It’s one of a number of lines that makes its way from Stephen Beresford’s 2014 film Pride into the fabulous new stage adaptation at the National Theatre. Beresford and his co-writer, Matthew Warchus, have transformed the classic Brit-flick portraying the then-unlikely union between working-class communities and metropolitan progressives during the miners’ strike into a piece of bombastic and campy musical theater. It lands in a political milieu markedly different from the 2014 film — and certainly from LGSM’s Eighties heyday. In recent years, the story recounted quite faithfully in Pride has become a political fable of the kind beloved on the Left. Like the Jarrow Crusade, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Peterloo Massacre, the Paris Commune, and the Spanish Civil War before it, it is a somewhat melancholic story of a social movement that is said to have succeeded in history’s long vista — in spite of near-term defeat.

But where Pride’s story differs from the parables of the Left canon is in the split fortunes of the LGSM coalition. Britain now is a far-cry from the widespread homophobia of the Eighties, whose officials responded so shamefully to the HIV epidemic. When the young today are told of how Manchester’s chief constable James Anderton — “God’s copper” — described gay men affected by HIV as “swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making”, they are rightly disgusted. Thatcherism failed to suppress gay rights. Within a generation, her Conservative successors would go on to denounce Section 28 and legalize gay marriage, David Cameron declaring this — in an admittedly small pool — to be “one of the things of which I’m proudest”.

But Thatcher and her heirs did succeed in shuttering British heavy industry and neutering the political weight of organized labor. Britain’s breakneck deindustrialization process was faster than any other nation; even the collapsing Soviet Union wasn’t so extreme. It is now a country where skilled manual work has become a niche career choice. Outside London are countless communities that have never recovered from the offshoring of their local industry.

It’s hard not to wonder how LGSM’s visionary founding member Mark Ashton would feel about how things turned out. Mischievous as well as driven, as a young man he spent a six-month stint in the King’s Cross Conservative Club undercover in drag. Played by Jhon Lumsden in Pride, he radiates a manic confrontational energy, simultaneously pithy, erudite, roguish and possessed of a rare moral clarity. When asked why a group of gay people should come to the aid of people who persecuted them growing up, he phlegmatically retorts: “Because miners dig for coal, which produces power, which allows gay people like you to dance to Bananarama till three o’clock in the morning.”

Ashton instinctively connected social liberty and class struggle. Millions of Brits were gay and millions worked in industry, and it was clear how contributions to the economy and social life of Britain linked the two. It would be difficult to draw the same threads together today. How does one link a piebald economy of casualized work, AI data centers, Deliveroo riders, vape shops and photovoltaic cell installers with the remaining contested battlegrounds of social liberty? It isn’t quite so clear how each of us contributes to the life of the other anymore.

Still, it is worth challenging the narrative that has emerged, particularly since the Brexit referendum, that these two core components of the old Labour vote — the urban progressives and the traditional working class — are somehow fundamentally opposed. The commonplace bigotry that I encountered at comprehensive school in a former pit community in the Nineties is dying. Indeed, polling by the likes of YouGov consistently disproves the stereotype of the bigoted, provincial “gammon” who has bewitched progressives since Brexit. People living in Britain’s social mobility cold-spots, characterized by the ghosts of production lines and shipyards, are no more likely to feel animosity towards the non-straight population than people anywhere else. Where homophobia is more prevalent is within religious communities, which leaves the modern progressive with difficult scales to balance, as those people often don’t resemble the middle-aged men of post-industrial England who have become their Ur-baddie.

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I saw the heartbreaking effects of this homophobia first-hand in 2014 — the year the movie Pride was first released. I was a key-worker in various homeless hostels in London. One was for young people in Sydenham where roughly half of my young charges were the disowned teenage children of homophobic parents — all of whom had been taught by their religious leaders that their children’s sexuality made them evil. Each case file would come with a letter from a parent containing words to the effect of: “I do not support my child’s lifestyle. They are no longer my child.” This social and familial ostracization used to be a common part of the gay experience in Britain; activists like Ashton fought so hard to overcome it.

The continuation of such attitudes within highly religious communities is a reality that most modern progressives mostly prefer to ignore. When, in 2019, a school in Birmingham was subject to a months-long campaign of picketing by Muslim parents outraged at a curriculum encouraging acceptance of LGBT+ relationships, most progressives seemed keen to shuffle the episode under the carpet. False claims that mimicked the worst of post-war-era bigotry whirled around social media: the school had a “paedophile agenda”, staff were “teaching children to masturbate”, and children were “being indoctrinated” into homosexuality. The campaigner Amir Ahmed said that children were being “conditioned to accept (gay relationships) as a normal way of life”, while the Imam Mullah Bahm pronounced the school’s headteacher was a “shatani” (a devil) who “needed to be broken”.

There is little sign at present that Left progressives are prepared to challenge such bigotry today; those who did turn up, tying messages of solidarity to the school gates, later went to the police after being pelted with eggs by the protestors. If Zack Polanski, whose Green Party is buoyed by a defecting Muslim vote after Labour’s Gaza failings, is following LGSM’s lead of building solidarity partly as means to a cultural end, he’s doing so very quietly. Meanwhile, Tribune, the magazine built by pioneering feminists like Labour MPs Ellen Wilkinson and Barbara Castle, is now owned by the same religious-conservative businessman whose Islam Channel has been fined by Ofcom for, among other things, advocating acquiescing to marital rape as a religious duty.

In this light, the ethical ethos that Ashton and his comrades held themselves to seems almost alien. LGSM were willing to put in hard yards to convince others they were on their side. Today, according to the pollsters More In Common (and anyone else who has spent any time in progressive circles), the group denoted as “Progressive Activists” are now the most insular citizens in Britain. They almost exclusively socialize with people who agree with them — and they are also the ones most likely to think those who don’t agree with them are morally deficient.

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Rather than drive hundreds of miles with donations for the skeptical but depressed villages of Britain, contemporary progressives stick to their own. They are the type to respond to national news of racial tensions in the depressed estates of Teesside by organizing a night-time vigil on the other side of the country in Walthamstow. They write, read and display dense, self-flagellating books about the difficult and intellectually taxing work of “not being a racist”. They swap Labour councillors for Green councillors in cities already full of Low-Traffic Neighborhoods and car-use penalties, reacting with shock when the small council budget allocations that aren’t already taken by elderly care don’t allow much in the way of revolutionary change.

In many ways, this is a politics of resigned indignation. One that has given up on Britain’s potential and instead built a members-only club inside of her major cities. The Mark Ashton of 1983 would surely feel a sense of disappointment. Progressivism may hold the kind of cultural dominance that previous generations could only have dreamed of — but it has also become an insular subculture. Outsiders are, if not the enemy, irrelevant.

Pride’s relevance today is in the contrast it sets out between LGSM and the modern activist. Rather than cultivating the necessary humility to find common purpose between groups of people, a culture of social media-incentivized extremism and righteous indignation has turned many on the Left into sniffy inquisitors, not entirely convinced that the poor are good enough people to be worth helping.

The National Theatre is Pride’s second stop after a stint in Cardiff. It isn’t clear whether the play will then go on tour, but it’s worth noting that if it does, it’s unlikely to visit the parts of Britain permanently broken by the end of the miners’ strike. Though it is a play that would be ideal for neglected England, it might be almost exclusively applauded by an audience of comfortable Londoners. I wonder whether that is what Ashton would have wanted.

***

Pride is at the National Theatre until 12 September. Friday Rush tickets are available.

Suffice to say this was not an old spit-and-sawdust sort of gym. Yet more than its style, what makes BoxCentric truly remarkable is how unexceptional it now feels. All over London, similar boxing boutiques are sprouting up like welts on a fighter’s face. BXR, founded by Olia Sardarova and backed by Anthony Joshua, has membership fees starting in the thousands. Then there’s JAB Boxing in Victoria, which features champion boxers from Harlem Eubank to Caroline Dubois in its slick promotions. Boxing, a working-class sport, sneered at by the likes of George Orwell, has been repackaged for the affluent.

Boxing’s migration into luxury gyms is easy to mock, but harder to dismiss. These clubs are opening the sport to women, professionals and people who would never enter a traditional gym. They are also giving fighters and trainers a way to earn outside the sport. The problem is not that the rich have discovered boxing. It is that, just as boxing becomes fashionable among the wealthy, the grassroots clubs that made it socially useful are starting to decay — with ominous consequences for the sport and its future.

As a boxer myself, it’s easy to scoff at the posh hitting pads. “This isn’t real boxing,” one England prospect tells me, “it’s feel-good boxing.” In practice, that means less actual sparring and more bag work, circuits and pads, played to some trippy music. Yet it’s precisely the pressure of being punched in the face, to paraphrase Joshua Buatsi, the Ghanaian-British Olympian, that makes diamonds. And for those of us who used to pay £2 in subs, £225 a month feels like a hook in the liver. For me, then, visiting BoxCentric felt rather exclusionary, a far cry from boxing’s egalitarian motto: all are welcome, rich or poor, black or white as long as you can fight.

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The economic upper cut stings in other ways too. Think again to our England prospect. He wakes up early, cycles across London to teach a class, then returns for his own training in Brixton. And for what? Life for kids like him is hard. “You spend 10-to-15 years in the amateurs and get your brains bashed in,” says Dan Morley, a pundit and former professional. “There’s no money in the gym. We make little money from it.” It’s easy, then, to resent the suit turning up in a sanitized gym, thinking that a few hits makes him Balham’s answer to Joe Frazier.

All the same, I’m not sure sneering is quite right. “Everyone,” Morley points out, “should have an opportunity to try a sport.” That’s especially true when these new spaces have opened boxing up to people who would never have walked into a traditional gym. Louie Basso, a manager at JAB, tells me that around 65% of their clients are women. This is unsurprising. I myself have seen many women wanting to enter my gym, but finding the old boxing environment intimidating.

Morley makes a similar point. “It gives people who in previous eras would turn their nose up at boxing an understanding of how difficult it is — the technical aspect.” If a cleaner, safer, better-lit gym gets more men and women hitting pads, learning footwork and discovering the discipline of the sport, that’s hardly a bad thing, especially when audience numbers continue to drop.

As our England prospect’s early-morning hustle implies, meanwhile, luxury boutiques help boxers themselves. That £225 a month has to go somewhere, and fighters need all the help they can get. As Mark Turley shows in Journeymen: The Other Side of the Boxing Business, the average journeyman’s living often depends less on ability but on the fact that he’s a poor ticket seller. Few know that the fight game is stacked in favor of the ticket seller; as Morley puts it, the industry is “fucked”, controlled by promoters and with very few opportunities for outsiders. Boutique clubs offer former fighters a way to earn money outside the magic circle. Visit 12×3, a gym in the City, you can be taught by Darren Barker, a British, Commonwealth and world champion. George Veness, the founder of JAB, is another good example. A Newham boxing vet who fought for England before leaving the sport, he began training Victoria’s Secret models before replicating the idea at JAB.

There’s a broader point here too. Boxing may have been the poor man’s sport, but few boxers would begrudge men like Veness from making money. That, after all, is what prize fighting is all about. And there are other reasons to feel relaxed about boxing’s posh turn too. When the Marquess of Queensberry put his patronage behind the sport in 1867, he helped civilize it. From the brutal brawling days of old, gloves, rounds, the 10-second knockout rule were all introduced. Without the Queensberry Rules, without money, boxing may not have survived in the form we know it. Certainly, many young men would have pointlessly lost their lives.

If rich people want to pay for expertise — let them. Even if the next Mike Tyson doesn’t come from Knightsbridge, we may still reap the benefits of high-flyers becoming advocates for the sport, just like the Marquess of Queensberry himself. Like it or not, it’ll be precisely these people who become future school governors, magistrates and lawyers, and who may actually advocate for boxing as a way of solving London’s epic social problems.

Having worked with young men involved in knife crime, I know that the first thing you teach a novice is not aggression. It’s emotional regulation. You teach balance, positioning, defense and timing. And that can only be achieved if you can stay calm, as Teddy Atlas, Mike Tyson’s old trainer, put it, “in an un-calm environment”. In sparring, the aim is not simply to hit the other man. It is to create enough distance to think and act, not merely react. To remain composed while someone is offloading on you is a beautiful thing. It gives you immense confidence in the ring, but also in life, business, conflict and personal relationships.

All that’s useful whoever you are, but especially for Londoners born on the wrong side of the tracks. Social workers and youth-offending teams in overstretched boroughs like Croydon recognize the benefits of boxing, often taking their charges to the gym. Every single kid that I myself trained up in Croydon had an absent father; what boxing gives them is not merely toughness. It gives them discipline, restraint and, believe it or not, gentleness. Little wonder that gyms often act as a mediator with law enforcement, even as some police forces have funded clubs as a preventative measure against antisocial behavior.

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What a shame, then, that while places like BoxCentric thrive, their working-class cousins are struggling. Once again, money is key to this dynamic, with soaring rents a particular blight. Consider the plight of Broad Street Amateur Boxing Club. A typical East London community center, nestled between Shadwell’s council estates, it has a 138-year tradition in the sweet science. But then, in 2024, it received an annual rent increase of more than £60,000, saved only by a public campaign. Nor is this just a London problem. Stockbridge ABC in Liverpool has struggled. The late Ricky Hatton’s old club, Hyde & District Amateur Boxing Club near Manchester, is at risk too. Sudbury Boxing Club, with a 70-year pedigree, recently needed Eddie Hearn, the larger-than-life promoter, to step in and appeal for funding.

These sorts of things create resentment because property owners and councils are removing one of the things that allows for Britain’s poorest to succeed. When someone chooses to “turn over”, or become a professional boxer, it’s often because other doors are closed to him. To prevent a young man from carving out a future with the only thing he has — his fists — seems to me a grave injustice. And what councils fail to grasp is that offering to move a club elsewhere doesn’t solve the issue. I saw this myself at Sting ABC, a club I once boxed and coached at. Too many of the gym’s young boxers were lost to the streets of Croydon, despite the dedication of coach Bruce Smith, an ex-British army veteran. Only now, after years of struggle, has Sting ABC finally re-found its feet in Lewisham.

After all, the young people who frequent a club can’t move with it. A boxing gym isn’t just a room with bags. It’s a local institution and a source of pride. Each gym has its own character, whether that’s the spartan white paint of Miguel’s in Brixton, or the converted church at Ingle Boxing Gym in Sheffield. Or else go to London Military Boxing Club and watch my own teachers, Andy Haines and Del Ali, teach their boys how not to lose control, how strength without composure is useless. That’s why boxing was once taught in schools. Boxing absorbs social pressure and tensions from home and the schoolyard. It creates intergenerational authority. It gives difficult boys structure, in a way no Tube poster campaign ever could.

So yes, let the lawyers, bankers, influencers and executives box. Let women find confidence in gyms that feel safe rather than hostile. Let old fighters earn proper money holding pads for people who want to feel, for an hour at least, that they are part of the fight game, that there is no tomorrow, that they are really in a Rocky movie. Boxing and wealth need not be enemies.

But if boxing becomes only a premium lifestyle product, something has gone badly wrong. The sport’s glamor has always depended on the existence of the unglamorous rooms beneath it: the local clubs, the volunteer coaches, the kids paying a few quid to train, the veterans wrapping hands, the smell of sweat and leather, the lessons in restraint disguised as violence. Whatever happens, after all, the rich will always be able to buy the feeling of boxing. But the poor will need its function.

Given this seismic shakeup, and Paxton’s polarizing past and personality, many are wondering if Texas — Texas! — can go blue. The answer is yes, but only if Paxton’s opponent, Democrat James Talarico, rejects the failed ideas that led to the Democratic Party’s decline in the state — and instead embraces Texas populism and the state’s surprisingly radical history.

Talarico himself is a different kind of Democrat. A young state representative and seminary student, he has garnered attention for his progressive brand of Christianity, which blends spiritual uplift with fulminations against the billionaire class. He has also raised boatloads of money and is surprisingly nimble with media, both traditional and digital.

But money and media savvy aren’t enough. Since Democrats lost control of Texas some three decades ago, a string of theories has tried, and failed, to envision a comeback. The latest one was “demographics as destiny”: the race-essentialist idea that as Anglos ceased to make up the majority of the population, the state would automatically become Democratic. Trump dashed those hopes, sweeping the state in part by winning over working-class Hispanics and African-Americans. 

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If Talarico has any shot at winning Texas, he will need to reverse this trend. He has some great examples to learn from. In Tarrant County, union leader Taylor Rehmet flipped a seat in the state legislature in an area that Trump won by 17 points. Rehmet’s secret? He ran a class-focused campaign, eschewing the culture war entirely in favor of speaking to the needs of Texas workers. 

But there is an even deeper tradition of working-class politics in Texas, going back to the mid-19th century.

When people think of politics in Texas, they assume “rock-ribbed” conservatism by default. But this is the result of a years-long political project to recast the history of the Lone Star State in the Right’s image. The reality is much more interesting. This is a state where cowboys mounted collective action to fight the privatization of the open range; that was once home to one of the largest socialist parties in the nation; and where a farmer-labor alliance almost toppled the capitalist elite. Texas is red, yes, but the color means more than one thing. 

Following the Civil War, Texas was economically decimated. The state government sought to attract business and finance to Texas with friendly policies, cheap land, and sweetheart deals. Major interests like the railroads took advantage, jacking up freight costs and cracking down on organized labor. A new set of Northern and European landowners entered the scene, like the Capitol Syndicate, a coalition of Northern businessmen and foreign capital, including the Earl of Aberdeen, who financed the Texas Capitol in exchange for 3 million acres of prime real estate in cattle country. 

Barbed wire, then a new invention, was used by a rising class of large landowners to choke off the “open range.” In alliance with the ruling political class in Austin, the new barons banished many Texas “nesters” off their lands. While corporate power swallowed land in Texas, the banks and the merchant class got to work on Texas farmers. Debt became a fact of life for many Texan farmers under the crop-lien system: cash-poor farmers who needed funds at the beginning of the growing season were trapped in a web of debt, as the merchant and banking classes conspired to buy cotton at low prices and keep interest rates astronomically high. It wasn’t uncommon for farmers to pay 100% to even 200% markups on needed goods. This usurious system led many Texans into the humiliating position of serving as tenant farmers on land their families once owned.

But Texans didn’t take these changes lying down. Instead, they launched a full-on revolt against corporate power — and even the very institution of private property. From striking cowboys in the Panhandle to the Fence Cutting Wars against the scourge of the “devil’s rope” to the Great Southwest Strike led by the union leader Martin Irons — Texans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries went to war against what used to be called the “money power.” Populism was thus born in Texas.

The Southern Farmers’ Alliance developed when Texans began asking themselves a simple question: why was it that “those who work most get least, and those who work least get most?” The cotton farmers who initially made up the movement soon struck up an alliance with industrial workers in the railroad system. They were united against the “shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations,” as a movement statement put it. This farmer-labor alliance led to the founding of the People’s Party, often called the populists, which would soon become the second major party in the state, competing directly with the Democrats.

Populism today is a much-abused term, often just used to highlight politicians who use an us-versus-them style, even as they pursue the same-old market-friendly agendas. But real populism, especially in Texas, was much more than just a rhetorical approach; it was a revolt against the way in which capital subjugates all higher pursuits to the profit motive. It was a movement that demanded dignity for working people, who faced daily humiliations from the bosses, the banks, and a dismissive media.

These populists were very aware of the conflict they were fighting. Take, for example, this statement in the official paper of the movement, The Southern Mercury: “There has always been a bitter and irrepressible conflict between the capitalist and the laborer, and this relentless struggle will continue as long as wage labor exists, because the capitalist always seeks to enslave the laborer.” That’s Marx in a Stetson.

Thomas Nugent, one of the early leaders of the Texas populists and its candidate for governor, condemned the new system emerging in Texas not only for the poverty with which it afflicted the farmers, but for the spiritual indignities it engendered. He decried “plutocratic capitalism,” noting that the system “robs genius of its glory, makes of intellect a drudge and a slave, and utilizes the achievements of science to raid the stock markets and enlarge the margin of profits.” 

In a three-way race for governor in 1894, Nugent came in second place, overtaking the Republican Party as the main opposition party in Texas. 

The populists were as defiant of the ruling Democratic Party as they were of the bankers, the landlords, and the railroads. Their ambitious platform took direct aim at the elites. On the labor front, they demanded legal recognition for trade unions, a ban on the use of unfree convict labor, and the establishment of the eight-hour working day, among other reforms. 

They also called for the railroads and communication industries to be brought under common ownership for the benefit of all. And they insisted on government action to curb the unfair land giveaways to the rich and powerful — beginning with restrictions on foreigners from owning land, aimed at the growing class of European capitalists who’d acquired large holdings. 

The corporations and railroad syndicates would likewise be forced to relinquish the land that they were not using for productive purposes. It was only right, the populists argued, as the government of Texas had betrayed the people, “stealing the guise of heaven in which to serve the purpose of hades, they have … squandered almost all the available public domain, the heritage of the people of this and future generations.”

Far from a protest movement, the populists were successful at winning office in Texas. In a matter of a few years, they were able to send 22 state representatives to the legislature, along with two state senators. As a minority, they found themselves effective in working with the more progressive-minded faction of the Democratic Party.

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The rise of a political movement representing the working class prompted accusations of “socialism” from the era’s newspapermen. Nugent turned the intended slur into a badge of Christian honor, writing in the main populist newspaper: “If sordid and foolish men call this socialism, let us not be disturbed. Such socialism is so near akin to genuine Christianity that we can well afford to welcome it.”

Fearful of a future in which politics pitted the masses against the elites, the Democratic Party engaged in a campaign of outright fraud to destroy the populists. After Nugent’s death, the populists organized a compelling campaign for governor in 1896, falling short of outright victory by only a few thousand votes. They were not beaten honestly. Across Texas, Democratic goons threatened voters with violence, with one thug bragging that standing outside of the polling place had deterred all of the black voters from casting a ballot. Ballot boxes were stuffed, and populist votes were not counted. In the following years, Texas would institute a series of “voting reforms,” designed to limit the black vote and the vote of poor whites and thus ensuring that the populist project would no longer threaten the state’s comfortable elites. 

