the term is so heavily blurred by the many and varied attacks on its members that it can mean any group that the writer dislikes. Here is an example of the kind of attack to which I refer. It happens to come from The Daily Telegraph:

“They [Remain supporters] are discombobulated by the fact that those who make £30,000 a year selling double glazing technically belong to the same sect as those who make £30,000 editing poetry books; and that Oxford graduates are theoretically condemned to the same social strata as those brandishing a degree from Oxford Brookes.”

The fundamental argument is that only snobbery can lead to a different political decision regarding membership of the EU. We also learn that “Many voted Brexit precisely to disorientate and dislodge the old elites and to allow ordinary people a greater democratic say and real democratic clout.”

If I were to ask the writer who the old elites are, I would probably sound like one of them; indeed, Remain insistence on detailed reasons to Leave has become itself a sign of entitlement, as has any wish to stage a debate. Such friendly non-elite folk as the TV historian David Starkey lambast ‘the Establishment’ — of which he is not a member, apparently — as treasonous for negotiating on behalf of the EU.

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By James Bloodworth

And it’s not just the Right. On the Left, The Canary is home to thousands of attacks on the elitism, centrism and middlingness of the BBC, like this one:

“During BBC Question Time on 12 September, host Fiona Bruce’s mask slipped for one revealing moment… it demonstrated a light-hearted, good-natured playfulness between the BBC host and her Conservative minister panellist.”

They are all in it together. Like many articles on the Canary site, the piece is mostly composed of tweets by Labour politicians and Labour Party members. The Right dislike the BBC too, and for the same reason:

“Andrew Neil… has complained that the corporation’s comedy output is too left wing… self satisfied, self adulatory, unchallenged left-wing propaganda.”

Many who have attempted to analyse the reason for the divisions in developed economies have blamed the middle classes. For instance, David Goodhart’s analysis of the Brexit vote as a conflict between the somewheres and the anywheres insists that the anywheres are part of a techno-elite equally happy in any city — rather like the urban elite defined by Christophe Guilluy in his analysis of the gilets jaunes. Guilluy writes that “a new bourgeoisie, secure in its gentrified redoubts” has left behind the ordinary citizen. He also uses the term bobo — bohemian bourgeois — coined by David Brooks in 2000.

Among synonyms for bobo, Wikipedia lists champagne socialist, hipster, liberal elite, and metropolitan elite. All are terms of abuse rather than analysis, so it is unclear who Guilluy means. And then comes the slippage: Guilluy uses the phrase “the upper class” as though it meant the same as the bobo class and the new bourgeoisie, since all of them, according to him, see globalisation as an opportunity; then in another paragraph, these individuals have become “executives” and then “the corporate upper-class”, growing richer at the expense of an unidentified majority. They are “the wealthiest”.

It is this slippage – from bourgeois to elite to establishment to globalisation – that has become fundamental to the populist policies of the Trump and Johnson regimes, and also of their opponents on the far left. But the whole structure relies on the unexamined conflation of the CEO of, say, Uber (who makes $6.4 million a year) with a head teacher or a systems analyst. While the former could be understood in good old-fashioned Marxist terms as taking more than a fair share, the others are just as dependent on a salary of dwindling value as any policeman or ambulance driver. Hollowing out the middle as a repeated rhetorical move is the reason that the politics of both Left and Right are becoming ever more extreme, and ever more resistant to even the suggestion of compromise. Compromise is now repeatedly represented as betrayal; differences of opinion are figured as treachery.

The many are now committed to the removal of the institutions that promote the cause of “the elite”. Such institutions are resisting the will of the people, resisting their rights. It follows that “the people” is a category that excludes members of “the elite”; judges, civil servants, students, parliamentarians, and academics are not “the people” and nor are they part of “the many”. Instead, they are part of the few. This group of non-persons may now include in some contexts doctors, lawyers, and anybody in the arts.

Suggested reading

Why do the elites despise the 'aspidistra class'?

By Graeme Archer

It is worth reminding ourselves that at least these groups are not actually disappearing, or not yet, but they did disappear in Ukraine in the 1920s, in Poland in late 1939, in Chile in the 1980s. But that literal disappearance was preceded by a figurative blanking, a series of routine attacks on the prestige and credibility of the organisations they represented.

