Is this a latte?
*Yeah*
A fucking latte?
*But I thought that’s what you wanted!*
I wanted a frothy coffee,
in a mug!
So today I want to talk about class,
thanks Gary
what makes someone working class,
and what doesn’t.
Whether we like it or not our understanding of class
is as much cultural as it is economic.
Errm this hat actually belongs to my stepdad.
Lots of the language we use around class is more about how much cultural capital someone
has access to rather than how much wealth they have.
Take a word like Metropolitan.
When you hear that in the media you know that it’s code for middle class and yet when
you hear a phrase like Inner city, which in straight forward terms is meant to mean the
same thing, it’s got an entirely different sort of cultural baggage attached to it.
It’s a euphemism for lower income households from urban areas.
For the most part when we hear about class struggles in the media, we’re not actually
talking about the people who make stuff versus the people who own stuff.
Class struggle is often a vehicle for other kinds of antagonisms; like progressive values
versus more socially conservative ones, or London versus the rest of England (big up
London), or the traditional working class versus migrant workers.
And against this backdrop of cultural baggage our understanding of who is the proletarian
Vox Populi, the everyman or women connected to the people, is completely divorced from
things that tell us about someone’s class status like median income or property.
So, often when commentators talk about class position and political alignment, they’re
actually talking about their own biases.
Take these two blistering hot takes for example.
The claim of both of these tweets that northern and/or working class voters are significantly
more keen on Donald Trump simply isn’t substantiated by polling.
But, what it does reveal is that the authors both have an idea that working class = reactionary
politics + regional accent.
Because of the way this formula has been encoded into the British political psyche we’ve
ended up with an absurd situation in which privately educated multi-millionaires can
cosplay as anti-elitist men of the people.
Go on Nige get it down ya.
But this pantomime starts to fall apart when you actually take a look at voting behaviour.
We’re constantly told that Nigel Farage’s support comes from people who have been screwed
over by neoliberalism, left behind by globalisation and impoverished by austerity.
However, data compiled by Politics.co.uk tells a different story.
So yes, while the Brexit Party did clean up at the recent European elections, they actually
underperformed in leave-y seats which were in the Northwest and the Midlands, and they
overperformed in leave-y and leafy boroughs in the South and the Southeast.
What this suggests is that Nigel Farage’s strongest electoral base isn’t left behind
towns or the formerly industrialised North and Midlands, it’s the commuter belt, it’s
the home counties.
It’s Hyacinth Bucket and people that bore your ear off in golf clubs.
I mean…
I’m not in a golf club I’m just imagining what it would be like.
The reductive equation of regional accent + reactionary politics = working class relies
on crude cultural stereotypes in order to substitute the values of the millionaires
for the values of the middle class, and the values of the middle class for the values
of the working class and it doesn’t take a genius to work out who benefits the most
then.
Now obviously I’m not saying that culture isn’t important.
I think that culture is the means through which we experience the political and economic
forces that shape our lives.
What I’m saying is that class composition has changed a great deal in the last forty
years.
We’ve seen the demise of heavy industry in this country, we’ve seen the creation
of a white-collar proletariat and we’ve also seen huge demographic changes because
of things like immigration and growing population of people of colour.
[The] difference is I don’t think that’s a bad thing!
What is a bad thing is that we no longer have politicised cultural institutions which are
capable of mobilising people who live off wages along the lines of their economic interests
while still maintaining that diversity.
Champagne socialism innit.
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