In many ways, the Texas of today mirrors that of the time of the People’s Party. The Lone Star State is fast becoming a playground for out-of-state billionaires trying to run away from tax obligations, labor protections, and democratic oversight. Their power, combined with the steady erosion of the working class’s hard-won achievements, is downright degrading. Texas, for example, leads the country in preventable deaths at work. And while under Texas law, dogs kept outside must have access to plentiful potable water, no such restrictions exist for those working outside. In fact, the Texas legislature has made rescinding local ordinances for water breaks for Texas workers a top priority. In Texas, we treat dogs better than we treat working people.

Texans must revive the questions asked by the Texas populists: “Why does he who works most get least, and he who works least gets most?” If James Talarico is searching for a model for how to win Texas, he should not look toward demographic fantasies peddled by “progressive” race essentialists, nor a return to the HR-style politics that have dominated Democrat politics since the neoliberal turn of the 1970s.

A fight for dignity and for economic populism is much needed in the Lone Star State. While his denunciations of oligarchy are promising, Talarico should plant his feet in the Texas soil and reclaim our long-held populist and radical traditions, demand dignity for working people, and run on an explicit pro-working-class agenda. Not just in rhetoric but in practice.

This essay was adapted from the author’s new book, The Myth of Red Texas.

One answer might be that they thought he was politically safe. This portraitist of the proletariat was from a middle-class background in a posh part of Manchester (the family actually kept a servant). He was also a stout Conservative who poured scorn on the suggestion that his work was in any way Left-wing. In one sense, that’s clearly true: to represent working people on canvas isn’t to promote their cause. Yet Lowry portrayed them as having a dignity and poignancy which one can see as implicitly political. What an artist says of his or her own work isn’t necessarily the last word. T.S. Eliot described “The Waste Land” as no more than a piece of rhythmical grousing. He was wrong.

Salford in those days was a town with a river so foul that not even canned fish could survive in it. Even so, the place was immortalized by a celebrated local folk singer, Ewan MacColl:

I heard a siren from the docks,
Saw a train set the night on fire,
Smelled the spring on the Salford wind,
Dirty old town, dirty old town.

Not every Salfordian rejoiced in the knowledge that their city was a byword for squalor. MacColl was a communist activist who in the Thirties had been a member of Red Megaphone, a Salford-based theater group which was revered throughout Europe. His partner was the formidable Joan Littlewood, whose Theater Workshop brought politically committed drama to the East End of London in the Sixties. Littlewood took under her wing a young woman called Shelagh Delaney, the daughter of a Salford bus driver, whose play A Taste of Honey stunned the cultural scene. Unusually for the time, the piece included a character of color, though in Salford this wasn’t that surprising.

Salford, after all, was home to the Manchester docks, where ocean-going vessels came and went up the Ship Canal, making it something of a cosmopolitan place. As a child, I lived in constant terror of being kidnapped by a Lascar, without having the faintest idea of what a Lascar was. Many years later, a truculent young man by the name of Morrissey, who was a pupil at my grammar school and has since fallen under the malevolent spell of Nigel Farage, pointed out that his songs were laced with allusions to Delaney’s play.

Delaney, who was employed for a while at a factory where my father spent most of his working life, had an on-off romantic relationship with the brash young son of a Salford bookmaker. His name was Albert Finney, and the two of them made a short film together. Finney went from Salford grammar school to RADA, graduating at just the moment when the new wave of working-class film and drama was breaking across Britain. One of his school friends, Harold Riley, became a distinguished painter, following in Lowry’s footsteps. Finney, too, is rumored to have turned down an honor from the Queen. My mother also remembered seeing the young writer Walter Greenwood, whose Thirties bestseller Love on the Dole became an immensely popular film, setting out for London in his ill-fitting best suit for a brief spell of celebrity.

The connections don’t stop there. When the Salford filmmaker Mike Leigh needed money to fund his early cinematic efforts, Finney stumped up the cash. Leigh also gave me some invaluable advice when I had a play staged in London 30-odd years ago. He hailed from the only area of the city which could be described as middle-class, a tiny enclave, and grew up not far from the home of an Indian schoolboy who attended Manchester Grammar School and whom I encountered while we were both working on the Christmas post. The next time I saw him was on the big screen playing Gandhi, having changed his name to Ben Kingsley.

Unlike Lowry and Finney, he seemed to enjoy being a knight. Nor was he the only Salfordian to win respectable recognition. My primary school was set in a warren of malodorous little streets in the city center, and the composer Peter Maxwell Davies was born and brought up in one of them. He would later study at Manchester, Rome and Princeton, ending up as Master of Music to the Queen and a knight of the realm. We once appeared together on a TV arts show, and I astounded him by whispering the words “Holly Street” into his finely tuned ear as the studio manager was counting down. He later decamped to Orkney, about as far from the dirty old town as one could wish.

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Around the corner from Holly Street lived a lab technician who spent his spare time reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire in the Salford public library. He was to become the country’s most renowned punk poet, and his name was John Cooper Clarke. Both of us have honorary doctorates from the local university, so that Cooper Clarke, with his cadaverous features, snake-thin body and purple-dyed spiky hair, now solemnly calls himself “Dr” in the publicity for his poetry-reading tours. He gave up hard drugs some years ago and even put on a tiny amount of weight, though he’s still almost invisible if you look at him sideways. Some ironist on a Salford street shouted at him: “Ay, Clarke, get back on the drugs, yer fat fuck!”

Lowry, Riley, Delaney, Finney, Clarke, Morrissey — all these names have something in common. It was Irish immigration into Salford and Manchester that laid the basis for a thriving working-class culture there. Even Eagleton is an Irish name of sorts, though Scottish in origin. The family probably went to Ireland as planters and returned, suitably humiliated by the Almighty, as proletarians. It’s easy to be pious or sentimental about such self-fashioning artists and writers. The Monty Python team had a hilarious sketch featuring a working-class writer sweating over the raw stuff of language while rebuking his coal-begrimed son for poncing around in the pit and betraying his old dad’s plebeian values.

Yet there were mill girls in Lancashire in Victorian times who would rise an hour early before work to read Shakespeare together, and it’s hard to be satirical about that. Few traditions are more honorable than those of the men and women who taught themselves to read, write and debate despite their lack of formal education. Ruskin College in Oxford, the Workers’ Educational Association, and university departments of continuing education have all played a vital role in this project. Some literary critic once described the novelist Thomas Hardy as an “autodidact”, despite the fact that Hardy, an apprentice architect, was more highly educated than the great majority of his fellow country people. What the critic meant was that he hadn’t been to Oxford or Cambridge. Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, makes it abundantly clear that he could imagine few worse fates.

An Oxford don was once invited to speak to a group of students at Ruskin College, most of whom would have been trade union activists or Left-wing militants in their former lives. Anxious not to strike a patronizing tone, the speaker decided that self-flagellation was the most productive tactic, breaking off his speech every few minutes to confess how little he really knew about the subject in hand, and how frightfully difficult it was to say anything definitive about it. He indulged in this scraping and squirming right up to his final words, which were a coyly self-effacing “I really don’t know” whereupon a voice from the back of the room thundered, “You’re paid to know!”

Some years ago, I was asked to give a talk in Bristol to one of the local groups which composed what was then the Worker Writers Association. This was a network of working people throughout the country who as former train drivers, postal workers or domestic servants were mostly engaged in writing their autobiographies, and who would meet together to discuss their work. A few of them even managed to get their stories into print. I was asked to speak about the theory of autobiography, and tried to keep it as comprehensible as I could without squirming and scraping, aware that nobody in the room had seen the inside of a college. When I finished speaking, an elderly, partially blind woman rose to her feet and asked rather querulously, in a rich West Country accent, what kind of language I was talking. Fearful that I’d failed to make myself clear, I was about to launch on a reply when she spoke up again. “Because I’d like to learn that language.”

Working-class women are damned by the impossible dichotomy of the lowest expectations and the highest standards. The ruling classes will scrutinize and judge us for signs that we are no better than we ought to be, while our own will turn on us if we show any sign of ambition. Far be it from us to want to be heroines.

To thrive against these odds, and to have any hope of getting by, there are two things working-class girls shouldn’t do. The first is to leave school without any qualifications. The second is to get pregnant at 16. Angela Rayner did both. And she defied Lennon. Rather than getting stuck in a council house with a menial job, as happens to so many, she rose to become one of the most powerful women in Britain. Until yesterday, that is.

But to me, Rayner is the epitome of a working-class heroine. The odds were stacked against her, economically and culturally. She grew up on a council estate in Stockport in poverty: her mother suffered from bipolar disorder, and her grandmother worked three jobs to keep the family afloat. She worked in social care, and later entered politics not via the Oxford Union, but through union activism. She has a Northern accent, uses coarse language, and she’s a woman who doesn’t know her place.

Class, though, is not a protected characteristic and Rayner’s origins have been the easiest and laziest tool for her critics. She vapes, they gasp; she wears green trousers and leopard print, the Daily Mail howls. She’s been called “thick as mince”, criticized for drinking vodka, and has been the subject of endless abuse. And yet, she’s never tried to hide her background. She leaned all the way in, defying critics by wearing what she wanted, dancing and drinking, and instructing Hansard transcribers not to correct her grammar.

And she was useful to her party. Rayner was the rarest of representations in a party that has badly lost its way. She was a politician of a type so scarce her background had to be part of every conversation, because it is staggeringly rare for an MP to emerge from her demographic. In the Seventies, Labour could boast around one-in-three working-class MPs; in 2023, it was just one in 10. As a result, the party used her as a human lamppost flag at every opportunity, even to the last. Keir Starmer, responding to the controversy, said he was proud to sit alongside a deputy PM from a working-class background (putting his hand on her shoulder in a way I’m not sure he’d have done with a man).

Of course, Starmer was never going to be able to save her — her sin was too grave. But the irony is that she was never going to be enough to save Labour. Working-class voters don’t like Starmer; his party isn’t for them any more. A YouGov poll earlier this year found that 31% of those living in households with an income of more than £70,000 a year intend to vote for Labour, compared with 19% of those in households earning less than £20,000. It’s all a gift to Nigel Farage, who couldn’t be more delighted to declare Reform the “party of the working class” — despite being a privately-educated former banker. 

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Another gift to Farage has been the defection of the suddenly working-class politician Nadine Dorries. And the comparison is telling. The novelist and former Tory MP defected to Reform this week and ran her working-class credentials up the flag-pole in the Daily Mail, reminiscing fondly about her Dickensian childhood. “My father, a bus driver,” she wrote, “suffered from Raynaud’s disease, an agonizing circulatory disorder that led to the amputation of his toes. It limited his ability to work. There were many times when I would be dragged under the kitchen sink to hide from the rent man as he banged on the front door or peered in through the window.” In the excitement that followed Nadine’s conversion to Nigel, few remembered that Dorries herself had been entangled in financial controversy not so long ago. But luckily for Dorries, she was the right sort of working class. She talks the right way, wears the right clothes, and doesn’t wear her class on her Boden sleeve (unless it suits her).

Yet only a year ago, Dorries had the gall to attack Rayner for “weaponizing her working class roots”. To me, this is the most frustrating insult of all: the one that comes from inside the house. It goes to the heart of the working-class woman’s paradox. Rayner has betrayed circumstances she didn’t choose in favor of those she did, and that is treachery. “She’s worse than a hypocrite, she’s a working class traitor”, insisted Lisa McKenzie, an anarchist and lecturer, during a recent LBC interview. McKenzie doesn’t believe in social mobility, saying it’s “essentially cherry picking individuals and allowing them into the middle class from the working class”. 

Obviously, I too, would like to live in a country in which there are ample opportunities for everyone regardless of birth circumstance; but surely those opportunities are allowed to include things such as “becoming a politician”, “earning money” and “buying property”, ambitions no one much minds when they’re chosen by someone who went to private school and is in line for a nice inheritance. It’s what’s expected, the natural order of things. But Rayner is an aberration.

The real test then, will be how Labour treats Rayner going forward. When Peter Mandelson resigned in 1998, following a furor over a £373,000 loan to buy a home, he was out for just 10 months before triumphantly returning — only to resign again in 2001 after being accused of interfering in a passport application. He then enjoyed a lucrative tenure as a European Commissioner before returning to government in 2008 as business secretary and the warm welcome of a peerage. He’s now happily hobnobbing with Donald Trump in another addition to his portfolio: a fancy mansion in Washington. The chances of Rayner following are non-existent; there is little chance of redemption, regardless of atonement — she simply doesn’t fit the mold.

Rayner’s opponents have long had it in for her, and she foolishly handed them the weapon. Sure, we could blame the complexity of our tax laws, but the truth is her stamp-duty downfall this week was quite simply the sort of mistake a working-class woman cannot afford to make.

If the Democrats want to vanquish MAGA, then they need to win back the 11%. Even garnering the support of half of them could deliver the party from the political wilderness. Doing so isn’t that complicated. It requires crafting a program that speaks to workers’ economic interests and social attitudes. Of course, that might be easier said than done.

The CWCP analyzed 128 public-opinion questions from three comprehensive surveys: the American National Election Studies survey, the General Social Survey, and the Cooperative Election Study. We looked at questions concerning immigration, civil rights, social norms, environmental policy, and two types of economic policy: predistribution (altering the division of the social income through bargaining power and higher wages) and redistribution (doing the same through taxes and welfare).

We sorted the responses by social class, so that we could compare the attitudes of working-class Americans — those with less than a college education and who fall in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution — with those of people above those education and income thresholds. We also looked at responses dating back to 1960 and through 2022, allowing us to compare attitudes across the decades. Then we isolated working-class Trump voters to compare their attitudes with those of the rest.

The resulting report confirms that working-class voters, even blue-collar Trump voters, aren’t a “basket of deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton once described them. They aren’t in thrall to a demagogue or hopelessly lost in the fog of MAGA conspiracies. Rather, working-class voters largely support a range of progressive economic policies and hold more progressive views than middle- and upper-class voters on a number of bread-and-butter questions (especially those concerning jobs).

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For instance, a majority of working-class voters support raising the minimum wage, boosting spending on Social Security and Medicare, limiting imports to protect domestic jobs, cutting the cost of prescription drugs, increasing federal investments in infrastructure and public schools, making it easier to join a union, putting workers on company boards, implementing a millionaires’ tax, and even the notion of a job guarantee.

Even more remarkable: working-class views on civil and LGBT rights and immigration have shifted to the Left over the past two decades — a fact easily missed by those in the liberal media who assume that anyone who works with his hands is a frothing reactionary. For instance, a whopping 61% of working-class respondents favor a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and 74% oppose family-separating deportations. Similarly, more than 80% of working-class respondents support legal protections against discrimination for gays and lesbians and favor background checks for gun owners.

Put another way: working-class voters are largely economic egalitarians, worried about inequality and in favor of the government leveling the playing field between capital and labor, the asset-rich and the asset-less. These voters have also steadily drifted to the Left on a range of cultural issues. So what accounts for the fact that these voters have abandoned the Democratic Party? Our research provides some clues.

First, while working-class voters are populists and egalitarians, they aren’t liberal welfarists. That is, while they favor a policy mix aimed at improving wages and bargaining power and protecting them against the effects of globalization, they are quite skeptical of new government regulations, welfare spending, and expensive social proposals. They prefer combating inequality at the level of wages and workplace power over cash transfers.

Democrats have long assumed that all progressive economic policy is roughly the same, thus straying from the kind of economic populism that appeals to blue-collar voters. Today, the Democratic brand is much more closely associated with redistributive cash transfers and social services than with a program focused squarely on work, wages, jobs, pensions, and trade. The reputation is well earned, given that only 18% of Democratic congressional candidates in 2022 prioritized jobs-focused rhetoric, as previous research by the CWCP found.

Second, although working-class voters have indeed shifted to the Left on many cultural issues, they’ve been far outpaced in that direction by the educated, professional-class voters who now form the party’s base. The latter, it’s fair to say, have become ultra-liberal in recent years. As a result, a wide attitude gap has opened up between the two camps. This has generated a significant amount of class tension. And overcoming it won’t be easy. But the challenge is surmountable.

In broad strokes, what’s needed is a fairly simple formula. If Democrats want to win back workers, they can start by loudly advocating for a worker-focused program — more moderate on cultural issues but decidedly populist on economic ones. They ought to promise to raise the minimum wage, protect industrial jobs from free trade, increase infrastructure spending, better fund public schooling, expand Social Security, strengthen Medicare, and guarantee full employment.

Partly, this will require some redistributive taxation of the richest Americans, and Democrats shouldn’t be shy about saying so; the working class would be with them. But the predistributive element must remain at the forefront.

On social and cultural questions, meanwhile, Democrats have no need to chase the Trumpian Right. But they ought to pull back from social commitments that put them starkly at odds with working-class voters. For example, progressives don’t need to ape Trump’s cruel deportation policies, nor should they drop their commitment to finding a genuine path to citizenship. But they do need to recognize the need for greater border security and a more restrictive immigration regime.

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Which brings us back to the 11%. We found that in 2020, that percentage of working-class Trump supporters fit in this populist sweet spot: economically egalitarian and culturally tolerant but moderate. With the right approach and candidate, they are persuadable. But are the Democrats amenable? That’s the big question.

As the party’s core support has climbed a few rungs up the class ladder, the interests, values, and attitudes of Democratic Party mouthpieces increasingly reflect this group. Not only do many top Democrats have no clue what working-class voters actually want, but they have fewer of them in their districts, and almost none in their offices, whom they might ask. Worse, even when the occasional liberal turns to the working class, there are strong headwinds preventing the message from becoming dominant in the party. Consider that so much of the Democratic Party’s image is not shaped by party communiqués, but through the institutions where liberals reign supreme: the media, the arts, the academy, think tanks, nonprofits, and philanthropic foundations. In these places, cultural liberalism is the currency of the realm, and liberal elites aren’t prepared to cashier their power.

What incentive do culturally progressive but economically inegalitarian liberals have to give up their seats in favor of working-class representatives? Not many. But if party elites have any desire of regaining a majority and pursuing a progressive policy agenda, they had better start listening to blue-collar voters. The quickest path back to power for the Democrats is to embrace a genuine social populism, against their donors wishes, and against the inclinations of many of their professionals. Indeed, doing so is the only shot they have of winning a working-class majority.

Now for the bad: even with that tick upwards, the nation’s total fertility rate remains way below “replacement,” the level at which a given generation can replace itself, 2.1 babies per woman. In 2024, the U.S. fertility rate was 1.62. In most years since 1971, and in every year since 2007, the rate has been below 2.1. What can be done to boost it?

The short answer is a pro-worker natalist policy that emphasizes so-called predistribution — altering the spread of the social income through better jobs, higher wages, and worker bargaining power, rather than redistributive handouts from above.

The Trump administration has signaled openness to post-tax redistribution. Last month, President Trump echoed Vice President JD Vance’s case for giving mothers a $5,000 “baby bonus,” calling it “a good idea.” Maybe, baby. A recent Niskanen Center report touted baby-bonus policies in New Zealand and Australia and claimed that just “$2,000 for every baby” born in the United States could be “an affordable, effective” policy “to support families.”

Fair enough, but let’s not kid ourselves about how many more kids a baby bonus might beget. In most nations that have experimented with baby bonuses, the impact on birth rates has been trivial, transitory, or ambiguous. A 2024 study found that financial incentives boost fertility rates slightly in the short run but do little to “increase the total number of children in the long run.”

Still, what if we aspired not merely to claw back to 2.1, but soar past it to the Baby Boom days of 1946 to 1964, when America’s fertility rate averaged close to 4. What might we do?

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Well, we might start by recognizing that while politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from economics with respect to fertility rates. Specifically, the quantity of high-quality blue-collar jobs for men matters greatly to marriage rates and birth rates: the better and more plentiful the jobs, the higher the rates of family formation and childbearing. There are good reasons, both anecdotal and analytical, for thinking so.

Let me start with the anecdotal. In 1958, I began life in a semi-dilapidated, brick-row house in South Philadelphia, just across the street from the cathedral-like Catholic church where the fictional Rocky “The Italian Stallion” Balboa got married in the sequel to the 1976 blockbuster Rocky — and where my nonfictional older sister got married in 1977.

The urban, Catholic, blue-collar Boomer world of my Philly youth was no paradise, but it was close. Most dads had steady, decent-paying union or other jobs. Nobody needed a credit card to take their vacation week on the Jersey Shore. Nobody bowled or drank alone. Nobody thought they needed to go to college to make it. Above all, nobody thought that intact families with three or four or more kids was anything but the natural, good, and godly order of things.

Indeed, Saint Barnabas, the Catholic elementary school I graduated from in 1972, had about 180 kids in each grade. And that was small compared to our K-8 rival, Most Blessed Sacrament, which at its Sixties peak averaged more than 400 students per grade.

Tutored by hard-won experience, the adult working-class women in my life never doubted that good jobs were essential to making men moral, marriage-ready, and marriage-worthy. As my maternal grandmother would say, “senza buon lavori, senza buon uomini,” meaning, “without good jobs, no good men.”

One of my aunts was married to a — as my father would always inject, “half-assed” — house painter. The guy would commence carousing and boozing whenever he was short on work, which was often. When girl relatives turned 15 or 16, she gave them “the talk”: men behave like animali (animals) on Saturdays and skip church on Sundays unless prezioso lavori (valuable jobs) await them and their paesani (male friends) on Mondays.

And lest you think it was just an Italian-American thing, one of my father’s brothers, a unionized construction boss, was married to a German-Irish woman. They had five children, plus me as their godson. She gave her four daughters essentially the same talk. And when her son talked of being a professional drummer, rather than working construction, she counseled him to “drum on the bricks” instead if he wanted to win a decent wife and lead a good family life. He did.

That job-centered male marriageability narrative is backed by statistics from numerous solid empirical studies. For instance, a 2024 study estimated that unionization, all by itself, “accounted for 20% of overall fertility increases during the Baby Boom”; and that these pro-family-formation effects were “driven primarily by wage growth” and “protection against adverse labor market shocks.”

Unfortunately, the relationship also holds in reverse. For instance, in 2017, three years before publishing their book-length discourse on “deaths of despair,” economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case detailed how decades of “worsening labor-market opportunities” were implicated in sizable and persistent declines in marriage rates.