Unfortunate, too, is the assumption that working for a globalised company makes you an enthusiast for globalisation and therefore non-aligned to a country or land. Ironically, Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentary general Henry Ireton argued exactly that about everybody who was not rich enough for the then strenuous franchise test for the House of Commons: that they did not have a stake in the country and could move abroad if the laws became displeasing or disadvantageous.

Obviously, this is conceptually completely cracked when contemplating Cromwell and Ireton’s agricultural labourer contemporaries. But it is really just as ridiculous when contemplating the average lawyer — or teacher or doctor for that matter.

Suggested reading

My social mobility shame

By DARREN 'LOKI' MCGARVEY

Historians usually say, glibly, that liberal democracy requires the middle classes to survive, and it is well understood that their economic destruction through the hyperinflation experienced in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s was one of the reasons for the rise of fascism. In Britain, the middle classes have not had to face this level of economic woe – yet; the collapsing pound and stalling of the property market are not the brightest of signs.

There has, however, been an equal loss of cultural capital, and soft power. The populist consensus across the Conservative party relies heavily on the fact that nobody thinks of themselves as an oligarch, and everybody can be relied on to see themselves as clinging on precariously. One reason for that, of course, is the tireless efforts of the press to stir dread, including fear of weather events and of rising knife crime. One of the deepest ironies of the referendum campaign was these same newspapers use of the phrase “project fear” to describe the political tactics of their opponents.

In exactly these ways, the many genuine threats to middle-class well-being and security can be further deployed against them. One characteristic form of this is the ironic pity piece in which some unfortunate professional working couple are lured into describing how difficult it is to live on £120,000 a year, so that they can be jeered at by those struggling on far less. It’s a modern pillory.

Suggested reading

The closed world of the 'enlightened' middle class

By James Bloodworth

Successive attacks on the middle classes are attacks on representative democracy itself. The current government stance on Parliament and politicians is not very different from Jeremy Corbyn’s contempt for Blairites. Judges are traitors. Lawyers are liars. Scientists fake results. Academics have all caved cravenly to social justice warriors. Objectivity is so impossible to imagine that one of the words we use to describe it — disinterested — has all but disappeared except as a synonym for boredom. These circumstances have created the opportunity for the political chaos we have now seen. If we want to survive it, we need to make sure that the centre can hold.

I propose an alternative definition of middle-class that should prevent the misuses and disavowals we see in the public sphere: those who pay income tax. Fewer than three-fifths of the adult population have high enough incomes to pay any income tax at all. I also propose an alternative definition of upper-middle-class: those who pay higher rate tax, around 15% in 2017. I propose this because it’s free from ideological freight.

If we can keep a more clear-sighted view of the income of the groups under discussion, then perhaps we have a chance of inoculating ourselves against the more specious claims and counter-claims of our modern populists.

The Conservatives walk away with a national equivalent vote of just 28%. To put this in perspective, if it were replicated at a general election it would be a lower share of the vote than what Michael Howard presided over in 2005, and a lower share of the vote than what John Major presided over in 1997.

It would be the party’s lowest vote in history.

The results that they’ll still be poring over in Conservative headquarters reflect the continuation of trends that I first pointed to in the shadow of the 2017 general election, with my colleague Oliver Heath.

To understand the dilemma facing the Conservative Party you need to drill down into its electorate.

Ever since the vote for Brexit, the party has been polling stronger in pro-Brexit areas, among working-class voters and in communities where there are larger numbers of voters without degrees. They have been steadily losing territory, though, in economically secure, middle-class and pro-Remain areas where there are larger concentrations of graduates and social liberals.

Suggested reading

How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

This tension was less of a risk when it looked as though the Conservative Party would deliver on Brexit and lead Britain out of the EU. Having done so, the party and a new leader could then have gone the country with a radically revamped domestic policy agenda, with as much for Remainers as Leavers.

But, as we know, things didn’t quite turn out that way.