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Likewise, “When Work Disappears,” a 2019 study published in American Economic Review, documents how, in the early Nineties, the loss in US manufacturing jobs, owing to the China trade shock, tanked earnings among young working-class and low-income men, and, in turn, resulted in steep declines in their marriage rates.

Now, Good Jobs, Strong Families: How the Character of Men’s Work is Linked to Their Family Status, a new study by the Institute for Family Studies, scholars Brad Wilcox and Grant Martsolf demonstrate that “the nature and character of men’s work play a major role in determining whether men marry and form families.” As they explain, factors like “job stability, predictable hours, good benefits, and high pay help men to flourish and, in turn, elevate their appeal as husbands.” The upshot: “prime-aged men with good jobs are markedly more likely to be married with children when they are well-paid, their jobs are stable, and their benefits are good.”

Based on cutting-edge statistical analyses of differences in married family-formation rates by job characteristics, Wilcox and Martsolf find that, across different employment sectors (construction, retail, health care, food and hospitality, trucking, manufacturing, and others), working-class “men who are employed in stable, good-paying jobs with decent benefits” are significantly more likely to get married, stay married, and become fathers.

So, more and better blue-collar jobs have been, and continue to be, the seedbeds of robust birth rates, stable working-class families, and strong blue-collar communities. If only we had a critical mass of seriously pro-worker and pro-family leaders in both parties, who knows, we might yet one day witness the dawn of a second midcentury blue-collar baby boom.

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.

All of the occupations the president mentioned typically require college degrees, as well as advanced professional degrees for doctors and lawyers. But no college diploma is required for the three occupations in the United States with the greatest number of workers — home-health and personal-care aides, retail salespeople, and fast-food workers. In discussing economic opportunity, both Republicans and Democrats often overlook the 62% of Americans who lack a bachelor’s degree or higher.

This oversight is no accident. The debate about meritocracy in both parties is dominated by people who are college-credentialed meritocrats themselves. In promoting “equity” or equality of result, progressives focus obsessively on the racial and gender compositions of university admissions and university faculties. For their part, conservatives typically reject equality of results, in favor of equality of opportunity — which they tend to equate with the successes of highly educated professionals or entrepreneurs.

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But fewer than 15% of Americans have a professional or other advanced degree, and only 7% own and run their own businesses. Equality of opportunity, with its promise of delivering exceptional success to individuals with exceptional abilities, is not enough. Broader social progress involves raising the economic level of those with mediocre abilities, because, outside of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, it is mathematically impossible for all children to be above average.

The word “meritocracy” was originally coined as a term of abuse. In his 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, Michael Young, a Left-wing policy expert in Britain’s Labour party, treated the idea of a society of successful test-takers as a dystopian nightmare. In 2001, Young complained that under Tony Blair, Labour had adopted meritocracy as an ideal. He warned: “If meritocrats believe … that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they get.” In our time, a similar point has been made by the British thinker David Goodhart, with his distinction between college-educated “Anywheres” and working-class “Somewheres”.

Debates over meritocracy often focus on college admissions. For many centrist Democrats and Republicans, the golden age of the American university was between the Second World War and the Seventies. In that era, quotas limiting the number of nonwhite, Jews, and Catholics fell away, and new quotas to help black and Hispanic students and faculty were not yet widely adopted.

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For those who define merit in terms of academic ability the structures of the university and the workplace in the United States are essentially sound. What is needed is rejection of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), the progressive doctrine that rejects equality of opportunity for equality of outcome, defined as policies to make the demography of every social institution mirror the racial and gender breakdown of the most recent US Census by means of reverse racism, of the kind called for by Ibram X. Kendi: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

But the crusade to end DEI in higher education is more important to conservative activists and donors than to the working-class Americans of all races who put Donald Trump in the White House a second time. Most of those voters did not graduate from college, and they are more concerned about grocery and gasoline prices than about the roster of authors in the literary canon.

Some want the rethink the assumption that an elite college degree is the standard pathway to success. The high-tech libertarians of Silicon Valley include many who are skeptical about traditional liberal-arts education and professional schools. They believe that ambitious young entrepreneurs and innovators should not have to compile diploma after diploma on campus before beginning their working lives until their late 20s or 30s. Peter Thiel has endowed a two-year Thiel Fellowship, described thus on its website: “The Thiel Fellowship gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.”

“Move fast and break things”, in the words of Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg. Indeed, in the natural sciences, mathematics, and technology, the greatest geniuses often do their best work when young. But entrepreneurial meritocracy is as irrelevant to most people as academic meritocracy. Most Americans neither go to college nor found successful startups. For the majority of people of middling ability, both equality of result and equality of opportunity may be less beneficial than a third option: equality of condition.

Equality of condition means that you don’t have to be a high achiever in order to have access to the things that define a decent life. In 19th-century agrarian America, the promotion of equality of condition took the form of policies that helped people to become farm owners. Widespread ownership of family farms was encouraged by the federal land laws of 1796, 1800, and 1820, which provided for the partition of federal lands into small and inexpensive plots, as well as by the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed Americans to own 160 acres of free public land after cultivating it for five years.

In the urban and industrial America of the 20th century, equality of condition meant well-paid factory and office jobs that permitted mostly male breadwinners to buy homes and cars and enjoy some economic security along with their families. Leisure is also important, because, unlike hard-driving professionals and business tycoons, most working-class Americans are not married to their jobs.

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The rise of the slacker aristocracy

By Joseph W. Sullivan

A growing number of thinkers and policymakers in both the Republican and Democratic parties are interested in creating pathways to success that do not require graduation from a four-year college or graduate or professional school. These alternatives include apprenticeship programs, community colleges, and skills certificates.

But these alternatives to conventional higher education can only succeed if employers are willing to hire workers without traditional academic degrees. Some corporations have removed degree requirements from their online job listings or announced programs to hire and train more workers without college degrees. But according to Burning Glass, a labor-market analytics firm, this has not led to a significant increase in the share of workers without college diplomas in many of those firms.

It is not enough for employers to be willing to hire more people without college diplomas. Skills certificates and apprenticeship programs may be avoided by young people if those alternatives do not lead to jobs with pay and benefits comparable to those of many jobs that require undergraduate degrees. Indeed, the multiplication of worthless skills credentials would be no improvement over the multiplication of worthless college degrees.

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The Millennial virtue economy is dead

By Matthew Gasda

Dismantling race and gender preferences in higher education and hiring is a necessary and long-overdue reform. So is the creation of alternatives to college. But politicians of Left, Right, and center should complement these reforms with initiatives that foster a rough equality of condition, allowing more Americans to achieve a middle-class lifestyle by 21st-century standards. What it means to be middle class in contemporary America and similar societies is somewhat subjective, but most people would agree that it includes adequate wages and benefits, access to affordable health care, quality education for children, and access to home ownership for those who seek it.

How to achieve these goals can be debated. But there can be a consensus in favor of equality of condition, to ensure that the rich, the poor, and the middle class do not live so differently that they might as well belong to different societies.

A modified car is an ordinary factory-built car that someone has altered, usually after buying it second- or third-hand. It is likely to be set close to the ground. It might have new, eye-catching wheels, a wide exhaust pipe, special lights, racing pedals, an upgraded sound system, or any number of other wild and wonderful adjustments.

Ask the driver of a highly modified vehicle how it has been altered and, unless you know a great deal about cars, your head will spin. At one gathering of petrolheads in Bradford, I spot a beautiful blue Opel. I ask the owner, a beanie-hatted mechanic, what he has done to his car. His answer is so quick and complicated that I capture only a small fraction of his words: “rods and pistons”, “valve springs”, and “anti-roll bar”. Then, more slowly, he explains the point of his labors. He has turned an old, modestly priced car into a powerful machine that turns people’s heads. He calls it “a sports car for the working class”.

Nobody knows how many Britons modify their cars. I would make a very rough guess that between one in every 50 and one in every 150 cars has been substantially altered. In some places around the UK, the share is higher. I am always a little surprised when I see a modified car parked in an affluent urban neighborhood. I am never surprised to see one parked in a suburban council estate or a seaside town that has seen better days.

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The cult of Land Rover

By Wessie du Toit

This being Britain, many sports and leisure activities bear social-class labels. Snooker, darts, boxing, greyhound racing, punk rock and bingo have different social connotations from cricket, sailing, fly fishing, dressage and jazz. Car modification is a largely working-class activity, and often a white working-class one. It thrives in places with poor public transport, quiet roads and plentiful parking spaces — in suburbs and small towns rather than inner-city neighborhoods.

The culture is especially strong in working-class places that have a bit of money. One of Britain’s most enduring modified-car scenes is in Aberdeen, a Scottish city with good manual jobs in the oil-and-gas industry. Another is on the Essex coast. And I have never seen so many modified cars anywhere as I have in the Medway towns of Kent, east of London. That area is working class, but not poor.

Car modification provides a rare opportunity for white working-class Britons to flaunt their artistry and skill, and lord it over everyone else. Most of the car modifiers who I’ve met are skilled manual workers or clerical workers. Many of the men are mechanics, or do jobs that are somehow linked to vehicles. A driver of a modified Ford Focus installs bollards for a living; another man, who has lovingly altered a Renault 5, is a joiner.

All are enthusiastic about meddling with cars, bordering on obsessive. When talking about their hobby, they use words like “addiction” and “hooked”. When they have changed one car to their satisfaction, they are likely to sell it and buy another to work on — for fun, not because it brings in any money. The joiner thinks he has owned nine cars, an impressive total given that he is only 22. Another man, who is not much older, reckons he has owned 20.

The wildest years of the modified-car era appear to be behind us. In the late Nineties, enthusiasts suddenly began to hold enormous “cruises” in suburban retail parks and seaside towns. At one point, 2,000 vehicles turned up in Bristol. Drivers did “burn-outs” (spinning the wheels while remaining stationary, which creates smoke) and “doughnuts” (rotating one end of the car around the other while spinning the wheels), leaving black marks on the tarmac.

Several things caused that acceleration. Cars became cheaper around the turn of the century, and credit more accessible. In 2001, Universal Pictures released The Fast and the Furious. But the crucial factor in Britain was a magazine, Max Power, which helped to define a cheap and cheeky British approach to car modification that was different from the glamorous scene portrayed in The Fast and the Furious. “It was often silly. Let’s have a hood that opens the wrong way! Let’s put Jaguar lights on a Corsa!” says James Burr, known as Midge, a mechanic and a veteran of the car scene.

The March 1997 issue of Max Power encapsulated the spirit of the time. Reporting on a cruise in Chesterfield, south of Sheffield, the magazine printed lots of pictures of burnouts, men admiring each other’s cars, and a woman flashing her bra. It noted with a twinge of disappointment that no “rozzers”, or police, had turned up to shut down the gathering. Max Power went on to cover many other cruises and car meets. It was soon scoring them according to fixed criteria: “motors”, “burnouts”, “rozzers”, (men’s) “asses”, and “chicks”. The magazine was not just reporting on the modified-car scene: it was shaping it.

It seemed at the time as though the wheels would never stop spinning. And yet, within a few years, they almost did. Max Power ceased regular publication in 2011. And the big, unruly cruises ceased. There were several reasons for this. The police became cleverer and more powerful, because Parliament gave them powerful legal weapons to stop cruises. The actor Sacha Baron Cohen ridiculed the scene. In Ali G Indahouse, the gormless white rapper drove a heavily modified, bright yellow Renault 5 GT around the safe suburban streets of Surrey, blasting drum and bass. It was a devastating joke, cruelly deflating the fantasy that your souped-up Vauxhall Corsa made you look like a Hollywood star. 

Cars became harder to alter: vehicles were increasingly controlled by computers and required the attention of qualified mechanics. Insurance companies insisted on being informed of even minor adjustments, and sometimes refused to cover modified cars altogether. In 2009, the government launched a scrappage scheme, which eradicated many of the older, cheaper cars that modifiers loved to work on. A proud culture became an endangered subculture.

The assault on car modifiers sometimes looks to me like an attempt to put young working-class people in their place. All enthusiasts, even responsible ones, were labelled “boy racers” — a term that originally meant a dangerous driver. In Aberdeen, a long-established, largely working-class group of car cruisers known as the “Bouley Bashers” came under sustained pressure from the authorities when their gathering spot became more middle class. 

But the modified-car scene was not completely crushed. It flourishes today, although fashions have changed. Modified cars tend to look more modest than they did two decades ago, partly because a modern car needs less alteration to make it look good. On the other hand, modified cars sound a lot less modest. Many people pay mechanics to retune their engines so they produce “pops and bangs”, which annoy pedestrians and even some other car modifiers. “If you spend $40,000, you can make your whole car explode,” one weary petrolhead told me at a car meet. 

Local authorities and the police rarely welcomed gatherings of modified-car enthusiasts, and the pops and bangs have given them another reason to detest them. It is hard to organize a meet these days. In the Max Power era, you could put the word out via text messages and cruise websites and not bother obtaining permission. Try that today, and you would be met with a barricaded car park, a line of police vehicles and perhaps an exclusion order. Some car groups have resorted to releasing locations at the last minute and hoping for the best; others obtain permission for their meets, try to persuade burger vans and other retailers to attend, deal politely with the police, and attempt to impose some order on the proceedings. 

The other big difference between the Max Power era and today is the role of women. For years, a woman’s allotted role at a modified-car meet was to sit in the passenger seat and to pose for magazine photographers, wearing as little clothing as possible. The culture was overwhelmingly male, and frequently sexist. Now, however, some of the most successful car clubs in England are run by women.

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The revenge of Britain's motorists

By Tim Abrahams

I have described car modification as a facet of white British working-class culture. It still is, but it is growing increasingly ethnically diverse. I have yet to attend a modified-car meet or a car show where no British Asians have been present. Car modification is especially popular among working-class Asian Muslims — as one Muslim man explains to me at a car meet: “We can’t go clubbing; we can’t drink. What else are we going to spend our money on?”

The car meet where I spot the blue Opel has been organized by Bradford Modified Club. It takes place in Manningham, just up the road from Bradford Central Mosque — the very heart of Pakistani Bradford. The event is billed as an “Eid Extravaganza”. Not surprisingly, the crowd is mostly Asian. But white men and women have also turned up to show off their cars and admire other people’s.

Such harmonious scenes aren’t often associated with Bradford — the city where, in July 2001, white and Asian youths violently confronted each other and the police. Manningham Ward Labour Club was firebombed; businesses were attacked; many police officers were injured. Afterwards, an official investigation led by Ted Cantle, formerly the chief executive of Nottingham City Council, concluded that whites and Asians were living “parallel lives” in Bradford and other northern cities. Cantle’s report argued for more diversity training and a string of rather worthy measures to reduce cultural segregation. It did not anticipate that working-class Asian and white people might find common ground in their love of alloy wheels, enormous spoilers and pop-and-bang remaps. Yet, that is what has happened.

British white working-class culture is often described in terms of loss. And some things, like miners’ welfare institutes, have indeed been lost. Car modification is an important exception. Not only is it thriving; it has expanded socially. Women and ethnic-minority Britons have found ways into the culture, and strengthened it. The modified-car scene should really be celebrated as a great British cultural creation. And what do the authorities do about this scene? Naturally, they try to shut it down.

***

This is an edited extract from Joel Budd’s Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class, which is published today.

The Rust Belt is my backyard, too. And in Erie, Pennsylvania, where I live, Vance’s schtick plays well. Folks here feel left behind — because they are. In their despair, they want a scapegoat.

In 1950, the Rust Belt was home to 43% of all American jobs. In Vance’s lifetime, industrial jobs have plummeted by 35%; in his early adulthood alone, 5 million factory jobs vanished. Deaths of despair filled the vacuum. Suicide in slow motion, the Rust Belt’s white working class leads the nation in early deaths caused by alcoholism, addiction and risky life choices. Before the term was even coined, Vance wrote in his 2016 Hillbilly Elegy memoir: “The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future — that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose.”

Vance and I share more than a backyard. His biography is mine. I’ve lost my best friend, dad, aunt, uncle, and two first cousins to deaths of despair. My sister will probably be next. Broken homes, poverty, and addiction are, like Vance’s, my family’s narrative themes. I flunked high school. But like Vance, I had a grandparent who helped me survive the post-industrial apocalypse. Somehow, I bumbled into college. Eventually, I earned a PhD.

Today, as a professor, I study American liberalism. And here in the academy, white working-class despair is seen as something best ignored. This comes with a political cost, but don’t take my word for it. As Lisa Pruitt, a professor of law who studies the rural working-class, told me: “Race, ethnicity, and sexuality: It is a competition. Everyone gets a gold medal unless you are white. We need to acknowledge white pain and white vulnerability, or you can’t build a broad coalition.”

But what if Pruitt’s warning is already outdated? Today, the Democrats’ “working-class” problem has metastasised beyond whites. In 2020, Joe Biden won the Hispanic, 55-41, and black, 92-8, working-class by wide margins. Yet Republicans have made real inroads with these voters. The Democrat’s lead with the non-white working class has collapsed to nine points. Two-thirds of all voters are working-class. The math is clear. If the polls of the non-white working class hold, Trump wins in a landslide.

The Democrats’ working-class problem goes beyond math — it cuts to the core of the party’s identity. Gregg Cantrell, a professor at Texas Christian University, has literally written a book on liberalism’s working-class roots. “Farmers and labourers were among the first Americans to realise that the new large-scale corporate capitalist economy needed a counterbalance to protect the little guy from being crushed,” he told me. The idea that the government can protect the small against the big guy is the foundation of modern liberalism.”

But now the “little guy”, of all races, is shifting to Trump. The Republicans are poised to become a multi-racial working-class party. Democrats, meanwhile, are, in the words of Vance, a coalition of “well-to-do white Americans and minorities from across the political spectrum”.

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Why rural America doesn't trust Joe Biden

By Jeff Bloodworth

Can Harris woo the non-white working class back to the Democrats? That’s the meta-question of the entire election. And simply replacing the top of the ticket is a cosmetic fix to a systemic problem.

To understand why, start at the top. A majority of House Democrats graduated from a top-100 college. Just one measly Democratic member of Congress has cited ever working a blue-collar or service job. Since 2004, a quarter of all Democratic presidential campaign staffers attended the same 15 elite universities. What this means is that Democrats, the self-styled “Party of the People”, don’t have folks with working-class backgrounds on their staff, in their offices, and now on their voter rolls. But the problem runs deeper than the class disparity of political elites.

Dr Cory Haala, a specialist in the political history of the Rust Belt Midwest, thinks the Democrats’ working-class woes stem from the party’s “singular focus on winning the presidency”. With the White House always in mind, he explained, the Democrats aimed policy at upscale suburban voters in key swing states. As a result, what started with Rust Belt working-class whites morphed into a problem with the non-white working-class.

And this political romantic comedy now has a twist, with Republicans wooing the very Rust Belt and non-white working-class base whom the Democrats had so long taken for granted. Eva Posner, a Democratic campaign manager, thinks her party’s working-class problems start with pocketbook concerns. “We are in desperate times. Housing costs have been going up consistently. There is not a city in America where you can afford an apartment on a minimum wage job.”

Posner agrees with Haala on the damage wrought by White House-centric politics. An obsession with the White House means Democrats ignore political offices that address basic problems. As she told me: “We don’t prioritise city councils or mayor races that have the jurisdiction. We prioritise the goddamn DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee]. Congress is doing shit. Why are we pouring millions of dollars into races that don’t do governance? The things that solve people’s problems are at the local level.”

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By J.D. Vance

For Posner, politics is not advanced calculus: “This isn’t goddamn hard. Voters see that we are quick to help corporations but not regular people. They think, ‘you aren’t doing anything for me.’ Well, no shit. Fund local campaigns, talk to human beings, find the problems and solve them. It is basic.”

Because Democrats no longer offer tangible solutions to working-class voters, they left the door open to symbolic appeals. From Kid Rock to Hulk Hogan, Trump and Vance offer a down-scale gloss on a plutocratic agenda. But Trump, at least, offers the gloss. And in choosing Vance, he nominated a person with working-class roots to the Vice-Presidency.

The decision may be hollow and, as recent weeks have indicated, not without blunder. Vance’s recent “cat lady” rhetoric, for instance, is as stupid as it is sexist. But the Democrats are wholly oblivious to our struggles. And in times of oblivion, scapegoats and ruses often have the final say.

Among the many myths woven around the miners’ strike is the claim that it represented the end of industrial working-class militancy — indeed, of the industrial working class as such. From then on, so the story goes, coal mines gave way to call centres and manufacture to finance and the service sector. Greasy overalls were replaced by the dressed-down mateyness of the modern office. The class which Karl Marx had dreamt might take over material production was depleted and scattered to the winds.

This isn’t quite what happened, not least if one takes a rather more global view of the matter. For one thing, work in the service sector can be just as heavy, dirty and disagreeable as traditional industrial labour. It includes not only Harley Street receptionists and celebrity chefs but refuse, postal, hospital, cleaning and catering workers. For another thing, while today’s chief executive smoothes his jeans over his sneakers, over a billion people on the planet go hungry every day. Slum dwellers, the fastest growing social group on earth, represent one third of the world’s city dwellers, while the urban poor more generally constitute at least half of the world’s population. Most of the mega-cities of the Global South are rife with poverty, disease and overcrowding. Capital is concentrated in fewer hands than ever, while the ranks of the destitute and dispossessed swell by the hour. The transition from industrial to post-industrial capitalism has expanded and consolidated the system, not modified it.

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Britain is still scarred by the miners' defeat

By Suzanne Moore

Like Mark Twain’s death notice, the obituaries issued for the working class have been much exaggerated. If you take the category to include both manual labourers and the lower levels of white-collar workers, it constitutes a massive proportion of the world’s population, perhaps around two to three billion. If you add to that the vast army of unskilled casual labour, along with the retired, unemployed and chronically sick, the number soars even higher. In Latin America, this informal economy now employs over half the workforce. There has also been an increasing proletarianisation of the professionals (teachers, social workers, technicians, journalists, middling clerical and administrative workers) as the modern middle classes are hit by the kind of economic insecurity that afflicted the 19th-century working class. Labels like “service” and “white collar” obscure the immense differences between airline pilots and hospital porters, or senior civil servants and hotel chambermaids. It’s true that there has been a huge expansion in technical, administrative and managerial jobs, yet this increase was also taking place in Marx’s day, who noted what he called the “constantly growing number of the middle classes” and rebuked orthodox political economists for overlooking it.

If by “the working class” you mean blue-collar factory workers, then this group has indeed diminished sharply in advanced capitalist nations — though this is partly because a large slice of it has been exported to poorer regions of the planet. It is true, even so, that industrial employment on a global scale has declined. Yet the working class is by no means confined to factory workers. Even when Britain was the workshop of the world, manufacturing workers were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers. Marx is generally considered to be a champion of blue-collar industrial workers, yet he was well aware that they didn’t form the majority of working people of his own time. For that, one must look to the vast army of Victorian domestic servants, most of whom were women. In fact, the original proletariat wasn’t the male working class but lower-class women in ancient society. The word “proletariat” comes from the Latin word for “offspring”, meaning those who were too poor to serve the state with anything but their wombs. They had nothing to yield up but the fruit of their bodies, producing labour-power in the form of children. And the labour they endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders. Today, in the farms and sweatshops of the Global South, the typical proletarian is still a woman.

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Despotism is a beast of capitalism

By Terry Eagleton

Marx didn’t champion the proletariat because he thought there was some resplendent virtue in labour. On the contrary, he wanted to abolish it as far as possible. In any case, some stockbrokers no doubt work as hard as some garbage collectors. Marx didn’t even consider the proletariat to be necessarily the most downtrodden of social groups. There are many more likely candidates for this role: vagrants, students, refugees, the elderly, the chronically unemployed and so on. What interested him was its place in the system of production. These men and women were familiar with its workings, organised by it into a collective force, indispensable to its successful running, yet with the capacity to take it over. It was in this sense that industrial capitalism created its own gravedigger. It couldn’t achieve its ends without massing people together, and by massing them together it created the conditions in which they could seize the means of production and run them for their own benefit rather than for the profit of their masters.

It’s in this sense that for Marx history moves under the sign of irony. Marx’s championing of the proletariat, in other words, is inseparable from his belief in democracy. People needed to throw off their chains by their own collective efforts on the spot where they found themselves, not handed their emancipation from elsewhere. What’s changed since the miners’ strike, then, isn’t that the working class has vanished, but that its material conditions have changed. A more flexible, smaller-scale form of capitalist manufacture, with its average unit employing  only a few hundred people, means that the workplace is no longer the main or sole focus of political militancy, as pits and power stations were for the miners. In our own time, the theatre of political conflict is increasingly the street. The mass protests which matter, from Americans marching for George Floyd to Israelis against Netanyahu, take place in public squares rather than factory yards, and the participants are a far more socially mixed bunch than a phalanx of Yorkshire coal miners.

A coal miners’ strike isn’t like a strike by, say, firefighters. There are no communities which consist almost entirely of firefighters and their families, but there used to be towns and villages which drew almost the whole of their identity from the local pit. It is this intimate interweaving of life and labour which Margaret Thatcher and her gang failed to grasp. For them, you would drive to the office and then return to your suburban home, with little connection between the two. In a mining town, the domestic and public realms are closely related, and one of the vital links between them is women. One function of the domestic arena is to breed a new generation of colliers, as well as to care for the current one. The solidarity among miners underground that may be essential for their survival can be translated into collective action in the political sphere.

Not much of this was understood by those bureaucrats and politicians for whom a mining community is just a convenient means of grabbing energy out of the ground, and can be allowed to collapse when the last chunk of the stuff has been excavated. What matters for them are the two grand abstractions of state and economy. The state was unleashed against the miners with such alarming force that any fiction of its impartiality was discredited. For their part, the police seemed to disown any semblance of disinterestedness and treated the strikers as deadly antagonists. My injured leg healed pretty quickly, but there are a number of wounds and traumas from that time which continue to fester.

Well, because it’s not quite as straightforward as that. According to the University of Chicago, 50% of the January 6 mutineers were either business owners or white-collar workers, and only 25% had no college degree.

Again and again, white working-class Americans have been slandered and cast as deranged MAGA fans in the national press. But the reality, as I reveal in my new book, is that Donald Trump’s most hardcore supporters are far wealthier and better educated than your ordinary American. The political scientists Noam Lupu and Nicholas Carnes have convincingly argued that only 30% of Trump voters in 2016 were white and working class.

The confusion partly stems from the misleading definition of “white working class”. The one widely used by pollsters and the media — “those without a four-year college degree” — is too simplistic. Many Americans without college degrees are financially better off than graduates; of the 2,600 top CEOs in America, 8% have no college degree. And while there are approximately 87 million working people in the US who have not finished college, almost a quarter of them are business owners, not workers. How could these bosses be in the same economic bracket as their employees?

We can get round this problem by tweaking the definition. In my research, I define the white working class as those who are in the bottom two-thirds of income distribution, and do not have four-year college degrees. The results have been quite extraordinary. I’ve found that, far from being a lost cause, this cohort has in fact become more liberal over the past several decades on key social issues concerning race, gender, LGBTQ+ rights, and immigration. A 1996 General Social Survey found that 59.8% of white working-class respondents thought that gay sex was always wrong; by 2021, that number plummeted to 29.3%. During this time, attitudes towards gay adoption also changed. An American National Election Studies (ANES) survey in 2000 found that only 38.2% of respondents agreed that gay and lesbian couples should be legally permitted to adopt children. By 2020, that figure had risen to 76%.

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After MAGA, a new Trump rises

By Malcom Kyeyune

Why, then, is the media so quick to demonise America’s white working class? The idea that the working classes have a penchant for demagogues was popularised by the 20th-century sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. In his influential article, “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism” (1959), he claimed that “ethnic prejudices flow more naturally from the situation of the lower classes than from that of the middle and upper classes in modern industrial society”. He argued that working-class and agrarian populists tended to dislike “civil liberties for unpopular political groups, civil rights for ethnic minorities, legitimacy of opposition and proper limits on the power of national political leaders”.

When it came to explaining the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the proudly working-class state of Wisconsin, Lipset’s essay appeared to have the answer: Wisconsin populists were clearly driven by “ethnic prejudices”. This view was gospel in the academic and political establishment until Michael P. Rogin, author of The Intellectuals and McCarthy (1969), deigned to look more closely at where the votes for McCarthy were cast. It turned out that working-class election districts voted against McCarthy. His real base of support came from small town professionals — the lawyers, business owners, and real-estate people who formed the traditional base of the Republic Party, especially in rural areas. The conservatives were in fact far more supportive of McCarthy’s assault on democracy than populist workers and agrarian progressives.

Today’s intellectuals have fallen into the same trap. Despite popular assumptions, Trump’s enablers consist of a vast horde of lawyers and businesspeople, similar to those who once supported Senator McCarthy. And then there are the media personalities and influencers who make their fortunes off the back of Trump’s success. In no way can these operatives be considered working-class.

Though white working-class Americans are often included in Trump’s photo ops, the archetypal MAGA face looks more like that of Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York City, who has shamelessly and repeatedly lied for Trump. MAGA definitely does not look like Shawn Fain, the president of the United Automobile Workers, who recently said that Trump has “a history of serving himself and standing for the billionaire class”.

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By Daniel Zamora Vargas

Critics will say a majority of the white working class did vote for Trump, and that’s true. But then again so did a majority of the white managerial class. It’s hard to argue, then, that the white working class’s support of Trump is notable, much less exceptional. And in any case, most white workers are not attracted to Trump’s racist dog-whistles or even his anti-immigrant position, but rather they desperately hope that he might be able to bring jobs back to America and prevent theirs from vanishing. In fact, for the past few decades, white working-class Americans have been more likely to vote Republican if they live in a region affected by mass lay-offs and manufacturing decline.

And is this so surprising? In the eyes of many workers, the Democratic Party can no longer be trusted. The heirs of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal catapulted many workers into the ranks of the middle class, have been unable to provide any serious protection against mass lay-offs — which have negatively affected more than half of all working people and their families. And since Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party has been associated with Wall Street deregulation and international trade deals that have decimated jobs in the manufacturing sector.

All this time, working people have been waiting for a politician who dares to challenge corporate greed. But the failure of America’s two major parties to mitigate Wall Street’s war on workers has eroded their legitimacy. Increasingly, working people are giving up on politics, assuming that the system is rigged against them. And when a political system fails to provide even a semblance of job stability, democracy is inevitably vulnerable.

America’s politicians once understood this. In the Cold War, Washington successfully challenged communism by improving the standard of living of the working class. But since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the combination of rising inequality, mass layoffs, and the domination of financial economic interests has put an end to rising prosperity. And the result, as we’re now seeing, is worse than an embrace of MAGA — it’s the working-class rejection of politics altogether.

Because these former mining valleys in the wilds of Glamorgan were the cradle of working-class politics in Britain. Revolutionary socialism is almost as old as the mining communities in these hills: the red flag of socialism was flown for the very first time in anger over the skies of Merthyr Tydfil in 1831. And, in time, this people and landscape gave rise to the British labour movement and the party that bears its name, a party that knew who it represented and what it wanted to change.

Keir Hardie, Labour’s founding father, was elected MP for the Merthyr and Aberdare constituency only a few years before he would oversee the transition from the Independent Labour Party to the more familiar abbreviated title in 1906. A former miner who first entered the darkness of the pits at just 10-years old, he knew first-hand the toils and struggles faced by these hardened communities, and never forgot them in Parliament, wearing a deerstalker and tweed jacket in place of the expected top hat and tails. But Hardie himself never lived to see the party he conceived in power. An idealist and a pacifist, he died a broken man in 1915, as his contentious objections to the First World War (on the basis of the working-class dead and war profiteering) went unheeded.

Just nine years later though, and 100 years ago this week, the Labour Party did form its first government. It was led, though, by a Scot, Ramsay Macdonald, later expelled as a traitor and a turncoat for his collaboration with the Conservatives. Throughout this fractious period, as the Labour Party split and reformed, mutated and reorganised, South Wales remained its natural home. It was here that institutions later synonymous with the party, such as the National Union of Miners, were first established. And the area produced the radical autodidactic streak that gave Labour’s second prime minister, Clement Atlee, his greatest lieutenant: Nye Bevan gained his education in the libraries and reading rooms of Tredegar’s Miners’ institutes, arguably the most impressive educational bodies promoting the socialist cause anywhere in Europe.

Nationwide, the party’s electoral fortunes waxed and waned after the war and into the Sixties. But, like working-class industrial regions across the United Kingdom, the party’s grip in South Wales was as firm as the iron smelted in the furnace-town of Hardie’s coronation. But now this relationship has been lost. A proud heritage has withered, and Labour means as little to these parts as “politics” itself. Understanding how such a bond could be neglected and dismantled is essential to understanding the story of Labour over the past century, and its origin can be traced to a single moment: the tragedy that stopped a school clock dead at 9.13am one Friday morning that became the moment of reckoning.

Some places are so synonymous with a tragedy that their very name becomes a byword for unimaginable suffering. Today, our own most baleful metonym is probably “Grenfell”, immediately evoking corruption, betrayal and the dereliction of state duty. But in the valleys of South Wales, a different tragedy bears a single name: Aberfan. That was the village where, on the morning of 21 October 1966, approximately 105,000 cubic metres of discarded coal waste slid into the community and engulfed the Pant Glas school and houses below. Half the town’s children were wiped out by the black avalanche that sped down the slopes, along with 28 adults.

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By David Torrance

Aberfan had already been foretold through numerous warnings, and in previous slippages in both the village itself and nearby. But even as the slurry settled and the spoil began to be cleared, the story was only just beginning. Much as at Grenfell, those who should have been held responsible, the people this community had most faith in, were absolved of any responsibility. John Collins, whose entire family was taken by the black mountain, later said: “I was tormented by the fact that the people I was seeking justice from were my people — a Labour government, a Labour council, a Labour nationalised coal board.” This Establishment cover-up was fatal. As veteran BBC broadcaster Vincent Kane later added: “Half a dozen or so organisations or individuals should have brought help to those stricken people, but instead they betrayed them.”

The central figure in this episode was Lord Robens who, as Chairman of the National Coal Board, continually presented himself as a defender of coal, while overseeing widespread pit closures. His arrogance was matched only by the lack of compassion he showed towards the families of the bereaved. Insult piled upon injury as the official tribunal into the cause of the disaster was marred by misinformation, delays and attempts to obstruct the truth. And the victims could see it — as a father of one of the bereaved children cried out when giving evidence: “Buried alive by the National Coal Board. That is what I want to see on record. That is the feeling of those present. Those are the words we want to go on the certificate”.

Worse was to follow: it was at the behest of the Labour Minister for Wales — the valleys-born George Thomas, later Lord Tonypandy — that the villagers themselves were required pay to remove remaining slag heaps still towering over their homes from the disaster relief fund. But this tragedy was to become the epicentre of a far greater conjuncture, where Wales began to reckon with all the false promises of industrialisation and unionism. If there is no history of South Wales without Aberfan, there is no complete history of the Labour Party which does not chapter the devastation and fury it sowed in this heartland. And, while the latter part of the Sixties was marked by the beginnings of a turn away from Labour, the following decade saw nothing arrive to replace it. Voter turnout in elections started to decline, while industrial action by the miners threw the country into darkness, a faction of the working class seemingly at war with the country — and, after the 1974 election, at war with a Labour government too.

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By Martin Johnes

Labour’s hold here wasn’t immediately severed. A son of the valleys, the Tredegar-born Neil Kinnock, would later assume the helm as Margaret Thatcher instigated a very different kind of revolution. An impressive intellect and pragmatist, Kinnock’s accent and bearing connected the party back to its past. He could speak with genuine feeling of the strength of those communities, “who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football”. But that would in part be his undoing: a conservative national press constantly mocked his “boyo” persona. And while he could give voice to South Wales through his own, it ultimately became the voice of political defeat, as the pits central to valley-life were shut and sealed, something the Labour Party proved powerless to stop.

The coming to power of Tony Blair offered a symbolic rupture from a party once grounded in working-class, Celtic regions. But he too had his ways of disrupting community life, for instance with his insistence that more children from deprived areas should be given the option to attend university. While many rightly welcomed the chance to escape, the continued lack of sustained investment in the South Wales valleys simply meant they had no reason to return. And, as Blair opened more of the country to the punishing writ of the free market, the last vestiges of industry petered out. The last of the pits closed, and some of the most prominent local employers such as Hoover in Merthyr and the Polikoff’s and Burberry factories in the Rhondda, dramatically cut their workforce, until their inevitable closure a decade or so later.

With the National Assembly for Wales established in 1997 following devolution in the Principality, the strength of support for Plaid Cymru, which had been gathering momentum since Aberfan, was now evident in the valley heartlands. By 1999 they would even manage to win seats in the once unimaginable ward of the Rhondda, where the old joke ran that even a Smurf would win should they be dressed in red. Blair’s appeal to Middle England was traded in Wales, and the party barely scrapes ahead of the Conservatives nationally now.

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Keir Starmer and the triumph of the middle class

By Terry Eagleton

Kinnock was probably the last leader of the Labour Party as it was originally conceived. But he was ultimately given the impossible task of trying to lead a party born in another age, a product of the dire need to have political representation to counter the exploitative nature of industrial capitalism. Now, it has lost its identity, just as much as the people it represented were losing theirs. As Thatcher transformed Britain and placed it at the forefront of the post-industrial neoliberal revolution, without the constancy of a manufacturing and industrial base, was there even any meaning to the term “labour”?

Today, as the party seeks to commemorate 100 years of its electable “progress”, it should turn is attention the places which gave the party its name and yet where poverty and abandonment persist. While you can be sure that disdain for the Conservative Party is still strongly felt, the Labour Party is regarded with something equally dangerous: an apathetic rolling of the eyes by a people whose rolling hills speaks to the layered memories of resigned weathering. Even as another Keir looks set to return the Labour Party to power, Ton and Pentre Labour and Progressive Club won’t suddenly reopen. Suspended in neglect, its rooms will remain empty as another electoral season passes. And all the while, what passes for progress will continue arriving at these towns from elsewhere, just explanations that try and fail to make sense of the greatest dereliction — the dereliction of the mind and soul of a people.

There was the hunchbacked man with a pork dinner; the woman in a motorised wheelchair eating sticky toffee pudding; and the obese man stuffed into a far-too-small football kit, working on a nut roast and strawberry shake. Outside, in Market Square, the only thing going on was a showdown between two addicts, “John’s a lying cunt” and “Wendy’s a fucking a fat whore”. I started on team John but quickly pivoted to team Wendy, when John insisted he hadn’t punched the guy we all just saw him punch.

I had planned on staying in Dover for two nights, but by the time the police came to take John away, it was clear I’d been fooled by decades of tourist board propaganda. Here was a scrappy, poverty-riddled port town struggling to live up to its historical hype. An essential node in modern life where motorways intersect next to a huge port, allowing us to have the stuff we have.

I thought about giving up on Dover and going to sleep, but first I went to Wetherspoons. There, I met Sandra. Or as she wrote in my phone, Sandra Puta. Since I’ve spent time in Brazil and the Bronx, I recognised this as confirmation of what was already pretty clear — she was for sale, or rent at least.

Sandra had come into the Wetherspoons 20 minutes earlier and methodically worked her way through the tables of men, none of whom wanted the problems she was selling. It was a buyer’s market anyway, since there were plenty of younger, blonder options nearby. Some were accompanied by both their newborns and their mothers, so that the latter could act as impromptu babysitters if their daughters got work. Three generations at one table.

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Sandra was originally from Brazil, she told me, but had been making her way through the EU, using refugee status to get what she wanted. She’d arrived in Dover a few months ago, using what she called her “Pussy Passport” to gain a long-term visa, a flat to bring men back to, and the £170-per-week payment offered to victims of human trafficking. She alternated between talking to me and FaceTiming a man who could have been her dealer, her pimp, her boyfriend, or any combination of the above. 

She wasn’t shy about any of this — what she did, or the bullshit she told the bureaucrats. Her honesty was disarming. I’m used to deflection, but she was upfront about everything, including what she currently wanted, which was more money for crack. I made it clear I wasn’t going to help her with that. We talked for about two hours, before I left to get some sleep. The next day, I would begin my week-long walk to Portsmouth. When I woke at 5am, I had over 20 missed calls, because addicts be addicts, no matter how smart, genuine, and interesting they are.

When I planned my trek along England’s South-East coast, I had images of boardwalks crowded with arcades, high streets chock full of fish and chip shops, and town centres of ancient churches and quaint inns above pubs. I wasn’t prepared for how populated the beaches themselves would be. Despite being an island, England isn’t thought of by us Americans as having a beach culture, perhaps because in reality it’s so ingrained — the literal and figurative water everyone swims in. It’s a good attitude, which I prefer to the American one of “let’s invade the beach for a few hours with loads of paraphernalia”. The coast to the British is more about long-term therapy and less about immediate pleasure — it has to be, given the climate.

The result is the British, more than most, want to live close to the coast, even if they don’t ever swim in the water, even if it means giving up a larger house with space. The shoreline, even in the most remote parts, is dotted with trailer parks and clusters of RVs, tents, and vans — some right on the beach, others off in the hills with only a view of the ocean, but all gaining value by their proximity to the sea. Wherever in England there is the right to settle near the coast, people settle; sometimes they even settle where there isn’t the right.

Somewhere between New Romney and Rye, I met Mark, who lives with his furless cat in a van in a squatters’ camp. The pebbled land is owned by “some rich guy in Thailand who doesn’t give a fuck about us”. He claims it is one of the few remaining plots on the southern coast that hasn’t been taken away by “them fuckers in the government, or the rich”. It is a self-policing year-round community of about 100 people — most retired, on the dole, working odd day jobs, or all of the above. I’d seen other squatter communities along my walk, but none as well-organised.

Many of the beaches I walked along between Dover and Worthing were the sad pebble and concrete beaches that Americans picture when they feel sorry for the British. They are rocky, cold, misty, mercurial — but they are busy, which fits with the rather passive English attitude toward life: people making the best of what they have and accepting things as they are, rather than trying to change them. This is how it is; this is how it’s always been.

These beaches fit what I call the British “Extra Rolo Culture”. When I worked in London in the late Nineties, the buses all had huge ads proudly announcing that a roll of Rolos now came with an extra Rolo. Eight, not seven, baby Rolos per Rolo litter. For me and my banker friends, it came to represent the material sadness of English life, compared to the US. You might have a stagnant GDP, a crumbling empire, rock-filled beaches, soggy and tasteless food, rainy and dreary weather, but don’t despair: here’s an extra Rolo!

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At the time my personality was peak Wall Street and I viewed everything in economic terms, and by that measure England is something to be laughed at or pitied. That hasn’t changed in the last three decades; if anything it’s worse. The seaside towns I have walked through are a good example. I’m typing this in a pub where almost nothing works, after spending three nights in three different hotels where almost nothing worked. Where showers are either scalding hot or freezing cold. Where, when the weather turns a bit warmer than usual, people treat ice likes it’s some magical thing that can’t be accessed. Not without offending the Gods. Where everything is small, sad, half-broken and dreary.

Since then, I’ve changed. I get the extra Rolo thing now: it is about moving beyond the material, accepting what you have, which is perfectly fine, and focusing on other things. Sure, you can splurge every now and then, spoil yourself with an eighth Rolo, as a lark, but that’s not the primary point of happiness. From what I’ve seen and heard in my two long walks across England, the English working class is a lot happier, more comfortable in their own skin and content, than the American. They might suffer from many of the same problems, but they seem a lot less angry. 

While there’s a lot of reasons for this, I think the main one is, ironically, that the class system is more calcified. In the US there’s this fantasy that anyone can do anything. The elites peddle this all the time: with enough hard work you can be whatever you want to be. The corollary to that is it’s not ok to be working class. You should always be looking to move on, rather than building your own culture. Divorce your class and be better, you loser!

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In the UK, the knowledge that you are stuck in your class is actually freeing. The attitude shifts from constantly trying to distance yourself from your community to contributing to it. Or at least being happy with it. Because fuck the elites and their scorn. I’m never gonna be them, so I’ll be what my dad was and my dad’s dad was. 

The result of this is the British seem like a wind-up toy that bumps over and over into a wall, but with a smile on its face. As a former banker, and an American driven to optimism, my first reaction is to find that annoying. But a decade removed from my banker days, I now see things in less material terms. I believe the biggest contributor to happiness is not having tons of stuff, but knowing your address in the universe of meaning. Knowing who you are, and why you’re here, and what will come once you’re gone. 