With Theresa May having failed, so far, to deliver any sort of Brexit, the Conservative Party is getting hit on all sides. Their biggest setbacks were in Remain areas. And among the voters, the most important were not the 18-24-year olds that are generally obsessed over, but the slightly older, 30-and 40 somethings who swung hardest against them in 2017.

These voters comprise what I call the ‘Things Can Only Get Better Generation’; they are the middle-aged and young middle-aged who came of age under New Labour and Tony Blair and who probably today have young families of their own.

In focus groups, they tell me a lot.

They say they feel squeezed on multiple fronts. They are often struggling to pay for childcare and also worry about how on earth they are going to afford to send their kids to university in the future.

Suggested reading

Is Corbyn doing the country a favour?

By Tim Bale

The Things Can Only Get Better Generation is absolutely convinced that their kids will have a lower standard of living than they did, and that the future is going to be harder than the present.

They worry about how they will afford to look after their own Baby Boomer parents, who are retired and will soon need care.

They are probably renting or, if they are not, then heavy mortgage payments and few savings mean that their family is one crisis away from financial disaster. And they lean instinctively against Brexit, or if they voted for it then they have concluded that it is being managed disastrously. The Tories are losing them.

But most worrying of all is the fact that the party is now also losing ground among the older and more committed Leavers, albeit less dramatically than it is losing ground in Remainia. Many of those areas where the party lost council seats, or councils flipped into no overall control, had endorsed Brexit in 2016.

But their results could have been far worse.

The Conservatives were only saved from further embarrassment by Nigel Farage – and the fact that his Brexit Party decided not to contest these elections. If the populists had done so, then the Tories would have seen much more serious losses in pro-Leave areas.

Indeed, in polls for the European Parliament elections, the Brexit Party is already polling around the 30% mark, while it is taking around 14% in Westminster polls –more than enough to pave the way for Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street. Much of this vote is coming from disillusioned 2017 Conservative voters and Leavers. Farage has already won over 52% of the former and 60% of the latter.

Suggested reading

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

The perfect storm that is approaching the Conservative Party is going to cause significant damage on all sides. The middle-class Remainers who are still in the party will finally jump ship or abstain, while Brexiteers will drift over to the Brexit Party or similarly decide that turning out to cast a vote at the next election is not worth it.

But nor did Labour fare particularly well at the polls. While Corbyn and his party did make some gains, their overall tally, compared with 2015, was a net loss of 82 seats.

An unwritten law at local elections is that the main party of opposition is supposed to enjoy gains not suffer losses. Nor is it supposed to suffer losses in its heartlands. That, though, is precisely what happened.

While it is true that the red Labour wave is continuing to sweep out beyond London, and into the commuter towns and parts of the South East, commentators who argued that Labour would suffer no costs for drifting toward Remain now find themselves having to explain serious Labour losses in northern pro-Leave areas – from Ashfield to Bolton, from Bolsover to Hartlepool, from Burnley to Darlington.

Suggested reading

Have Remainers lost perspective?

By Matthew Goodwin

The weakening of Labour’s relationship with its traditional working-class voters, which started to break down long before the 2016 referendum, and which I first pointed to in 2014, continues. And there isn’t much evidence that the challenge will ease.

Blue-collar Britain, which leans heavily toward Brexit, is now being targeted by the Brexit Party, which is spending much of its time campaigning in pro-Brexit Labour heartlands, as well as seats that flipped from Labour to the Conservatives in 2017.

For Labour, this means that, once again, the party is going to have to fend off national populists in its pro-Brexit heartlands where, we tend to forget, UKIP often finished in second place at the 2015 general election.

But, for me, the most striking statistic of all from the local elections was that the combined share of the vote going to the two big parties tumbled to just 56% – the second lowest figure on record. A bad night Labour and the Tories was a good night for independents, Liberal Democrats and Greens.

In this sense, one of the peculiarities about Britain’s Brexit moment is that it is making our politics more European. Britain voted to leave the European Union but its political system is now fragmenting like many other EU member states. The old mainstream parties are being squeezed by an array of new challengers.

The weakening of Britain’s two-party system has been visible in the national polls for a while. In the past month, those challengers above alongside the Brexit Party and UKIP have been taking as much as 46% of the vote.

Suggested reading

Tories will reap the Brexit whirlwind

By Matthew Goodwin

This is a stunning turnaround from the general election less than two years ago when ‘the others’ took less than half this figure.

It is a remarkable shift. It is also a deeply problematic one for a political system that is organised around only two, or at a maximum, two-and-a-half parties. The longer this continues, the harder it becomes for either of the major parties to win a large majority. And the longer this continues, the stronger the case for electoral reform becomes.

It is tempting to trace all this to Brexit. But the picture is more complex.

The process of fragmentation that is unfolding in Britain began long ago and is one that our Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish neighbours know well, none of whom are grappling with leaving the EU.

As we argue in National Populism, what is happening in Britain and other advanced democracies is that many of our established, older and hence less flexible parties are struggling to absorb and navigate new issues that are cutting directly across their traditional electorates.

Suggested reading

Europe's biggest test yet

By Matthew Goodwin

Brexit is certainly one of them but there are many others such as immigration, terrorism, refugees, climate change, minority rights and the steady advance of social liberalism, all of which are dividing voters and often because of their values rather than because of their specific views toward specific policies.

The arrival of these value conflicts is also coinciding with a breakdown of tribal loyalty to the main parties, which is making it easier for new populists and other challengers to break through. The firewall of party loyalty is today much weaker.

Meanwhile, deeper changes in the overall structure of societies are reshaping party coalitions from below, and will continue to do so for many years to come. These drivers include the expansion and now squeezing of the new middle-class, the rise of university graduates, our collective failure to respect and support those who choose, or are forced down, other paths, and the ongoing effects of unprecedented migration and demographic change.

Our established parties enjoyed a golden era when much of this was absent or had only just begun. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that they are coming undone.

British politics has been pushed into a state of partial realignment with voters facing cross-cutting pressures and our political parties facing deeply divided electorates. Whether the Conservatives, and whoever succeeds Theresa May, can win voters back and build a new coalition remains to be seen. Likewise, whether Jeremy Corbyn and Labour can cobble together a viable coalition for majority power is unknown. It’s entirely possible that the future holds a full-blown realignment.

For now, though, the only thing we can be certain of is that the fragmentation that has been working through our political system is set to continue. And as the old order struggles to cope, new challengers will take advantage of that volatility.

Not social security, though. That remains very firmly under central government control. But that wasn’t always the case. Before the modern welfare state, social security systems, as well as being rudimentary, were highly localised.

For instance, the Poor Law system of Victorian England varied a lot from place to place – with some areas being much harder on the poor than others. But what explains this variation?

Further reading

A plan to defeat Jeremy Corbyn: provide help to the poorer Britons he has deserted

By James Kirkup

The Economist reports on a new paper by Jonathan Chapman of NYU Abu Dhabi, which looks into the question:

“He compared the generosity and harshness of the conditions of poor-law relief in different areas with the gap between rich and poor, as measured by income from wages, and inequality within the rich, as measured by families’ number of live-in servants.”

The gap between the rich and the poor is of obvious relevance, but why also look at the gap between “within the rich” i.e. between the very rich and the merely middle-class?

Well, it turns out that the size of both kinds of income gap had an effect on local Poor Law policies – albeit in opposite directions:

“He found that areas of high wage inequality had less harsh rules for claiming poor relief—as conventional theory would suggest. More surprisingly, however, he also found that areas with a larger gap between the wealthiest and the simply well-off were much less generous and had much harsher rules for welfare handouts than those where the elites were more uniform.”

In other words, the further they are behind the rich, the less generous that the merely comfortable are inclined to be to the poor.

Might this factor still be in effect today? Obviously, a huge amount has changed since Victorian times – not least the size of the middle class, which like the welfare state is massively bigger than it used to be.

And yet it might explain a seemingly paradoxical feature of our contemporary politics. This is an era of widening inequality – of real anger towards the rich and powerful. And yet as The Economist notes, there’s been no groundswell in support for redistribution through the tax and benefit system.