The English working class has that. It is eating mushy fish on pebbly beaches, then heading off to the local for a pint of bitter. That’s the difference between Dover and all the places in the US I’ve visited. They both have addicts — both have people like Sandra who are gaming the system — but in Dover, despite all the dysfunction, despite very little working, there is far more happiness than in the Bronx, or West Virginia. 

Chaplins, despite all the visible unhappiness, is a happy place. Everyone that came in knew everyone else, including lying John, and understood them. They knew where they were coming from and what they were going through. Because England, even the “worst” parts, still has a real community, built around a shared history and culture; even if it sometimes gets turned into tourism board silliness, it very much matters. The English know who they are, and are ok with it. That they also got an extra Rolo every now and then is the cherry on the top.

We have good reason to be sceptical of Starmer’s attempts to wave the red flag. The thinness of his commitment to working-class interests is demonstrated by his record. It was Starmer, after all, who played a key role in Labour’s disastrous attempt to please everyone and no one by courting supporters of a People’s Vote, ignoring the Red Wall’s steadfast desire to leave the European Union. It didn’t matter that, as an institution, one of the EU’s key purposes was to prevent member states from upturning their economies — precisely what Corbyn’s nationalisation plans, which Starmer signed up to, needed to do. Nor did it matter that the EU boasts a proud history of enforcing anti-union legislation.

Since then, like a good lawyer rather than a good working-class boy, Starmer has revelled in playing both sides — assuring businesses of his “economic competence” while also talking uncomfortably about the needs of the working class. This past weekend, his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, promised that a Labour government would rule out increases in taxes on capital gains and top rates of income. The week before, Labour’s national policy forum attempted to win the hearts of corporate leaders by diluting pledges to strengthen workers’ rights.

This is the essence of Starmerism: a commitment to fiscal discipline that doesn’t scratch, let alone smash, his “class ceiling”. As Steve Hall and Simon Winlow argue in The Death of the Left, “Labour seems even more liberal and metrocentric than it was under Corbyn.” Just wave the flag, tell some anecdotes about your working-class father, and surely no one will notice.

Except that, when they look a bit closer, voters surely will. Consider Starmer’s much-vaunted “Five Missions”, the last of which — “break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage” — is little more than a rehashing of Blair’s behavioural managerialism. Teach people “resilience”, “emotional intelligence” and… “oracy”? That’ll do it. New Labour also demonstrated a strong commitment to reforming working-class behaviours. Regulate daily life, interfere with what people say, do and think, and, somehow, some way, that “class ceiling” will just melt away.

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There used to be so much more to it than this. At the turn of the 20th century, the Labour Party emerged out of workers’ attempts to organise as a formidable political force. They weren’t constrained by condescending talk of a “class ceiling”, but saw an entire world for the taking. As Martin Hagglund puts it in This Life, in 1912, a 33-year-old German miner with eight children could describe his involvement in the labour movement thus: “[It] enriches me and all my friends through the glowing light of recognition. We understand that we are no longer the anvil but rather the hammer that forms the future of our children, and that feeling is worth more than gold.” It was this realisation that pushed workers’ parties across Europe towards political power — the recognition that their work built countries and made them run. Contained in this is the core of a working class constituted as a political subject. It is about more than money and “getting ahead”. It is about being a political subject capable of directing everything from the shipyard to the seeming arcane throws of the economy.

At the same time, however, the British labour movement has always been characterised by a tension between a philanthropic faction, which grew out of Methodism and saw social reform as a moralising mission, and a second, grittier faction that grew out of the working class itself. As Hall and Winlow relate, this was a conflict between middle-class socialists motivated by charitable desires to help the poorest and those who thought “philanthropy should play no part in the movement”. It wasn’t about feeding the hungry and giving beds to the homeless, but rather “creating a new economy and society in which charity wasn’t needed”.

This tension is perhaps best exemplified by the role of the temperance movement in the early Labour Party. A product of the more religious elements of the progressive middle class, they saw ridding poorer communities of the scourge of alcohol as a key step in improving their lot. This mission clashed with those who wished to be more pragmatic, recognising the role of the pub in social life and the importance of alcohol for relaxation after exhausting working days. These positions also matched an existing split within the working class itself, between the more “respectable” elements who valued public morality and the bawdier factions who enjoyed drink, sport and straight-talk. Yet, for the most part, it was recognised that foregrounding temperance and associated moral reforms was a losing political battle.

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This division, of course, has always been about more than alcohol. It is between those who wish to oversee the working class and its problems and those who wish to represent the working class and move beyond its problems. It is a tension between the working class as objects and as subjects. And, in the therapeutic language that adorns his Five Missions, Starmer has shown that he’s uneasy with moving fully from the former to the latter. For him, the real barrier to working class advancement is their own behaviour and outlook. Like the temperance advocate, we must “protect them from themselves”. Here, it is not a collective project to better society that matters, but rather a shoring-up of each individual’s will and resilience to confront the world as it is — unchangeable and fixed. There is no alternative. Sound familiar?

But in clumsily trying to walk Labour back to its working-class roots, Starmer has wound up lost in their labyrinth. He has learned nothing from the failures of 2019, wherein trying to please everyone — now including business technocrats — meant that everyone was thoroughly disgruntled. Comrade Starmer has figured out that the material reality of working people is important, but mistakenly thinks that’s all that counts. Yes, material comfort is important, but the working class always jostles between hardship and comfort. And it can endure a great deal of hardship if it is doing so for a project whose pathway it is directing.

For supporters of rugby league — a game associated not with public schools but the towns of the post-industrial North — the arrival of the Conservative Party into its territory was a surprise. League had always been part of a working-class culture which was intrinsically Labour, played out across the coalfields of Lancashire and Yorkshire, in the weapon and shipbuilding plants of Cumbria and by the docks of Humberside. But when Brexit proved to be a reckoning for those areas, with the Conservatives vowing to see it through, the sport was inevitably drawn in.

This is how we ended up with Ann Widdecombe addressing a Labour club in the rugby-league heartland of Featherstone in early 2019. In an ex-mining town that had once looked to Arthur Scargill, she won cheers for attacking the “traitors in parliament” and the “bureaucrats in Brussels”. The only boos came when anyone mentioned the prospect of a “second referendum”. It was part of a political sea change. Featherstone’s MP, Jon Trickett, was one of the lucky survivors of the collapse of the Red Wall in 2019. But the gradual decline in his vote share over recent decades emphasises the disconnect between the party and the people. In 1997, Trickett won over 70% of the vote, making it a rock-solid New Labour area. By contrast, in 2019 his share was down to just 37%.

Labour politicians can no longer afford to take those voters for granted. Lisa Nandy, who represents another ex-mining rugby league town in Wigan, has since made the connection between sport and her constituents’ sense of place. In her book All In, she notes how almost every Labour club in Wigan has been demolished, how the once-beloved ground, Central Park, is now a Tesco.

For all the changes to society, however, rugby league stands firm in those areas as a focal point for working-class communities to come together. Despite operating in an ever harder financial climate, clubs remain the place where identities are forged, and community cohesion is harnessed. When Covid-19 hit, for instance, it was the clubs that were at the forefront of the organisational response — from co-ordinating welfare checks and running foodbanks to raising money for NHS services. When the Johnson Government ensured the game had a loan to keep operating when the doors were closed, Oliver Dowden said it was because “it has been the social glue holding communities together”.

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If there is one area that symbolises the historic importance of a team to a community then it is Featherstone Rovers. Often described as just a “set of traffic lights on the road from Wakefield to Pontefract”, the club has prided itself on punching above its weight by producing generations of international players — the likes of Jimmy Thompson, Paul Newlove and Zak Hardaker. For much of the 20th century, players did the same jobs, drank in the same pubs, lived on the same streets, and sent their kids to the same schools as the supporters who idolised them on the terraces. When a group of sociologists visited the area for the study Coal is Our Life, rugby league was judged alongside the pub and the cinema to be “the only institution bringing large numbers of people together”.

This organic community began to dissolve in the Eighties. Any town that was linked to coal-mining was hammered when the pit closure plan was initiated, and, during the miners’ strike, Featherstone became emblematic of the turmoil that was engulfing the region. League players picketed by day while those working in other industries were stopped and interrogated by the police as they went about their daily business. Wives of miners stopped fundraising for the club and started supporting each other instead. Rovers let striking miners in for free on the assumption that they would reimburse them when they were back at work. But the pits never did reopen. The community was broken up and people took on new jobs as labourers and taxi drivers. The local historian Ian Clayton watched on as a succession of building societies and well-established businesses were boarded up and broken into. Crime, which had never been a factor in the town’s day-to-day life, increased. “For the first time to my knowledge, I’ve known Featherstone folk pinching off one another,” Clayton wrote.

At the same time, rugby league looked set to abandon Featherstone, too. The sport’s attempt to come to terms with the settlement of the Eighties was the plan, fuelled by a mega broadcasting deal with BSkyB, to merge small clubs together and expand into the cities. “We have 35 clubs in terrible little, tiny areas all competing to get the same sponsors, the same people through the turnstiles, the same players,” argued Maurice Lindsay, who spearheaded the move. “Nostalgia”, he concluded, “does not pay the bills.” For the “expansionists” who wanted the game to grow and move into the cities, teams such as Featherstone were symbolic of the league’s parochialism and the “cloth cap” image that it wanted to distance itself from. A profitable future for the sport would come through big money and big media.

Lindsay tellingly likened it to Nigel Lawson’s financial “big bang”, allowing clubs to amalgamate like banks and building societies had. Others saw it as an attempt to change the image of the game. The veteran rugby league journalist Paul Fitzpatrick wrote that the sport could not hope to survive when it was “played in dumps and against a background of stark poverty”. But, in 1995, when Featherstone supporters were told that their club would merge with neighbours Castleford and Wakefield (to become Calder), it stirred deep emotions within them.

The resistance to the mergers was soon framed as a battle between the people and the elite. Supporters made protest signs — “Bought and Sold for Murdoch’s Gold,” read one — and came together in community halls and Labour clubs to orchestrate a campaign of protest. One, speaking at an anti-Calder meeting, declared rugby league is not a “commodity to be bought and sold by billionaires”. The “expansionists” framed the opponents as reactionaries who were unable to see how society and the marketplace around sports was changing. But revisiting those debates today, it is clear that the battle to conserve those identities was not just about the past. It was also about the future. For all that had been lost during the Eighties, there was hope that, through rugby league, their areas could one day be part of the national story again.

So, when Ian Clayton was invited on to the BBC to debate the mergers, he dreamed that “one day a woman would wake up in Toulouse one morning and turn round to her husband and say, ‘Do you fancy a weekend in Featherstone?’” His campaign even printed T-shirts which emphasised this philosophy, urging people to “Think Global – Act Local”. But due to the huge fan pressure, the rugby league mergers never happened. Instead, dreams of global expansion were traded for the preservation of heritage, and league continues to serve the same working-class communities that formed the game over 125 years ago. It was the same lesson that football learned when they tried to instigate the European Super League in 2021: when faced with a direct choice between cash and community, fans will pick community every time.

It’s a sporting simulacrum for the vote to leave the European Union. But, just as with Brexit, there is a clear economic trade-off when you focus on the local rather than the global market. Today, league clubs remain community assets but are increasingly irrelevant on the national stage. In the fierce battle to secure sponsorship and TV revenue, league increasingly arrives at the table with a weak hand. While the organisers of the Rugby World Cup forecasts that it will make €45 million this year, the league equivalent, hosted in England last autumn, failed to drum up much public interest. Had it not been subsidised by the British taxpayer it would have run at a significant loss.

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The lack of funds at the top of the game means that the sport is always battling for survival. Just last month in Featherstone, the local amateur club, the Lions, who run junior clubs, put out an appeal to raise money to fix craters and potholes, as well as rebuild their toilets and showers. The organiser admits that “the last thing our kids and wider community need is for our club to close due to financial reasons”. For now though, Featherstone on a matchday remains a place where the community can come together. It is the place where ex-players can meet in the clubhouse and reminisce about the “good old days”; where young people can sit, vape, and hang out together; where new parents can park their prams and let their children play.

As Britain navigates its post-Brexit landscape, the dilemma facing rugby league is not too dissimilar to the one facing our politicians. How can areas protect those community assets in an economy that has been dependent on market forces for so long? Brexit and the 2019 election put places such as Featherstone at the centre of the debate about Britain’s future and its identity. As we struggle to adapt to our new era, their communal spirit, powered by rugby league, might once again hold the key.

According to liberal conventional wisdom, we are in a post-industrial, post-imperial society where shouty (white) men can no longer trumpet their entitled assumptions unchallenged, and perhaps even have to stand in line. Well, if that’s truly the case, thank fuck for it. After all, imperialism and the patriarchy cost a lot of lives, and gave us wars, bad politics and bad art. And nothing’s changed.

Ironically, however, most of those lives lost in Western society were male, white and working-class; basically, those citizens assumed by the paradigm of class-denying intersectionality to be the enemy of progress. White working-class males are now recast as the establishment’s salivating attack dogs; the overseers of imperialism, enforcing the bidding of their wealthier masters. Their role in securing most of our human rights — through workplace struggle in the trade unions, strikes, demonstrations, wars and riots — is to be erased from our collective consciousness.

Because some sections of the white working class bought into the reductive neoliberalism of unrestrained capitalism through the Thatcher-Reagan revolution, so the entire group was written off. In the “hierarchy of the oppressed” so beloved of intersectional theory, a (white) penis in the underpants is more important than the lack of an arse in the trousers in determining your place in the world.

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Bret Easton Ellis: 'My generation wanted to be offended'

By Bret Easton Ellis

So, what excludes white working-class men from this LGBT intersectional paradigm? It can’t be race, as white women are permitted. It can’t be class, as working-class women and black men are allowed in. It can’t even be sex/gender, as gay or bisexual white working-class men and women are included. But perversely, white proletarian men are lumped in with their bourgeois “brethren”; outsiders in this rainbow-coloured festival of the oppressed.

In this bizarre schematic model, working-class football supporters in Liverpool are deemed on the same side as rabid establishment mouthpieces such as The Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie, who demonised, vilified and lied about them. Conversely, black teenagers in inner London estates, continually the victims of harassment by the Metropolitan Police and at the bottom of Britain’s opportunity pile, are ludicrously deigned to have common cause with the privately-educated colonial elites placed strategically in the media and commerce through “equal opportunity” positive discrimination schemes. There’s something about the bourgeois psyche that produces a visceral reaction to that deadly combination of working-class, white and straight — irrespective of the actual views and life experiences of someone in that grouping.

The decline of class politics and its replacement by the schisms of identity is an integral part of the neoliberal order. After all, one unites and the other divides. The class war was won by the elite in Britain, probably as far back as Orgreave in the 1984 miners’ strike, when organised labour was crushed. Today, capital rules supreme, steadfastly tightening its hold, aided by a rapacious individualism that has now tipped into a demented narcissism, and a technology concentrated in the hands of corporations and its co-opted governments.

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The naked persecution of Donald Trump

By David Mamet

Therefore, in the realms of finance and economics, nothing is now contestable, unless it’s national elites using their power (and manipulating the populace) to try to gain more traction and influence at the expense of the interrelated global ones. What is presented to us as politics is a hollow civil war of the super wealthy, with the rest of us as pawns. Silver-spooned, daddy-issue Republicans, like Trump and his ilk, have long presented as comic-book versions of the most vulgar, dumbass versions of redneck USA. This is now Right-wing de rigueur, enabling exploiters to “connect” with a politically and socially displaced white America, which embraces grievance and victimhood as eagerly as any grouping that claims to be oppressed. This folksy affectation is only partly strategic: late capitalism has stupefied its winners as much as its losers. Hollywood has recycled the potty mouth of the ghetto into the boardroom, where the same tropes are now regurgitated in a decontextualised way, with defiant alienation replaced by entitled arrogance, under the depoliticised posturing of “attitude”.

Meanwhile, digital technology and its deployment solely for private profit through capital accumulation has fucked all our attention spans, and our sense of the past, as completely as George Orwell suggested. (Indeed, there’s little point in saying that: the ubiquity of Orwell as just another internet cliché has completely nullified the power of his message.)

In Britain, I believe that the traditional working man — of all colours — has had a bad rap. Recently, I was out with some old pals, and we were talking about how we’ve stayed close friends down the years, despite life, love and work taking us off in varying directions. One friend went on at length about how his partner and her friends were quite surprised at the continuing bond between us all. It’s a recurrent theme with women I know, who ask, perhaps not unjustly: how can you still be bothered with each other?

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Race is a delusion

By David Mamet

Men, whose camaraderie can seem frivolous, built on drinking, football and laughing at each other’s embarrassments, paradoxically tend to stick together down the years more than women, who talk of weightier, more emotional subjects. Several years ago, following a relationship breakdown scenario, I went through a phase where I felt like I was done with male company. I decided I could do without the gung-ho nature of the archetypal male response to such events: “Forget her. They’re all the same. Get another round up. I’ve left a line out for you in the toilets.” As a result, I basically surrounded myself with my women friends. Not for the first time, they were the ones offering real support and genuine insight into my predicament.

Then you realise: it’s not about thesis and antithesis. There’s always got to be room for a synthesis of different ideas and values. Once more, I’m appreciating the narrow, lazy affirmation that belonging to a mob of men can offer. The best thing about being a man of my generation is that we’re allowed to get the fuck out of the house. Now I feel for youth who don’t do this so much — they really don’t know what they are missing. When they do, the experience is invariably packaged for them. The biggest indictment you can offer our current dystopia is that we’ve created a society where the old pity the young. That’s just not right.

Masculinity (as well as femininity) is tied to our lost sense of community. As pubs and clubs close down across the country, teenagers are more likely to spend their evenings on Instagram, TikTok, playing video games or on some dubious porn forums than getting drink from the offie and messing around in the park or on abandoned railway lines. A social vacuum has been created at the same time as a dumbed-down visceral communication system has emerged. This creates a place where someone as pathetic as Andrew Tate can gain a limited sphere of influence. The emergence of such characters would have been impossible in the Nineties. They would have been dismissed as ludicrous wankers in a truly contested, democratic street culture, as opposed to the top-down media one we now live in. Now a noncey, supermarket transgression has gained a foothold, appealing to an entire lost generation of anxious, isolated teenage bedroom wankers, brimming with the sleazy narratives of onscreen porn.

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The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

While young people are being stripped of their right to be completely irresponsible — i.e. young — those of us who spent a whole chunk of our change in the last century are often unprepared to let go of our unruly youth, still investing in bad behaviour and the institutions believed to encourage it; the pub, the gig, the nightclub, the rave, the football ground and the traditional workplace. I personally thank the higher powers for those declining bastions.

In their growing absence, the neoliberal state has gutted everyone’s lives of meaning — to the extent that we have little to cling to other than a narcissistic, media-constructed sense of who we are and our supposed entitlement to avoid personal discomfort at all costs. Thus, through toxic social media platforms, proponents of various identities get to sling all sorts of mud at each other, devoid of any social setting and real human interaction. Generally, it’s an inconsequential battle, in which people are afforded the keyboard warrior’s licence — rewarded by the dopamine hits — to abuse each other with relative impunity. The objective of the game is to goad the other party into an overreach and a subsequent pile-on, with an attendant Twitter ban or, the great weapon of our times, “cancellation”. Generally, however, in those futile wars, no party claims a feasible victory. Nonetheless, the participants are rarely shy of pompously deploying tiresome, overdramatic dictums declaring their cause or viewpoint to be “on the right side of history”.

This nonsense benefits only the continuation of the current bankrupt system. The establishment’s economic, financial and social elites once starved people into compliance; now it lures them into pointless shouting matches, allowing them to stupefy themselves in the process.

So, white men aren’t the only ones rendered toxic by our culture. Every group and demographic, as evidenced by its social media extremists, are fundamentally unhappy with their lot and in existential crisis about who they are in this changing world. Part of this is the old science of consumer capitalism: keep us feeling bad about ourselves and then give us a product or service or procedure that will make us centred, complete or alive. Ignore the fact that we’re strutting around in a zoo we’ve made for ourselves. Whatever we consume or change or alter, we remain polar bears in the same concrete enclosure, pacing up and down.

The toxicity of white rich men is more consequential than that of the rest of us, which is largely an acting out, a cry for attention. After all, they are seen to have the power to change all this. Only they don’t. The consciousness-crushing machine they’ve helped create and service brings them no substantive life benefit anymore. Can a man with £400 million in the bank really be poorer than one with £500 million? How many lives do you need to live to spend that? It’s the accumulation of meaninglessness; the buying of some kind of dominance and largely imagined status over peers. Checking figures from the spreadsheets on their screens. Seeing how efficient a capitalism no longer tied to production is in taking the resources of communities, monetising it, and transferring it to their accounts. Basically, wasting their lives away in that most futile of pursuits: making non-spendable money, while the years tick by, and dreams of love and laughter are replaced by a rancid resentment and urge to satisfy the ego-driven need for “influence”.

The continuing war of capital upon consciousness, on what makes us human, continues apace. In an economy that can produce everything at zero cost, the wealthy are coming to the end of their ability to control us by paying wages. Now, this can only be done through the steady erosion of human consciousness. AI is a backstop here, just in case our spirits rebel in reaction to this, and we cut up too rough. After all, a robot or a computer doesn’t need food. And crucially, it’s not changed by anyone looking at it. It is not self-conscious. But if the system can’t make robots quickly enough to replace us, it’ll try to make us all into robots.

“We’re not allowed to say that” is the factory bleat that resonates throughout social media from all we older, toxic, white working-class males. How excited we get on our dopamine hits, when some papier-mâché faced ponce seems to stick it to the poker-arsed gatekeepers of neoliberal morality with a racist or sexist quip — while they (quietly) endorse an economic system of gross inequity that now almost literally defecates on us. Our participation in “politics” is reduced to watching a Frank Drebin from Police Squad/The Naked Gun look-and-soundalike clownishly annoy some uptight disapprover.