It’s telling that the radical parties of the Left talk about more spending through borrowing or by resort to exotic measures such as Modern Monetary Theory. If higher taxation is mentioned at all, it is very clearly targeted at the super-wealthy and corporations. As for spending priorities, the emphasis is on free stuff for everyone – e.g. the abolition of student fees, socialised healthcare, universal basic income etc – as opposed to support targeted at the poor.

Further reading

Slaying dragons: Britain's national religion, the NHS

By Peter Franklin

As I’ve argued before, you don’t get Scandinavian-style welfare states without Scandinavian levels of taxation on middle-class incomes – but that appears to be an unsaleable proposition in politics these days.

And no wonder. Writing for the BBC, Sean Coughlan looks at a new report from the OECD that shows how the middle class is falling further and further behind the rich:

“Across OECD countries, which include most of the big economies in Western Europe and North America, the 10% of highest earners have increased their income by a third more than middle earners. In the UK, more than a third of middle-income households ‘report having difficulty making ends meet’, says the OECD. In the United States over the past three decades, the top 1% of earners have increased their slice of total annual income from 11% to 20%.”

The fragility of middle-class household finances isn’t just about income:

“The report, Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class, says that totems of middle class family life, such as access to housing and higher education, have become increasingly expensive.

“The rising cost of property, in particular, has outstripped the growth in income, with parents worrying about the housing prospects for their children.”

Given the ease with which rich avoid tax, the squeezed middle fear that they will be squeezed even harder to pay for a tax-funded redistribution of wealth to the poor.

And whether they pay for it or not, I suspect that people on middling incomes (i.e. the majority of the working population) resent redistribution to the poor when it pays for lifestyles not dissimilar to their own. This isn’t snobbery so much as the sense of unfairness that people feel when the things they have to work for are given to others for free.

I wonder if trends like the expansion of higher education, competition for affordable housing in expensive cities and the erosion of some mid-level occupations is having the effect of pushing the classes closer together – both physically and in terms of socio-economic status. One might have thought this would encourage solidarity, but it could be having the opposite effect – undermining popular support for focusing government assistance on the poorest people.

It is usually assumed that a weaker, less optimistic middle class is bad news for the established parties of the centre-Right. On the one hand, angry older supporters defect to the populist Right; and, on the other, the conveyor belt of prosperity that would otherwise turn young radicals into middle-aged conservatives grinds to a halt.

Further reading

The irrelevant debate over the top rate of tax

By Peter Franklin

And yet the Left needs to watch out too. Right now, their ranks may be swelling with the disaffected children of the middle-class. Indeed, by holding out the prospect of change to Generation Rent, the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders might just find themselves in power. However, what this new Left would be expected to deliver in government wouldn’t just be a bigger welfare state, but a middle class welfare state. That won’t be cheap and they’ll be expected to pay for it without middle-class tax rises.

Yet with the wealth of the rich never more mobile (and alternatives like Modern Monetary Theory being, let us say, unproven) a Left-wing government would have to rely on borrowing and thus the confidence and goodwill of the money markets.

A corrupted capitalist system is close to putting the radical Left into power – and yet it is on that system that the Left in power would have to depend.

Passing a group of Westminster sixth-formers on the street recently sent me on a journey into memory that reminded me of an unspoken truth of political debate around education and opportunity. Though politicians all say they want more social mobility, they don’t really mean it. Or at least, they wouldn’t mean it if they stopped to think about what that actually means.

Suggested reading

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

The boys in question could have come from central casting. All tall, all thin, all floppy hair and loud good humour. One wore the sort of overcoat politicians wear to the Cenotaph, another a Tweed shooting jacket. Both fit perfectly. As did the uniforms that look more like lounge suits. The loafers and brogues were scuffed, of course, but not so much as to conceal how expensive they were.

From 50 yards off, I’d initially clocked them for a group of Tory researchers, either from Conservative party HQ or the Commons, heading back to the office after lunch. It was only when they drew closer that I even realised not one of them was old enough to vote.

The Proustian thing was that seeing those boys – young men, more accurately – strolling through Dean’s Yard took me back to a trip I made to Oxford University 25-odd years ago for an interview.

There were a lot of reasons that I didn’t, in the end, take up a place at Oxford, but one was that it just didn’t feel like a place for someone like me. Too many of the other candidates were cut from the same cloth as those Westminster boys: charming, confident, self-assured and comfortable. They knew they belonged there.

(Some things don’t change. A headteacher in the Northumberland town where I was born recently told me about a boy from his school who is a truly gifted mathematician, the sort of brain that wins prizes and makes millions. So keen was the head to ensure that his pupil ended up at a college with a quad that he personally accompanied the boy to open days and interviews – his parents were too poor and too scared. And when it all paid off and Oxbridge opened its door to that boy? He said No. It just wasn’t a place for him.)

Suggested reading

The closed world of the 'enlightened' middle class

By James Bloodworth

What’s this got to do with social mobility policy? Think again about what social mobility means. It’s a measure of how much someone’s final economic status moves independently of their background: real social mobility means where you end up is determined by your talent, character, effort and actions, not the family you happened to grow up in.

Naturally, politicians talk about upward mobility, focusing on how easily (or not) children from poorer homes can “climb the ladder”, get more education and income than their parents and generally, to use an out-of-fashion phrase, better themselves. Who doesn’t like a story of upward mobility, of people working their way to the top? Of course we want more of that, so of course that’s what politicians like to sell us.

But political conversation on social mobility rarely dwells on downward mobility, where someone ends up with less money and status than their parents. This isn’t a theoretical thing. It happens, though generally only to people who start out in the lower half of the income distribution. If you grow up rich, you’ll almost certainly stay rich in later life; your chances of experiencing downward social mobility are really quite small.

Suggested reading

Why you can't rely on the news media to understand... ordinary people

By Liam Halligan

Why? A lot of people — especially ones who went to private schools and write for Right-wing newspapers – like to explain everything through education: richer kids go to better schools and get better grades, so of course they get better jobs, it’s said. That’s the way of the world, folks. If you want to change it, provide better schools for poor kids.

And of course, poor kids need and deserve better schools; Matthew Goodwin set out that case brilliantly on UnHerd last week. But guess what? Better schools for poor kids will not be enough.

Ask just about any politician about social mobility and they’ll immediately talk about the need to improve state education. They probably won’t talk about the work of Abigail McKnight of the London School of Economics.

In 2015, she produced a report for the Government showing that differences in education aren’t the only reason the British jobs market is tilted in favour of the privileged.

Analysing data from the British Cohort Study — which tracks the lives of 17,000 people born in the same week in 1970 – McKnight reached the following conclusion:

“Children from more advantaged family backgrounds are more likely to have high earnings in later adult life and are more likely to be in a ‘top job’. This is not simply due to different levels of cognitive ability as it holds within attainment groups as well as over the complete distribution.”

In other words, a clever rich kid will grow up to earn more than an equally clever poor one.

Suggested reading

Elitist Britain is a closed shop

By Paul Embery

Indeed, this effect is so strong that some not-so-clever rich kids will grow up to out-earn much smarter poor kids. Their relative failure in education won’t cause them to slide down the ladder.

McKnight sees a “glass floor” under their outcomes, a level below which they cannot fall. She might as well have called it a ‘class floor’ because class plays a huge part in explaining why some people really can’t fail in life, no matter how little they try.

This is what Richard Reeves, a former adviser to Nick Clegg, has called “dream hoarding”. Sometimes life really is a zero-sum game: one person’s success means another cannot succeed. A job taken by an averagely-bright middle class applicant can’t be won by a bright poor one. McKnight speaks of “lower-skilled advantaged children blocking the success of higher-skilled disadvantaged children through the hoarding of opportunities.”

How does this happen? Another 2015 study by the Social Mobility Commission conducted numerous interviews with recruiters from “top” firms in law, accountancy and banking, exploring why their recruitment is skewed in favour of applicants from better-off backgrounds.

Suggested reading

Communist China's class-ridden society

By Peter Franklin

While richer people do tend to get higher exam grades and degrees from “better” universities, that wasn’t the only reason they got the best jobs. The study found that “elite firms define ‘talent’ according to a number of factors such as drive, resilience, strong communication skills and above all confidence and ‘polish’, which participants in the research acknowledged can be mapped on to middle-class status and socialisation.”