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Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

What we certainly are allowed to do, is to be nostalgic. The system plays on our need to make sense of our existence by processing our past, but only in a way that all conflict is taken out of it. Thus, our need to validate our lives in a fake “golden age” haze becomes a de facto endorsement of a system that has limited the potential of those lives. It encourages us to sit around crying into our beer about how things ain’t what they used to be, reconstructing a collective rose-tinted past designed to sustain us in our dotage, while ensuring this state creeps ever closer as mindless aphorisms — ubiquitous, circular — rot our brains.

Fuck that. Pick up a book instead. Let’s get educated. The smarter we are, the less easy it is for the unenlightened greed junkies to fuck things up for us. The world is changing, let’s change with it, but in ways which make sense to us, not to the blueprint of white-collar fascist controllers or soulless tech nerds who need to get properly laid. (They are the ones who’ve swamped our brains and culture with the shabby dictates of their crass dating algorithms.) If I could make one solitary plea to white working-class men: do not be servile to the upper classes. They are not your amigos. They blithely dispatched your forefathers to the killing fields, and they haven’t gained any greater appreciation or respect for you since. In broader terms, Trump-Biden 2 or 3 or 4 will not do anything for the citizens of this world that the first one didn’t. Probably much less. Toxic masculinity is just that, because it exists within a toxic system.

The witch is Esme Boggart. She represents a new collective established to campaign against no-fault evictions, and to support the families affected by them. In this case, the owner of the estate had commissioned an architect to refurbish the cottage. But, when the architect recommending demolishing and rebuilding the house instead, the tenants were handed their notice. A family of seven, they had lived on the estate for 26 years. “The owners of this property don’t live here,” reads Esme Boggart’s campaign literature. “They don’t know our community.”

Esme Boggart, in contrast, stands for “people who belong to a landscape, but don’t own an inch of it”. The people behind the protest use her name instead of their own because they are afraid to lose their own homes. “We are sick,” they write, “of this neo-feudalism that governs our lives.” Folksy as it is, the collective is identifying a modern twist on an ancient and serious problem: though stereotyped as a world of affluent comfort, the British countryside is a place of profound inequality. As a new UnHerd polling map shows, forgotten provincial regions are experiencing a cost-of-living crisis equal to the inner cities, compounding an existing problem of rural poverty and working-class displacement. 

No-fault evictions are commonplace across the country — reports say they increased 76% in just three months last year — but there are no official statistics that break down how many take place in rural areas. If you speak to those who live in an Area of Natural Beauty, you’ll hear the same story again and again, of landlords evicting local people so they can make more money from their properties, often by turning them into holiday cottages. In some places in Wales, the Highlands, Cornwall and the Lake District, one in four properties are Airbnbs. When you add second homes to that statistic, there are villages like Elterwater in Cumbria where 80% of houses are unavailable to live in. Inevitably, it is the lower classes who are pushed out.

For hundreds of years, if you worked in the countryside, you were usually given a “tied” house to live in. Villages used to have a house for the doctor, the teacher, the policeman, and so on. Foresters were provided with cottages in far-flung, newly-planted forests. Cotton mills, which were first built in the depths of the countryside so that they could take advantage of the waterfalls to power their factories, provided dorm-like accommodation for their workers (who were mainly orphans: children were cheaper to employ). Slate, coal, copper and tin mining all provided rows and rows of badly insulated houses.

Many of these traditional rural industries are gone, and most with good reason. There is no point romanticising them. The homes they provided were often cramped and sometimes isolated. And if you lost the job, you lost the house too. The words of a Scottish crofter, from 1883, are evidence of the impact this insecurity had: “I want the assurance that I will not be evicted for I cannot bear evidence to the distress of my people without bearing evidence to the oppression and high-handedness of the landlord and his factor.” His words eerily echo those of Esme Boggart, a reminder that the old ways are not the best.

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Why the North needs its Angel

By Dan Jackson

While the old schoolhouse might have been sold off, this ancient status quo still exists for farmers, who have lived in “tied” houses for centuries. If you rent the farm, usually a home will be provided too. Currently, around a third of England is farmed by tenant farmers. But having lived and worked on the land for decades, they often find themselves forced out of the landscapes they love. Christine, who lives on a tenant farm in Yorkshire, will have to leave her home when she and her husband can’t farm anymore. In preparation, they have bought a small house in the nearest market town. They would have preferred to stay in the countryside, but they simply can’t afford it.

And while people who have worked the land their whole lives are forced to move off it, people who work in cities are retiring to the countryside in droves. The Highlands and Islands Business Federation, for instance, is worried that some areas will simply become “glorified retirement communities”. If there are no children left to go to the local school, and no-one left to run the county show, put on the pantomime at Christmas or run the shop, these things cease to exist. Businesses are already shutting down because they can’t find enough local staff.

Some sectors still provide homes for workers — usually the ones that cater to outsiders. Big hotels need plenty of staff, and will provide rooms for bar managers, waitresses, chefs, and cleaners if necessary. Distilleries provide accommodation. The National Trust houses workers on some of its properties. But most restaurants and cafes do not, and slowly but surely, they are closing.

This is a sign that it’s not just the older generation, whose working days are done, being forced out of rural areas and into towns. Rachel grew up near Hawkshead, in the Lake District. When she first left home, she worked at a hotel in a neighbouring village. “Obviously I couldn’t afford to buy round Hawkshead,” she told me. Any houses that come on the market in the picturesque village get snapped up by people who can afford to pay sky-high prices. “The cheapest house was in Kendal,” about 20 miles away. But it was subject to a local occupancy clause, designed to keep houses in the hands of local people. It wasn’t very well designed: “They said I wasn’t local enough! My whole family is from either Kendal or Hawkshead area!” She wrote to the local councillor arguing her case, and was eventually allowed to buy a one-bedroom house in Kendal.

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Boston and the tragedy of Brexitland

By Jacob Furedi

Ten years later, Rachel was married and pregnant with her first child. She and her husband applied for another local occupancy house in the same area but were, again, told no. This time the reason for refusal was because they didn’t have children. “I was about to have a baby!” And her choices were limited. There is still no way she could afford to buy in the village where she grew up. Opportunities to rent long-term are rare.

“It’s not a housing crisis, it’s an affordability crisis,” says author Catrina Davies. In other words, it’s not about building more. A decade ago, when she was in her early thirties, she wanted to move back to Cornwall, which has the largest number of second homes in England. Catrina spent her childhood there, but the only place she could afford was a shed. “Houses have become a luxury item”; they are supposed to be homes. The shed is over 100 years old and she has no running water, but it is just that: a home.

Rural areas have benefitted from the wealth of those who don’t live there for decades, but now the balance has tipped. Locals are being squeezed out by those with more money than them, and communities are starting to vanish. The government is, slowly, doing something about it. As of April 2023, a holiday home must be rented out for a minimum of 70 days a year to qualify for business rates as opposed to council tax. In Wales, local authorities have already been given the power to increase council tax on second homes by 300%. And in Scotland, properties intended to be used as holiday rentals will have to apply for a licence from local authorities.

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What if King Charles were your landlord?

By Tanya Gold

In England, however, the crackdown is slower. In December last year, Cumbrian MP Tim Farron campaigned for more powers to restrict short-term lets. It was voted down by 321 votes to 172. It is worth noting, at this point, that MPs are three times as likely than the average citizen to own a second home.

With understandably limited faith in the authorities, communities are fighting back. There are now over 200 community-bought woodlands across the nation, for instance, used for a range of things, from forest schools to improving biodiversity. And collectives are buying land on which to build houses that can unequivocally belong to local people, locking in clauses to make sure they are never sold off as second homes. But many, like the anonymous campaigners behind Esme Boggart, are too afraid to directly challenge those with the power to evict them. As for the family in South Oxfordshire that the witch represents, they have been given another six months. What then, who knows.

For almost a century, the question of how to deal with the working class was at the centre of British politics. This period stretched from 1884, when the Third Reform Act enfranchised a significant group of working-class men for the first time, until March 1985, when those miners who had stayed on strike for a year staged a last show of defiance by marching back to work behind their colliery bands. Of course, the working class mattered to the Labour Party (which became the dominant party on the Left after the First World War). The trade unions were the pillars of the Labour Party. Most of its voters were drawn from this class — as were, at least at first, a certain number of its MPs.

But in a more complicated way, the working class mattered to the Conservatives, partly because they needed to contain its power, but also because they needed to win at least some working-class votes if they were to form a government. And the fact that Britain was ruled by mainly Conservative governments for most of the 20th century shows how successful they were.

When did things change? The Labour Party under the leadership of Jim Callaghan from 1976 to 1980 was closer to the trade union movement than at any point before 1914. But, perhaps for this reason, it was troubled by the number of strikes — often ones that involved a breakdown of union power rather than its assertion. The Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher’s leadership from 1975 still assumed that it was going to have to live with a large industrial working class; the party came to power in 1979 aiming to revive British industry, not destroy it. It also came to power with a surprisingly large working-class vote. Such voters had often voted Tory in earlier times in spite of being working-class (because they were deferential to those they imagined to be their social betters or because many voters, especially women, didn’t identify as working-class at all).

In 1979, however, some voted Tory because they were working-class. This was partly because they were voting against the various forms of pay restraint that the Labour government had practised (Thatcherite faith in monetarism meant that they were the first significant group of politicians since the Sixties who thought that government might simply absent itself from private-sector pay negotiations). The Tories also actively courted working-class voters in 1979 and for a couple of years afterwards. Watch Norman Tebbit (then Secretary of State for Employment) giving his “On yer bike” speech to the Tory Party conference in 1981. He is wearing a badge that says “CTU”: the initials stand for Conservative Trade Unionist.

Of course, the Tories wanted to reduce trade union power and, in particular, to break the National Union of Mineworkers. All Conservatives had wanted this for the whole of the 20th century. The desire was, in fact, particularly strong in the non-Thatcherite section of the party — it was, after all, Heath who had been destroyed by his confrontation with the NUM in 1974. However, the desire of the Tories to break the miners in 1979 was a bit like the desire of 16-year-old boys to sleep with Debbie Harry out of Blondie. They fantasised about it but did not think it likely to happen, or have any concrete plans to bring it about.

Indeed, the Thatcher government was nervous of the miners and backed down quickly when faced with potential strike in February 1981. But then Arthur Scargill became leader of the NUM. He took it into a strike in the worst possible circumstances, just after a Tory election victory, at the end of winter and after he had exasperated other union leaders and a significant minority of his own members. The Tories could not believe their luck. It was as though Ms Harry had stepped out of the poster on the bedroom wall and laid her head on their pillow.

The defeat of the miners changed the British working class. The miners themselves had once been its archetypical representatives — there had been over a million of them just after the First World War. Their numbers had been declining for decades but that decline became dramatic after 1985. By the early part of the next decade there were more university teachers than miners in the United Kingdom. Other unions were now wary of going on strike. Since the unions were often strongest in the public sector, privatisation (which took off after 1985) was both a cause and a consequence of weaker unions.

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Conservatives rely on inequality

By Richard Vinen

All of this fitted into to longer term changes. The total number of manual workers had been declining since the Sixties. The working class was increasingly divided — by sex or race, or by the growing difference between public sector workers (who were increasingly likely to be white collar and female) and those in the private sector. The working class also became less visible in a literal sense. In the Seventies, you could catch the 63 bus from Birmingham city centre and tell, almost at a glance, which of the passengers belonged to which class — you could, in particular, have a very good guess as to who was going to get off at the stop by the university and who would stay on until they reached the giant Longbridge car factory. You could hardly do that now (not least because Longbridge closed almost 20 years ago).

The miners’ strike has lodged itself in the public and historical memory, and this fascination springs partly from the fact that it seems so archaic. It involved an entirely male and almost entirely white group of workers who earned their living by hard and dangerous manual labour and worked for a single nationalised company. It seemed to mark the end of a struggle that had begun in 1926 and rapidly became associated with the end of a whole industry. Mining now plays a strange part in the British self-image. Almost no coal has been dug for years but people still talk of “pit villages”. The NUM is still, in an odd way, one of the most important unions in Britain, fighting for the rights of former miners and curating the memory of the “great strike”.

Focus on the miners has, however, had odd effects on how we see the working class. For one thing, the emphasis on a single, long strike involving a large number of workers is as deceptive as trying to understand contemporary warfare with reference to Western Front in 1916. Even before Scargill led his followers to defeat, most union leaders understood that the working-class is, almost by definition, weak. Outright confrontation with an employer or government was dangerous. Strikes now are short and intermittent. They are conducted by people who are often ostentatiously reasonable in their aims. The post-Scargill leaders of today have learned the hard lessons of the mid Eighties as much as the pre-Scargill leaders remembered the hard lessons of the Thirties.

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Will the people blame the strikers?

By Phil Tinline

An emphasis on the numerical strength or weakness of the working class can also be deceptive. In many ways, the most successful strike of the Seventies was not that of the miners which brought down the Heath government but that organised by the Ulster Workers’ Council a few months later. A relatively small number of workers (rendered more powerful by the fact that Protestants monopolised the best paid and most important jobs) were able to bring the province to a halt and force the government to abandon plans to introduce power sharing between Protestants and Catholics. The Conservatives, by now in opposition, studied the strike carefully. It taught them how much power might be exercised by small numbers of workers in key positions. They showed how well they had learned their lesson in 1984. The defeat of the miners was partly rooted in a willingness to appease other unions whose members might have helped the miners. The relatively high pay of train drivers now derives partly from the fact that they kept working during the miners’ strike.

In some ways, the previous balance of forces between workers and the middle classes has been reversed in recent years. Once, the great majority of the population were working-class but only occasionally and with difficulty could they assert their power in ways that redistributed wealth in their direction. Now a large part of the population has acquired attributes that would once have been associated with the middle class. They are likely to do white collar jobs, to own their own homes and to send their children to university — indeed access to university and to the “property ladder” are often foci for Left-wing complaint.

A small working class is not, however, necessarily a weak one. Covid illustrated the sharp distinction between those whose presence in the workplace was required and those who could work from home: “Virtuals” and “Physicals”. I am not sure that people have yet fully grasped the importance of this distinction. Anyone who can do their job from their bedroom will have shown their employer that their job can be done by someone much cheaper in Chennai or Manila. It will take a long time for employers (especially in the public sector) to act on this lesson but it will happen.

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Labour should sell the BBC

By Richard Vinen

In recent years, it can seem as though the working class is a matter of purely historical interest — in universities, it feels as though even historians who once worked on the working class belong to the past. E.P. Thompson is often talked about as a quaint relic of a bygone age. Mobilisations around gender and race have attracted far more interest. If economic divisions are discussed at all, they are presented as ones that divided “the people” from the “1%” — as though an equitable division of wealth would be arranged in a manner that caused no inconvenience to anyone who is not a partner at Goldman Sachs.

Strikes, of course, bring back a simple question. How essential is your job and who would notice if you stopped doing it? After each strike by university teachers, we get a polite note from the administration asking us to specify which days we were on strike. I am guessing that Avanti do not need to ask the driver who is responsible for taking the 8.10am out of Euston whether or not he turned up for work. I doubt if there is going to be a great resurgence of working-class power, partly because the working class was never that powerful even when it was most unionised. But some workers have begun to realise again that withdrawal of labour is a powerful weapon — and one that may reveal how much the distinction between manual and non-manual workers still matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The year was 1976. The factory was the Grunwick film processing plant, and strike became a cause célèbre of the British trade union movement. Dozens of Labour MPs visited the picket line. One MP, Audrey Wise, was left “black and blue” after she spotted a young woman on the picket line being dragged away by police. Wise intervened to prevent her arrest; the police dropped the woman, turned on Wise, and said: “You’ll do.” The next day photographs of the Labour MP behind bars flashed across the national papers.

A month earlier, ministers in the Labour government visited the same picket line. “We came down to show our solidarity,” Education Secretary Shirley Williams explained. One of the picketers, Mahmood Ahmad, thanked the Cabinet ministers for their “great morale boost”.

It was inevitable that the then prime minister, Jim Callaghan, would face scrutiny over his Cabinet ministers’ appearance. During Prime Minister’s Questions, John Stokes, a Conservative MP and member of the Right-wing Monday Club, rose to level the charge. He asked if Callaghan would “rebuke” his ministers for the “most unfitting action” of joining a picket line. “No, Sir,” came the prime Minister’s defiant reply. “I should have thought that the honourable gentleman would go and do the same thing.”

Almost half a century later, it is difficult to imagine Keir Starmer uttering the same words. In the current standoff over railway workers’ pay and job security, he has declared that he is “against the strikes”, going so far as to sack Shadow Transport Minister Sam Tarry after appearing on an RMT picket line. Echoing his boss, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: “a serious party of government does not join picket lines.”

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It was a remarkable display of historical illiteracy. Even the so-called Labour “modernisers” of the Eighties and Nineties did not punish their MPs for standing on the picket line. In 1988, Shadow Health Minister Harriet Harman joined nurses on a Unison picket line outside Maudsley Hospital in her constituency, and faced no rebuke from leader Neil Kinnock. A decade later, Gordon Brown’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, Don Touhig, visited a CWU picket line outside a factory in his constituency; no fuss was made. In 2006, a member of Tony Blair’s Cabinet, Hazel Blears, appeared on a Unison picket line outside a local hospital. She was criticised in the press for protesting the consequences of her own government’s health reforms, but there was no suggestion she should be sacked.

Lammy’s comment was indicative of a mindset common among Labour strategists today: that the party will lose elections if it is seen as too close to unions. Often they point to the Callaghan government’s fall in 1979, which they blame on the breakdown of industrial relations during the previous “Winter of Discontent”. Callaghan’s defence of his ministers on the Grunwick picket line is now regarded as an act of tremendous naivety.

In the following decades, modernising leaders Neil Kinnock and John Smith attempted to make some reforms to trade union power within the Labour Party, notably by reducing the unions’ voting strength in party conferences and in the selection process of parliamentary candidates and leader. Yet neither wished to challenge outright the Labour Party’s connections with the unions — they had, after all, founded the Labour Party. In his final party conference speech before his death, John Smith argued that British democracy itself “springs from…the trade union campaigns for the rights of people at work”.

When Tony Blair became leader the following year, this rhetoric quickly evaporated. Stan Greenberg, an American political consultant, told Blair that his “willingness to take on and master the unions” would be the defining feature of his leadership. Greenberg’s research found that although Labour was leading in the polls, “a third of Conservative defectors to Labour worry about excessive union influence”. What was needed was “relentless reassurance” that “the unions no longer seemed to control Labour”.

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Mindful of this, Blair went to great lengths to reassure the public that the unions had little sway over the New Labour project. As one union official memorably put it, under New Labour “unions were seen as a virility test; bashing the unions was seen as macho and a way of distancing yourself from the mad auntie in the attic”. And so in the 1997 election, Blair promised that “we will not be held to ransom by the unions”, rejecting the longstanding view that the Labour Party was the “political arm of the trade union movement”. Instead, he declared, Labour was the political arm of the “British people”. Tony Benn, still a Labour MP at the time, bitterly remarked that Tony Blair was the political arm of the Daily Mail.

In government, Blair was broadly able to resist trade union influence because he found alternative means of funding the party, relying on the wealthy. During the Kinnock leadership, there would have been none of the slick Walworth Road research and PR operation without trade union money. In the early Nineties, well over three-fifths of Labour’s funding came from the trade unions. But by 1998, Blair had shrunk union revenue to just 30%, with 20% of party funds coming from the newly created “High Value Donors Unit”.

Yet Labour’s divorce from the union movement was far from finalised. As recently as 2019, Starmer himself joined a BFAWU picket line of McDonald’s workers who were on strike over low pay. It’s only in the years since that, in spite of standing on a radical manifesto when he sought to replace Jeremy Corbyn in 2020, Keir Starmer has spent his leadership renouncing Labour’s once unashamedly supportive relationship with the unions.

This is a mistake. In a YouGov poll last month, just 31% of the public said they believe Labour should distance itself from the unions in part (18%) or completely (13%). While over 80% of the public in the Callaghan years thought the unions were too powerful, just 36% did during the Corbyn years. Today, 58% of the public say the rail strikes are justified, and 66% of the public blame the Government for them.

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None of which should come as a surprise. Britain, after all, is no longer living in the shadow of the Winter of Discontent and untrammelled trade-union power. Years of Thatcherite assault and New Labour neglect have seen to that. Today’s concerns are of a different order: Britain is now living in the shadow of the financial crisis and austerity; the public realm has been hollowed out; public services are not working; living standards are still below pre-financial crisis levels; the ongoing energy crisis could see households paying as much as £500 a month on their bills next winter.

There is, to put it simply, nothing like the relative prosperity and confidence of the Nineties. A failed economic model is not a bad memory; it is a living reality. Except, this time, the British public recognise that the culprit is not the power of working people but a vulture capitalism that has picked off the dying carcass of the British state. The Conservative leadership contest has descended into a Margaret Thatcher tribute act. Labour’s response to this crisis cannot be a Tony Blair tribute act. If New Labour was about meeting the politics of the moment, Starmer’s muffled response to the crisis of low pay is anything but.

Nearly 50 years ago, the oil crisis of 1973 sent inflation skyrocketing across Western countries. It was a textbook case of imported inflation, which in a context of close-to-full employment and strong union bargaining power triggered self-reinforcing inflationary pressures, as companies raised prices to defend profit margins while workers in turn demanded wage increases. This price-wage (or wage-price) spiral was a response to the inflationary pressures coming from abroad — not their cause.

However, the Seventies crisis came at a time when the “compromise” between labour and capital that had provided the bedrock for the post-war economic-political settlement was already heavily strained, as each side attempted to claim a greater share of a shrinking cake. Economic and political elites realised that the inflationary crisis provided them with the perfect opportunity to deal a deadly blow to the post-war full employment regime, which in their view had led to the working masses becoming too powerful. They concluded that it was time to strike back — to break the back of organised labour and reassert the unfettered power of capital over society.

Inflation represented the perfect casus belli. With the theoretical backing of monetarist economists such as Milton Friedman, they crafted a narrative that blamed all economic problems — beginning with inflation — on excessive union power, unreasonable wage demands by workers and bloated welfare systems. The neoliberal counter-revolution had begun, a crucial aspect of which was the deliberate engineering of unemployment through a radical tightening of monetary and fiscal policies, in order to crush the bargaining power of unions. Combating inflation was not the end — it was the means.

As Alan Budd, economic advisor to the Thatcher government, would later admit: “There may have been people making the actual policy decisions… who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did, however, see that [monetarism] would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes.”