In other words, people handing out top jobs aren’t recruiting purely on the basis of brainpower and talent. They’re also hiring the soft skills, demeanour and habits that a privileged upbringing gives you – regardless of your talents or industry.

So those Westminster lads strolling through the yard are right to exhibit such comfort and confidence. They are the holders of what amounts to an insurance policy against failure in life. Even if they do relatively poorly in their exams or at university, they will still, in statistical probability, do OK in life. Indeed, it’s quite possible that their “polish” will see them through to a high-earning career regardless – possibly even beating smarter, poorer kids seeking the same jobs.

A bad outcome for them would be to end up about as wealthy and successful as their parents; falling down the ladder to end up poorer would most likely require either conscious choice or significant, and thus unlikely, misfortune or malfeasance. Botching some exams or even – whisper it – just being a bit thick wouldn’t be enough to put them on the breadline.

Anyone who went to one of our “better” universities will grasp this on an anecdotal level, familiar with stories of contemporaries from affluent homes who drank, toked and dozed their way to a 2:2, or even a third, yet still somehow ended up with a job in the City and a nice house in Fulham. Medicine, the law and politics are generously staffed with people who succeeded at least in part because their parents insulated them from the risk of failure.

But this goes beyond anecdote. McKnight’s data shows that children from high income backgrounds who show signs of low academic ability at age 5 are 35% more likely to be high earners as adults than children from poorer families who show early signs of high ability. Tim Nice But Dim has long vanished from TV, but he lives on in that data and the UK economy.

Suggested reading

Why do the elites despise the 'aspidistra class'?

By Graeme Archer

That study on “polish” and the McKnight paper were both published in 2015. Just as the Coalition government was winding down, the Social Mobility Commission, under Alan Milburn and Gillian Shephard, was just starting to dig into the neglected, uncomfortable but vital aspects of the social mobility challenge.

Four years is a long time in British politics, and the last four especially so. Precious few politicians wanted to engage with that research at the time, and those that did sadly aren’t in a position to build on it. Justine Greening was keen to tackle this issue when she was Education Secretary, but is now wasted on the backbenches. Milburn and Shephard ended up quitting in frustration at Theresa May’s timidity and lack of commitment to social mobility.

Their replacements are serious, well-meaning people; Damian Hinds, the current education secretary, knows the social mobility debate as well as just about any politician. But – in part, no doubt, because of the vast distraction of Brexit – neither he nor the Prime Minister has yet shown the boldness to acknowledge that true social mobility is a sword that cuts both ways; let alone to swing that blade at the armour with which middle-class parents equip their kids.

More from this author

What's killing the Conservatives?

By James Kirkup

To be fair, there are some positive signs. Sam Friedman, an LSE sociologist and the co-author of an excellent recent book (The Class Ceiling – Why it Pays to be Privileged) is now a member of the new Social Mobility Commission. But he’s one of many commissioners, and the worry is that this SMC lacks the focus and clout Alan Milburn’s body had.

The US debate about downward mobility has been illuminated by the work of Reeves, now at the Brookings Institute in Washington; as a country with a clearer story about the importance of mobility, America is perhaps more receptive to new arguments here. But so far, British politicians haven’t quite caught up with these issues.

I can’t think of a politician who doesn’t say Britain should be more socially mobile, that we should have more social mobility. Would quite so many of them be so quick to use those words if ‘more social mobility’ was understood to mean ‘more mediocre middle-class kids ending up poor’?

Breaking the class floor won’t be quick or easy. CV-blind recruitment and ‘contextual’ data on applicants’ backgrounds would be a start. A bigger goal would be challenging the value that is still attached to that polished debating-points style that has its apotheosis in a certain sort of Oxford PPE graduate.

If politicians are serious about social mobility, they should acknowledge and embrace its implications, even if they are uncomfortable on behalf of people for whom comfort is not an aspiration but the norm.

What Gore Vidal said of friendship is true of social mobility too: “It is not enough to succeed. Others have to fail.”

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?