In many ways, the same thing is happening today. As in the Seventies, inflation is surging, threatening the post-pandemic recovery and raising once again the prospect of stagflation — the simultaneous incidence of stagnant or negative growth and accelerating inflation. And as in the Seventies, establishment economists and commentators have been quick to blame the surging prices on excess demand (people having too much money to spend), fuelled by excessive wage increases and over-expansionary fiscal and monetary policies during the Covid crisis.

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Their proposed solution is the same as that adopted in the Seventies: central banks must hike up interest rates and cut back on fiscal spending. In one word: austerity. And that’s what they’re doing. Not only the US Federal Reserve, but central banks all over the globe — including, most recently, the ECB — are raising rates rapidly in the most widespread tightening of monetary policy for more than two decades.

The problem with all this is that — again, just like in the Seventies — the recent inflation has relatively little to do with excess demand and excessive wage growth. In fact, it has mostly supply-side origins, triggered by the Covid crisis and now the Ukraine war, and rooted in the systemic deficiencies of neoliberal globalisation. From a Western perspective, the global lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 caused a collapse of global supply chains in durable goods and industrial components, as well as of cheap, flexible and abundant labour in low and middle-income countries. These foreign supply-side bottlenecks, which in turn were exacerbated in several countries by domestic supply-side bottlenecks — such as a shortage of long-haul truck drivers and dock workers in the US and UK — are the reason prices were on the rise well before the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine.

In other words, lockdowns are to blame — not the fiscal measures adopted to dampen their effects. This is what we might call lockdown inflation, which is now flaring up once again due to the recent Chinese lockdowns.

In recent months, the Ukraine war and the sanctions on Russia have caused inflation, especially energy and food prices, to grow at an even faster pace. These price rises have several self-reinforcing causes. On the one hand, the conflict has directly disrupted exports of crude oil, natural gas, grains, fertiliser and metals, pushing up energy, food and commodity prices. These supply-side problems have been further exacerbated by the West’s utterly self-defeating sanctions against Russia, which have left European countries scrambling for more expensive alternatives to Russian oil from America and Africa — as well as by speculation in commodity (futures) markets.

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Indeed, notwithstanding the conflict in Ukraine, changes in supply and demand in themselves can’t justify the energy price increases. Global oil production, including from Russia, has actually increased compared to the same time last year (indeed, some Western countries, such as Italy, are importing more crude oil from Russia today than they have in past ten years, even though Russia’s recent decision to slash its gas supply to Europe suggests this is about to change). But energy traders, most of whom work for the world’s largest oil companies, saw the conflict in Ukraine as a perfect opportunity to hike up prices, knowing that most people would simply blame the rising prices on “the war” or even see it as “the price to pay to defeat Russia”.

This is why, as more and more people struggle to make ends meet, global energy giants such as Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and Chevron have raked in record profits in the first quarter of 2022, far exceeding their revenue during the same quarter in 2021 — all because they are passing on ridiculous mark-up prices to consumers. As President Joe Biden recently put it, oil companies have “made more money than God this year”. Likewise, speculative activity by hedge funds, investment banks and pensions funds, fuelled by QE-induced cheap credit, rather than “supply and demand”, is also helping to drive up wheat prices, despite comfortably high global wheat stocks, raising the prospect of an unprecedented global wave of hunger. This is what we might call speculative inflation.

To make matters worse, certain mega-corporations that dominate entire sectors are able to use the (temporary) shortages, production cost increases and market chaos to raise their own profit mark-ups without losing customers — which is why corporate profit rates in the US and elsewhere have soared to their highest level since the Second World War. As even the Chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, has said, large corporations with near-monopolistic market power are “raising prices because they can”. This is what we might call profit or market power inflation — or what some have termed “greedflation”.

Indeed, despite all the talk of the need to rein in wages to avoid wage-price spirals, the reality is exactly the opposite. As a result of the structural loss of workers’ bargaining power during the neoliberal era, workers in this new inflationary era are unable to protect their real wages, which are falling off a cliff in many countries as nominal wages grow much less than the general price level. Blaming workers for the current situation is a textbook example of victim blaming.

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In this context, raising interest rates and pursuing fiscal austerity will not only achieve little or nothing in terms of lowering price rises that are driven by primarily supply-side factors — but by depressing aggregate demand and economic activity and driving up unemployment, it will hurt wage-earners even more. Furthermore, it will “discourage investments that could ease some of the logistical bottlenecks that emerged during the pandemic crisis”, as a UN report reads — that is, long-term investments needed to increase domestic production (supply) and wean countries off their dependence on foreign imports, especially in the field of energy.

It would be naïve to assume that policymakers aren’t aware of this. So why are they pushing for such a solution? I would posit that once again, as in the Seventies, they are intent on exploiting the current inflation to engineer a recession and drive up unemployment in order to pre-empt a potential rise in labour bargaining power. After all, even if organised labour is still very weak, it is also true that labour markets — particularly in countries such as the US and UK — have been growing increasingly tight as a result of the post-lockdown surge in labour demand and Brexit in the UK. They are bound to remain relatively tight even in the future as the global economy undergoes a structural process of de-globalisation and reshoring.

In this context, recreating a reserve army of labour through austerity and engineered unemployment might be seen by capitalists as a way to ensure the balance of power between labour and capital doesn’t tilt too much towards the former, even at the cost of causing some creative destruction on stock markets — and of sabotaging the long-term shift towards a more environmentally and geopolitically sustainable model of greater economic self-sufficiency. Indeed, the Fed now predicts that unemployment will rise for the next three years as a result of its decision to hike interest rates.

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Moreover, in the EU, monetary tightening is seen by European techno-elites as a way to get countries back on the path of neoliberal “structural reforms” after the pandemic put these on the backburner. As Robin Brooks, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance (IIF), recently said: “Behind closed doors, there is a feeling that Italy’s spread has been too low for too long. That stymied needed reforms and drove away private investors who want a higher yield. So spread widening after [the recent] ECB meeting is partly by design. Back to more market discipline…” So much for the chattering classes’ talk about the EU’s post-pandemic “progressive turn” and abandoning of its neocolonial approach to economic policy.

So what might an alternative labour-driven rather than capital-driven response to the current inflationary crisis look like? There’s no shortage of tools that would shift the burden of the adjustment on the strong — the corporate pandemic and war profiteers — rather rather than on the weak: workers and low-income families. In the short term, as the Dutch economist Servaas Storm writes, “temporary strategic price controls, accompanied by supply-enhancing policy measures, can be used to eliminate corporate profiteering and prevent key prices (of energy and food) from shooting up”. These include price caps on fuel, energy and basic food items. This would force corporations to accept a reduction in their profit share, while allowing the labour share of income to rise.

Meanwhile, financial regulation cracking down on excessive speculation in energy and commodity markets would help lower inflationary pressures coming from financial markets. Redistributive fiscal policies, the opposite of austerity, are also needed to shield vulnerable groups from the higher costs of energy, fuel and other basic goods. And in the longer term, inflation control must be unconditionally subordinated to broader societal aims, such as boosting domestic supply and making economies more self-sufficient and less dependent on foreign imports. Ultimately, the debate about inflation is not really about inflation — it’s about the future of capitalism. And perhaps of the planet itself.

But will this strategy work? To truly understand the gentrification of the Democratic Party, we need only observe how the class composition of the Democratic presidential primary electorate shifted between 2008 and 2020. Looking at the 16 states that voted in both 2008 and 2020 before the winner was all but decided, the trend is the same: poor and working-class voters are shrinking as a share of the Democratic electorate, while middle-class and affluent voters are growing.

In these 16 states, counties where the median household income (MHI) is under $60,000/year went from contributing 35.3% of the presidential primary vote in 2008 to just 28.6% in 2020. By contrast, counties where the MHI is over $80,000/year rose from 24.5% to 30.7%, with about half of that growth in counties where the MHI is over $100,000/year.

In some states this transformation was particularly astonishing. In Virginia, for instance, counties where the MHI is under $60,000/year accounted for 32% of the vote in 2010, while counties where the MHI is over $100,000/year accounted for 34.4%. Ten years later, the state’s poorest counties contributed just 25.3% of the presidential primary vote, while the richest counties contributed 41.4%. During the same period in South Carolina, the electorate shifted away from poor and working-class counties and toward middle-class counties by 20%. In North Carolina, the shift was 11%; in Florida, it was 9%.

These changes have occurred not only because the party is growing in prosperous areas, but because it’s also collapsing in struggling ones — a trend that has been most dramatic in the South. Middle-class counties in Tennessee, for instance, grew as a share of the Democratic electorate from 30% to 37.3%, and their raw vote shot up by more than 50,000. But at the same time, poorer counties went from representing 65.9% of the electorate to 56.3%, and their raw vote plunged by over 120,000.

What accounts for such profound changes to the Democratic coalition? Some argue the cultural aesthetic of liberal professionals has become toxic among voters without a college degree. Others believe the party has squandered its credibility with working-class voters by failing to pursue a robust economic agenda. The former perspective counsels Democrats to move to the centre on culture; the latter urges them to move Left on economics. Ideally, Democrats should do both. But the truth is that these problems have been brewing for decades, and it’s unclear if they can be reversed.

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It was during the mid-Sixties that the Democratic Party’s traditional base in the white working class started defecting to Republicans, kicking off the slow-motion collapse of the New Deal coalition. Over the next decade, senior Democrats began contemplating how to attract new constituencies that could replace these voters. In December 1976, Jimmy Carter’s pollster Pat Cadell wrote a memo arguing that the party’s best bet was to capture the ballooning cohort of college-educated professionals emerging from the country’s transition to a post-industrial economy. Caddell called for the development of an agenda that catered to this cohort’s liberal cultural sensibilities and moderate economic views, one that eventually came to be known as neoliberalism.

This ideology emerged victorious from the internecine battles that roiled the party in the Eighties, culminating with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. Though the Clinton years saw new milestones in the country’s partisan realignment, Democrats still enjoyed enough support from the white working class that it remained an important constituency, if no longer a dominant one. As a result, the Clinton administration was often riven by contradictions — particularly in the realm of social policy — as it sought to satisfy different members of its coalition at different times.

Though the Democratic Party’s neoliberal wing was willing to ban same-sex marriage and execute the disabled from time to time in order to mollify conservative white workers, it resisted any concessions to them on economic grounds. What it wanted more than anything was the chance to move further in the direction of social liberalism and economic conservatism. When Al Gore lost the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, politicians such as Al From, the founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, and Clinton pollster Mark Penn argued that Gore’s mistake was in adopting populist economic rhetoric that alienated the white professional class.

As John Judis and Ruy Teixera noted in The Emerging Democratic Majority: “The DLC and Penn blamed Gore’s loss on his adoption of a populist appeal in the last months of the campaign.” Published in 2002, the book is mostly remembered for its prediction that changes in racial demography would lead to Democratic dominance over American politics. But Judis and Teixeira argued almost the exact opposite.

Like many of their contemporaries, they agreed that college-educated professionals should be the party’s new base. But they also emphasised that Democrats must supplement their support from the professional class with support from various other constituencies. “The key for Democrats,” they wrote, “will be… in discovering a strategy that retains support among the white working class, but also builds support among college-educated professionals and others in America’s burgeoning ideopolises.”

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To strike this balance, Judis and Teixeira recommended a policy agenda that they called “progressive centrism”. Instead of pacifying the white working class with Sister Souljah moments while shipping their jobs to Mexico, they advised Democrats to just take their foot off the gas when it came to neoliberalism. As long as they avoided spooking liberal professionals on economics and alienating non-college whites on culture, the party could safely pursue a more conventional centre-Left agenda.

In 2008, Barack Obama captured the presidency with exactly the coalition that Judis and Teixeira described: young people, racial minorities, college-educated whites in the Sun Belt, and non-college whites in the Rust Belt. In 2012, he successfully reassembled that coalition, becoming the first Democratic president to win consecutive popular vote majorities since Lyndon Johnson. He governed along the same lines that they recommended, roughly halfway between Bill Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. By November 7, 2016, almost everyone in politics believed that an enduring Democratic majority had finally emerged. The next day, it was gone.

When I interviewed Teixeira in February, he told me that the reason for the collapse of the emerging Democratic majority was twofold. First, liberal professionals grew contemptuous of anyone who didn’t share their cultural politics, alienating the white working-class segment of the Obama coalition. Second, their dismissal of these voters’ economic pain as an excuse for racism allowed Donald Trump to push his advantage with non-college whites to blockbuster margins. To make matters worse, liberal professionals have only grown more insular and censorious over the past six years. Partly as a result, even non-college non-whites — Asian and Hispanic voters in particular — have started to drift to the Right.

No argument here, I told him. But what else did he expect from the professional class? They always prefer to push the envelope on culture rather than pay a nickel more in taxes. It’s no coincidence that the most explosive theatre of the Critical Race Theory war has been Loudoun County, Virginia (median household income: $152,000). If the party wanted its base to be the multiracial working class, shouldn’t it have made them a better offer than “progressive centrism”?

If only it were that simple, Teixeira answered. He told me that not only do many working-class voters not support a Left-wing economic agenda, but for those who do, economics is not always the issue that most informs their vote. A candidate who can’t satisfy their demands on higher salience issues won’t even get a hearing on economics.

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He’s got me there. In 2020, a socialist candidate, Bernie Sanders, had a better shot at the Democratic presidential nomination than at any other time in the party’s history. Post-mortems on the Sanders campaign have reached all sorts of conclusions about what went wrong, and some have even cited the party’s professional-class takeover as a big reason for his defeat. But that just isn’t the case. In the 21 states that held Democratic presidential primary elections before the declaration of a national emergency concerning the coronavirus pandemic on March 13, 2020, Biden beat Sanders across all income categories, and Biden’s margin was greatest among the poorest voters.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom for the political revolution. West of the Rocky Mountains, Sanders beat Biden across all income categories in multiple states. In fact, he often notched up his best performances in poor and working-class counties, including in California. Sanders’s popularity among Hispanic voters was also critical to his success in this area of the country. Chuck Rocha, the architect of the campaign’s Hispanic outreach program, credits its success to the decision to eschew social justice rhetoric and appeals to identity in favour of bread-and-butter economic themes that resonate with immigrant families.

One more little ray of sunshine for the Left is that the economic profile of Sanders’s coalition in this cohort of 21 states closely tracked the economic profile of the overall electorate in them. In other words, his support wasn’t disproportionately concentrated in any one income category. All of which means that in 2020, Sanders really did build a movement of the “multiracial working class”, even if Joe Biden built a bigger one.

Perhaps in the future, another socialist candidate will succeed in this endeavour. But the window to do so closes a little more each year. Sanders’s coalition mirrored the Democratic electorate of 2020, not 2008: significantly wealthier and more middle class than a decade before. For years, the Democrats have sought to distance themselves from the working class — is it any wonder they’ve finally started to notice?

Adapted from Matthew Thomas’s Substack, Vulgar Marxism.

For much of its history, Japanese politics was characterised by conflicts among its ruling daimyo, and later between the great industrial zaibatsu who replaced them as dominant powers. Similarly, America’s politics is now being shaped by a civil war not between classes, but within the ruling capitalist elite.

As the 2022 congressional elections approach, two sides are polishing their armour and fletching their arrows. In one corner stand the daimyo of the gentry corporate elite, largely drawn from the ranks of tech oligarchs and much of Wall Street. Their focus lies in the creation of a capitalist utopia rooted in paternalistic state control, much along the lines of the corporatist “Great Reset”. In the other corner, meanwhile, stand their opponents to the Right, largely made up of those who own private capital and are therefore anxious not to see their activities curbed.

These divisions reflect profound differences in industry, reminiscent of the 19th-century conflicts between aristocratic merchants and British manufacturers, or the one that broke out between the daimyo who embraced industry and those samurai who stubbornly hewed to traditional ways. Drawing on this, the French economist Thomas Piketty aptly divides our capitalist class into what he calls “the Brahmin Left” and the “merchant Right”. One side, as its caste association assumes, tends to see itself as more spiritually enlightened, as priests of the progressive secular religion. The merchant side, however, is more concerned with market competition (particularly from China), the cost of goods, and the impact of regulatory policies on their core businesses.

Today, the Brahmin Left has its base in large corporations and investors, and has allied itself with the academic and media establishments, financing non-profits and generally supporting increasingly intrusive government. By contrast, the merchant Right draws its natural support from the traditional middle class — skilled workers, high-street businesspeople, and small property owners — who also have become the bulwark of the Trumpian Republican Party.

Until recently, these two opposing capitalist groupings have contented themselves with near-peaceful coexistence. But the recent massive hysteria among progressives over Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter could signal the start of a more heated conflict, pitting competitive, market-oriented business interests against the conformist gentry progressivism of so many of the largest firms.

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This corporate shift to the Left, particularly since the Black Lives Matter protests, has created a backlash within the capitalist class, with many concerned at what they see is the creation of a highly regulated, less competitive and openly politicised economy. Add to this Biden’s own embrace of progressive ideology and it’s hardly surprising that many traditional capitalists now fear for their future.

Some of this reflects understandable concern over Biden’s energy policies and taxes on the analogue economy — where food is grown, products are manufactured and shipped, and oil and gas are drilled. In recent years, Republicans have reaped support from many of the families tied to the “old economy” that markets tangible products. Looking at contributions, the differences between business sectors are stark: with manufacturers and agribusiness favouring the GOP by three to one, while the entertainment, internet and publishing industries overwhelmingly support the Democrats. To some extent, this is a conflict between those who invest and make stuff, and those who gorge on media and digital tools.

What makes Musk so different from his tech counterparts is that he remains, primarily, an industrialist, more in the mould of great Valley founders like Robert Noyce or Jerry Sanders — building cars, spaceships, and tunnel-making equipment. Like any manufacturer he needs reliable, affordable energy and worries about overregulation, which sets him against California’s ultra-progressive legislature.

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By contrast, Meta, Google, Apple, and Microsoft manufacture almost nothing in the United States, and primarily make their money based on advertising or charging for services without much in the way of competition. So while many industrial firms support some protectionist measures against China, Silicon Valley is largely resistant to the idea. After all, on those rare occasions when they do manufacture products, they outsource their most critical production to China. Wall Street follows a similar post-national script, financing Beijing’s industrial machine with its notoriously high carbon supply chains.

A year or two ago, these elite divisions would not have been so pronounced. After the chaos of the 2020 election, big business seemed to welcome Joe Biden’s presidency as a return to normality. Many capitalist elites, particularly in the tech and finance industries, invested heavily in elevating the somewhat doddering warhorse into the White House. Biden, they reasoned, was far more reliable than Trump, whose greatest talent seemed to be widening already serious divisions in the country.

And at first, this corporate class seemed to support the Biden administration’s priorities on immigration, racial “equity”, gender, and climate change. But the government’s incompetent Afghanistan withdrawal, the intensifying border crisis and its own economic programme weakened this capitalist ardour. Most critical has been Biden’s stunning failure to address the roots of rising inflation. While costs of living soared, his supporters claimed everything was either temporary or Vladimir Putin’s fault. But it is clear inflation was rising rapidly before the Ukrainian invasion, and is now considerably higher than key competitors, such as Japan, Germany, France, Canada and China.

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Meanwhile, those who would have previously moderated the Democrat machine, as occurred during Bill Clinton’s ascendency, find themselves unable to restrain a party now dominated by its far-Left fringe. And for all its alleged benefits, wokeness is not generally a good business strategy; it just cost Disney an estimated $50 billion, while causing firms such as Netflix to lose subscribers, in part due to what Musk describes as a “woke mind virus”. Yet so deep are the partisan divisions that it’s unlikely that much of the Silicon Valley and the Brahmin Left are ready to seek refuge in the clutches of the GOP .

Amid a contentious climate, who will win this new capitalist civil war? Hopefully neither side, at least not too decisively. As unromantic as it may seem, the middle and working classes rely on political competition between the elites to survive, as it forces them to make concessions to those below. Just look at the Meiji Restoration, or the socially democratic turn of the British Conservative Party, in Disraeli’s time as well as in recent years. Both are proof that the enemy of mass progress is in the uniformity of elites: when autocracy thrives, and when a small group of people — be they feudal lords, oligarchs or party cadres — control the political field, it is the middle and working classes who suffer.

To put it simply, a capitalist civil war isn’t necessarily all bad news. Although voters should not expect either side to defend their core interests, conflict between corporate moguls gives leverage to the middle and working classes. Like the plebeians in the Roman Republic, the average American could use this conflict to their own advantage. This could, for instance, take the form of a pro-reshoring strategy, which would lead to better paid blue-collar jobs, greater incentives for home-building, more skills education and greater access to healthcare. It’s not an ideal situation; in fact, it’s thoroughly depressing. But it’s far better than letting the rich gorge without conscience or concerns over popular pushback.

The point is to get students to reflect on what is often immediately apparent about a person — such as sex, age, physical build, race — and what emerges with longer acquaintanceship. Students may bring up things like accents, levels of education or cultural knowledge — but almost always a little nervously, as if not quite sure if these are legitimate objects of interest. I’ve never had a student spontaneously suggest that one thing you might notice is somebody’s social class, and embarrassment always comes from my suggesting it. These days, it’s just not what the novelist should be thinking about.

Douglas Stuart’s debut novel Shuggie Bain, for instance — a coming-of-age story set in working-class Glasgow — was sufficiently out of fashion to lead 30 publishers to reject the manuscript. After its eventual release, it became a huge triumph. This week, Stuart publishes another novel set in the same world.

Young Mungo follows a boy whose mother is a hopeless alcoholic on the breadline; his elder brother is a thuggish criminal, living with his underage girlfriend and their baby. But his sister, Jodie, is intelligent, orderly, practical, full of possibilities: “She’s gonnae be a doctor, or an astronaut.” Mungo has ambitions, too, although he has never been outside the East End of Glasgow. He falls in love with Jamie, and together they dream of escape. But it’s not a geographical escape; there’s no doubt that it’s their social class they need to leave.

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Such frank investment in social improvement now seems unusual in a novel. Stuart knows better; in an interview he has remarked that the one positive consequence of the urban deprivation he observes is that it gave rise to masterpieces of the written word. But few novelists would be brave enough to write of Jodie’s future as a place where she “would round out her vowels and suppress her glottal stop; she would like her bread to be brown and her films to be foreign”. The urge to better oneself through education is not something novelists want to be seen praising. After all, it might look as if you thought some people were better than others, and even that some of the people left behind, like Mungo, who “would work where he could, and he would steal what he could,” might bear some responsibility for their own lives. If you’ve invented all of these cases, the misbehaviour starts to look fairly terrible to the contemporary eye. And so the subject of social advancement has largely been left to the memoirists, who can at least show that they are writing the truth, or at least “their” truth.

But social class — how people may be trapped in their circumstances, and struggle to escape them — has been at the core of the novel since the beginning. The form thrives on the differences between people, and the place people take in the world. They can be as vast as between Dickens’s Lady Dedlock and Jo the crossing sweeper, or as minute, but real, as those between Austen’s Emma and her vulgar enemy Mrs Elton. But we have to be able to tell characters apart for the novel to make sense; a story set in a society where social differences had been genuinely erased might be quite hard to follow.

Novels, too, are dynamic forms. They tell of changes in circumstances, and how characters end up in places they could not foresee. Very often, these journeys are social odysseys. Defoe’s Moll Flanders, rampaging through rich merchants and bankers as husbands before ending up as a common thief, starts it off. Proust’s Madame Verdurin, starting in obscure circumstances and ending as the Princesse de Guermantes, is an almost indecently frank example; Elizabeth Taylor’s Angelica Deverell shows that the habit of rising in society is not forbidden to artists and writers. All in all, it is not just class that has always driven the novel, but how it changes.

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But now, through a combination of nervousness, embarrassment, and an apparent concern by novelists that their observations on difference shouldn’t be mistaken for snobbishness, the subject is being cast aside. In part, I think, this is because social class seems much more complex and puzzling than it used to be. What to make of a Russian oligarch with his house in Belgrave Square? Or the Syrian professor and refugee, now driving an Uber to get by?

In part, too, it must be affected by a general squeamishness about making personal observations of a specific sort. Some readers have started to object when a novelist makes a factual note about a character’s physical nature, or their race. This style of objection might be making novelists nervous about plain statements of class. You can talk about a character’s wealth or poverty, but it is quite hard to imagine a serious novelist writing about a character’s relationship to money and status in the direct and contemptuous way Evelyn Waugh writes about John Beaver, or Rex Mottram.

What we call class is a complex but coherent association of culture, power, money, behaviour, speech and — more now than 50 years ago — education. It’s a compelling subject, but, strikingly, we seem only to be comfortable with it in fiction in the safely removed form of the historical novel or novels of different cultures: the Indian novel in English still talks bluntly about social status. Novelists who made their mark with exquisitely differentiated fiction about class, such as Martin Amis or William Trevor, are markedly dropping out of fashion.

What is taking the place of this traditionally central concern? The main interests of the novel now are such things as race, particularly racial injustice, sex and sexual preference, and (a surprisingly common interest) the world as seen by individuals who are somehow hindered by an external factor, such as a mental illness. Indeed, perhaps Stuart gets away with his analysis of class because both his novels are also concerned with one of these external factors, gay male sexuality. These factors will successfully distinguish characters; they will do a good job of showing how an individual is treated by society. They are all important and interesting subjects. But as motors of fiction they have one marked limitation — they are all unchangeable characteristics.

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In Great Expectations, Pip’s story of transforming himself into a gentleman powerfully drives the narrative through a minute attention to a shifting social standing. It’s hard to imagine how a novel focused on these other fictional concerns — even if it could reveal how essential and insurmountable differences between people often become apparent through crushing injustice — could reproduce such a journey.

Perhaps there is a larger pressure at work here, about a sort of social media-driven desire on the novelist to present themselves in as amiable a light as possible. A novelist who writes with their full attention on racial status in a post-imperial society is obviously commendably engaged; a novelist who writes about the different styles of speech of rich and poor is running the risk of being labelled the worst of men, a rampant snob. It might be easier to suppress those observations altogether, however conspicuous and interesting they are.

I walk my dog most mornings in Battersea Park. There, a huge range of society mixes; young professionals, retired working class families, those in social housing, and the seriously rich of Chelsea. You would have to be unusually slow not to register the dramatic differences between some of these people, and how they manifest themselves in behaviour, speech, the names of dogs, even the dogs themselves (Labradors and French bulldogs called Reggie are upper middle class; Alsatians and Staffordshire bull terriers called Killer or Sheba, probably working class). This is the sort of thing that novelists used to be very interested in. Now, it seems to me that there is a disinclination to talk about what is as plain as a pikestaff, because what sort of writer would even try to deduce anything from an Alsatian being called Sheba?

For this reason, Young Mungo, an excellent novel, nevertheless feels somewhat old-fashioned. But it’s very good to see a novelist entering with some of the old gusto into working class culture, exploring how its products might inhabit it, or want to get out of it at the first opportunity. Stuart is rare among contemporary novelists in saying, without the slightest apology, things like: “Clothes are often a signal for social class.” And so they are: and yet we are not expected to notice it, or remark upon it. What this sort of thing is starting to require is real nerve.

Indeed I only found that out last week, when word got out that North Lanarkshire Council had agreed to purchase Cumbernauld’s town centre, but only in order to raze it to the ground. The responses adhered to a familiar script. Architectural historians, of course, were appalled; they argued that, as Britain’s first shopping centre and a radical experiment in building a town centre that went up instead of down, the eight storey “megastructure” was an important part of our cultural legacy. But there was no popular outrage at the news that the rotting eyesore in the centre of the town might soon be gone.

In fact, the destruction of The Centre Cumbernauld (to give it its proper name), which was erected on concrete stilts over a dual carriageway in 1967, has been a dream of many people for a long time. In 2005 it topped a poll of 10,000 people in the UK as the building in Britain that people most wanted to see demolished. Cumbernauld itself, like many of the 27 New Towns that were built in the UK after the war, does not have a great reputation. The comedian Craig Ferguson (who grew up there) once derided it as a “modernist experiment”, where “clueless” town planners had provided “soulless housing for ground-down workers”, before adding that the houses looked like “German machine gun turrets”. My cousins on the west coast of Scotland were pithier: they called it “Scumbernauld”.

Yet for a brief moment in the Sixties and Seventies, Cumbernauld represented an exciting vision of the future, in which a projected population of 70,000 workers and their families would move through the town via a network of pavements, underpasses and bridges. They would never have to cross a road, and never have to spend more than 20 minutes walking to reach the “brilliantly logical” town centre, which housed shops, a library, offices, apartments and even a few penthouses.

When Princess Margaret visited The Centre Cumbernauld in 1967, she pronounced it “fabulous”; that same year it won the Reynolds Memorial Award from the American Institute of Architects. My grandparents lived there in the last years of their lives and greatly preferred their Cumbernauld flat to the one they had lived in on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow; likewise my Aunt Janet, who lived there between 1972 and 1982, still remembers how novel it was to go shopping without being rained on.

Indeed, even if it had been pouring when I paid a visit last week, I would have remained dry: when I stepped off the bus, I was already inside the centre, confronted with its “brilliant logic”. Is it possible, I wondered, that the architectural historians are right: does Cumbernauld’s town centre deserve to be preserved for future generations? I followed a ramp (there were no stairs or lifts) to the first floor, where I entered the retail complex which had so impressed Princess Margaret 55 years earlier.

The years have not been kind to the place. Where once it featured well-known retailers, such as Halford’s, M & Co. and the supermarket chain Presto, now it is clearly the part of the complex where rents are cheapest (an additional shopping centre, the Antonine, was grafted onto the original building in 2007; that one was opened by Princess Anne); it is here that the eyebrow threaders, tattoo artists, “vintage” shops and suicide prevention centres set up shop. The interior had been remodelled so all traces of its late Sixties utopia-lite origins were gone: bizarrely, the enormous clock from St Enoch’s train station in Glasgow had been embedded in the wall of a mezzanine in the new section, where it kept the time at a permanent 8:20.

After about ten minutes, a security guard informed me that it is forbidden to take pictures in the centre, because it is private property. I moved to the next level, which contains the library and a children’s day-care. This section has not been remodelled; it is very close to the original: lots of brick and tile and concrete, the pipes and wires were exposed. The corridors had names, as if they were streets, but the doors granting entry to them were locked. A service lift was out of order; a weird bench was moulded into the concrete; the glass overhead was filthy. Through it, I could make out the windows of the penthouses, long since abandoned. At the far end, a roof garden for toddlers hung suspended in the air over the dual carriageway beneath.

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The library itself was cheerful enough, but overall, I felt as though I had stumbled upon a vision of Logan’s Run as reimagined by Seventies British trade unionists, only the death squads that were supposed to kill you after you turned 30 had all gone, and everyone had long since taken the opportunity to run away, or simply grow older. It was pretty grim.

But if it was grim on the inside, then it was much worse from the outside. Glimpses of Cumbernauld’s town centre from the window of the bus over the years had not done justice to the scale of the architectural catastrophe. It reminded me of the vast Izhmash plant in Udmurtia, Russia, where they pump out AK 47s and other weapons. But Izhmash at least had a decorative historical entrance; with the general absence of windows and the abundance of pipes and wires in the town centre, everything looked like the back of something. The only feature the eye was drawn towards was the long rectangular section with porthole windows suspended on stilts that hung over the road. Locals call it “the alien’s head”.

From there I took a stroll over the bridges and through the underpasses of the town. Certainly it was convenient, though obviously the planners had not thought about the canvas that endless concrete represents to bored teenagers and the threatening atmosphere it can present at night. I was passing through a particularly luminous underpass when I was accosted by a man with a hammer and sickle tattoo on his arm. “They paint it and then it gets graffitied the next day,” he said.

When I asked him how long he had lived in the town, he replied: “Most of my life, on and off. Cumbernauld is a social experiment: it’s driven me doolally. Have you seen the centre? It’s full of people like that.”

Returning, I felt a sense of coercion: the ghostly hand of the planners had arranged everything so that I was more or less obliged to follow the same route through extremely functional housing. Obviously the working classes had no need of freedom, beauty, or variety: they could get by with a few trees. Behold, Le Corbusier’s “machine for living in”, in the Lanarkshire hills.

When I arrived in Cumbernauld, I was open to the idea that the town centre might be worth saving. Now, not so much. It was not the brutalism; having spent a lot of time in the former USSR I have developed a taste for brutalism when done right. In Central Asia, in particular, architects took eastern motifs and incorporated them into their concrete structures, giving a character to blocks of flats, universities and national libraries that is entirely lacking in Cumbernauld. Those structures are worth preserving, though the cheapness of the materials likely means that one day those buildings too will disappear. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that the USSR embraced brutalism in the Seventies, after “communism” had withered to mean a fridge and a TV in every house, and an annual beach holiday. In the end, the ideology was not that dissimilar to the modest utopianism of Britain’s post-war town planners.

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Cumbernauld’s town centre was pioneering, but it was also a failure. There is no disgrace in that failure, however: the first generation of occupants, like my grandparents, found these homes a huge improvement on the Glasgow tenements they had grown up in; indeed, New Towns across the country were an improvement on conditions in the slums they were designed to replace. Instead of a single room, kitchen and shared toilet, families now had extra bedrooms, bathrooms and a living room. Later generations did not have this point of comparison, however, and lived in the town once it was already decaying.

The problem with preserving architectural experiments is that they are not like novels lacking the letter “e” or repurposed urinals that live unobtrusively on bookshelves and in museums; they are infrastructure, and it is very hard to persuade people that they should pass their lives in crumbling buildings that they hate because of the interesting ideas that inspired them.

It would be nice, of course, if you could take all those decaying brutalist buildings from around Britain and move them to an open-air park where architectural historians could admire these daring visions, while others could reflect on the dangers of falling for ideas that look good on paper. But that isn’t going to happen: some of these buildings will be preserved, but most of them are going to disappear, just as most of everything has disappeared.

The truth is, we often judge New Towns too harshly: it takes centuries for a city to become interesting, and even then, many old places are also quite boring and squalid. And as it turns out, many New Towns were simply a step in a broader evolutionary process. Just as Milton Keynes has realised its destiny as a sleeper town for middle class people priced out of London and Oxford, so Cumbernauld is discovering its destiny. It was never to be a self-contained social unit built around an eight-storey mixed use retail, office and residential complex — but rather a bedroom community on the edge of the larger metropolis of Glasgow.

This faceless collection of houses and shops and retail parks, without any particular centre or identity, will ultimately surrender to a vast urban sprawl: that’s progress. In time, other New Towns will see that this too is their best option; or, if they are not located close enough to a major city, continue to crumble, until one day they vanish and are forgotten forever.

No wonder people turn to conspiracies or theories of identity oppression.

It would be a strange person who would actively campaign for a return to the social attitudes of the Seventies. But writing my book about growing up in that uniquely screwed up decade, I was reminded that class has its uses — even the weirdest of class systems in which the English, and perhaps only the English, excelled.

In the early Seventies, in an unfashionable, un-Georgian corner of Bath — a place known as Bear Flat — you could spy at lunch time an elderly woman walking slowly towards one of those cafes that used to be part of every city-scape: not a chain; no coffee offered except, well, coffee with milk or without; the food mostly fish and chips or burger and chips or just chips. Ketchup suspiciously decanted (Heinz too pricey) into giant tomato-shaped vessels. There would have been people smoking in a section of it.

The elderly woman, my granny, would sit in a corner and eat some of this basic fare, but call as well for a glass so that she could take her medicine. Poured out from a medicine bottle. Semi-sweet wine, a whole glass full. Granny had no money to speak of and lived in a rented flat, but she had enough to buy wine and drink it every day.

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By Julie Bindel

Here is the question that arose: did this daily ritual mean that Granny was working-class? She had never done any work to be sure. Her tiny hands had once played the piano but never lifted anything heavy. She had lived in Italy and studied music in Belgium. Her parents were Irish and Austrian aristocrats who had no job. She had been married to a magazine editor; in the pre-war years they had a cook and a driver.

And yet here she was drinking sweet wine. Which my mother, enter stage right as it were, regarded as working-class. Along with, in no particular order: holding hands, growing begonias, eating in public, saying “toilet”, watching ITV, listening to music while doing something else, saying “couch”, saying “settee”.

Have I missed anything? God yes. It goes on and on. But the wine issue was important. Proper people — by which she meant us, the ruling class — drank dry wine unless it was with pudding.

I asked mum about it once. Her response was bewildering and telling at the same time. Bewildering because it was protected by a carapace of pure, indestructible self-belief. Telling because underneath, it was mush. It was nonsense.

This is the logic: Granny was not working-class because she was not. So when she did working-class things they were not working-class. When working-class people did those things, they were. Got it?

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Yep. I grimace too. I cannot defend the attitudes my mother had. She was kindly in many ways. She worked for Amnesty International in the days when it had a single purpose: to help prisoners of conscience. She was a Quaker, a pacifist who visited the protesters at Greenham Common. And yet her view of the human beings she wanted to save from nuclear holocaust, or from foreign jails, was dismissive at best.

Fifty years on, our social attitudes are utterly changed. We have said good riddance to the system that Mum believed in, that kept her and Granny safe from class disaster even when poverty overwhelmed their lives. A system of caste as much as class.

But I wonder at what we have lost: in solidarity, in safety, in togetherness — and above all in psychological freedom. No longer can we shrug and say, whatever, I had no agency. Life is what it is, and I am protected from the deepest psychological hurt because I am a member of a social class and I cannot rise, and cannot fall, because of it.

Consider the falling. Distressed Gentlefolk, like the poor, are always with us. And very sad they often are. Granny certainly was. Even the Association that used to look after them has deserted them, changed its name and cleared its throat, to assure people that its charity is available to all.

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But in Britain in the Seventies, Granny and her ilk could hold on to something. They were still able to consider themselves socially superior and, crucially, be treated by everyone else with the kid gloves they could no longer afford to wear. That café had no licence for alcohol consumption, but they let Granny drink her wine because she was a lady. She was treated with deference, although she had nothing.

Granny still fell — economically, materially — but not socially. The pride — the haughty, foolish, risible stuff that she and my mother believed about themselves and their place in society — helped them when times were tough.

And what about those who served them? I think of the man who used to drive me to boarding school. Den Davis (polyester shirt, neat slacks, slicked back hair) ran a one-counter sweet shop squeezed between the railway tracks and the main road. Den was from a part of Bath even more unfashionable than Bear Flat, a section of the city that is still genuinely down at heel. He probably had more ready cash than Mum but treated her with proper reverence, holding open the door of his Vauxhall Viva for her to get in and only closing it once he was sure her coat was safely folded in with her.

Den told me once that the boys at my school (he didn’t acknowledge the education of girls as a serious project) would one day make the world “better for all of us.” He was a victim of class for sure. He had been fooled into believing that this impecunious but grand duo — mother and son — was superior to him.

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And yet in the dark of the night, when Den considered his lot, I bet he was able to laugh at us a bit. We had the Queen’s English and the books at home. But he had the car. And the knowledge that he could not compete with us in class matters would have been tempered by the simple fact of being a working man. I don’t think for a minute that he wanted to compete. He had his identity and, crucially, it was an identity that linked him to other people.

This is not, of course, a reason to bring it all back. The kow-towing, the secondary moderns, the manual jobs with no prospects, the judges (and the politicians) who all went to Eton. The staggering waste of talent that was never looked for, never found, never nurtured. But a look back at the Seventies reveals a society in which there were groups, into which all of us could sink our own identities, our own selves.

Meritocracy has flourished thanks to atomisation. And it has come with costs that we are only now daring to start talking about. Class was a warm blanket in that decade of power cuts. When it was pulled away there was always going to be trouble.

Justin’s book, The Gift of a Radio: My childhood and other trainwrecks, is published by Doubleday

As the protests enter another week, Ottawa’s mayor has declared a state of emergency. Jim Watson described the truckers — ostensibly protesting against Canada’s harsh Covid mandates — as “out of control”. Watson sees anarchy; the truckers fulminate against Covid authoritarianism. But this battle is really about working-class discontent.

The naive among us could be forgiven for thinking that this protest signalled something auspicious about “late capitalist” society. For decades, the common folk wisdom for both the Left and the Right was that the West’s working classes had been completely neutralised as a political force, and that class conflict itself was a relic of the past.

This idea took hold in the Sixties, when Herbert Marcuse theorised that Western workers had been subjected to a “socially engineered arrest of consciousness”. Their vested interest in the existing capitalist order made them impossible to radicalise. Ever since, finding new theoretical models to explain the unreliability (and stodgy conservatism) of workers has been a recurring activity on parts of the Left. Marxists had made a horrific discovery: the working class were not their foot soldiers. As Joan Didion once put it: “The have-nots, it turned out, mainly aspired to having.”

Many on the Left came to believe that without their corporatist union structures, and without their shop stewards and political organisers, the working classes were done for. They were little better, to paraphrase Marx, than a “sack of potatoes”.

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Without proper leadership, the workers would be too inert and stupid to do anything about their plight. As such, the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union (and the defeat of the strike waves of the Eighties) saw many Leftists indulge a wistful nostalgia for a time when the workers stuck it to the powers that be. Celebration of the good old days of the Left, and of “working-class power” in general, was thus central to the aesthetics of the now completely defunct wave of Left populism in the 2010s.

With that backdrop in mind, the explosion of worker militancy over vaccine mandates — and, on a related note, high fuel taxes in Europe — ought to have been greeted by enthusiasm by the Leftist activist and organiser set. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The truckers in Canada have instead triggered a primordial sense of dread in the hearts of the urban classes, in the people who Canadian trucker Gord Magill has dubbed “the email job caste”.

This sense of fear and dread at the machinations of the proles is hardly something unique to Canada. Indeed, even the United States saw a large increase of worker militancy and wildcat strikes over oppressive vaccine mandates. Like their compatriots in Canada, America’s various professional friends of the working class responded with horror and scorn. The well-known Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, was mobbed on Twitter for suggesting that workers striking over mandates were actually part of something called “class struggle”, rather than merely an expression of “fascism”.

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Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it.

The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?

It’s easy to laugh at this sort of absurdity, but the lesson here is anything but a joke. The divorce between “the Left” and “the workers” is now complete and irrevocable. Nora Loreto may not be a person with calloused hands, and she may very well belong to Gord Magill’s “email jobs caste”. But for the longest time, the political rhetoric and worldview of the Left depended on the idea that the trucker and the activist were merely two sides of the same coin.

Without the activist and the “organiser”, the trucker would never be able to know how to organise himself and his fellows politically; without the trucker, the activist and the organiser would not have a cause for which to organise. Now it seems that the trucker — and by extension, the pilot, the garbage collector, and the bus driver — does not need or want this caste of self-appointed leaders.

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This divorce has happened all over the world in recent years. After the massive rejection by Red Wall voters of Jeremy Corbyn and his activist base in the smart, urban, and highly credentialed parts of Britain, one started to see a rhetoric of open loathing for the dumb, uneducated gammons and proles. In Germany, the Left party Die Linke has endured several rounds of severe internal fighting and strife. As in the UK, the younger, more urban, more credentialed parts of the Left have fought a running battle — and thrown pies — against pro-worker “racists” such as Sahra Wagenknecht.

In Canada, that loathing has now turned into fear — and into outright hatred. The problem of the truckers is not really the honking (which the Guardian sniffily calls “crude behaviour“), because sooner or later, that honking will stop. The state of emergency will end. But the protests, significantly, have shown how confused and weak the opponents of the working classes are today.

During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste loved to talk about essential workers, and luxuriated in public displays of gratitude for them. But this caste of genteel urbanites never realised that this choice of nomenclature was in fact much more meaningful — and ominous – than they understood. Some people, it seems, simply are critical to the functioning of the economy, pandemic or no pandemic. Once those people — and truck drivers are perhaps the most critical of them all — start to demand to be listened to, they have ways to make those demands felt.

For the Left, the problem of the truckers is their newfound political independence. Nostalgia really is a thing of the past now; the dinosaurs that were thought long extinct are back now, and they are hungry. Gone are the halcyon days of dreaming about halcyon days – where serious working class militancy was just a distant myth.

The real danger of any trucker’s strike, or any pilot’s walkout, or any fuel tax protest in Europe, is that every new confrontation sets a precedent: a precedent that says that the Gord Magills are done taking orders from the Nora Letos of the world.