Let's Talk About Class

DavidDP

If I come up with, say, the Equalities bill, does whether it's a good idea depend on my background?

If you can convince me it does, you've got a convert to your class war.

Dirty Euro

The labour party represents the working and middle class (except the upper middle class) the tories represent the upper middle class and the rich in pure economic terms.
The labour party should point this out in a firm but fair manner. It is nothing to be embarrassed about. The tories want to in general get rid of tax funded public services and live in an extreme free market society, where people like me would have no public services, no education, the left want to redistribute wealth with taxes on the rich. Labour should be proud of their purpose.
But whether the leaders of the parties went to private school or state school is irrelevant. If a posh bloke wants to help the poor he gets my vote. If a working class bloke wants to cut taxes for the rich he won't get my vote.
A working class tory who closes the mines is hardly going to win many mining votes.
.

Bunnykins

Always wondered Martin...is the opposite of posh, common? And if so, why is it deemed perfectly acceptable to refer to someone as the former, but unthinkable to describe them as being the latter? Perhaps the Equalities bill could advise.

Fergus Pickering

Nobody should be allowed to talk about class without saying what class they are. I'm middle class though many people think I'm common because of my accent, which is North London. My wife is middle class but sounds posh. I would imagine you, Martin, are middle class and have the accent to go with it. Accent, not money, is the most important pointer for class in the UK. Tony Blair and his wife both have rather common accents, in his case obviously by design. I LOVE the word common. Many rich celebrities, David Beckham, Jonathan Ross, Naomi Campbell are, as the expression goes, common as dirt. The present England cricket captain is wonderfully posh. This works best in the South East and the Midlands where, I suppose, most people live. Northern, Scottish and Welsh accents are difficult. Eric Pickles sounds common to many Southerners, but I don't think he is.

Dave B

"We live in a country where the two dominant political parties are essentially representative of their class. "

No we don't.

"..a political party to represent the interests of working people"

If you're referring to the Labour Party, then they represent the interests of their paymasters, the public sector unions. They do not represent 'the interests of working people'.

David Bouvier

Martin - when employment hits 3 million Prime Minister Cameron will be celebrating that it is coming down from the level Brown pushed it up to.

David Bouvier

But apparently it is better to have no job under Labour.

Catesby

OK let's talk about class.

How do you define it?

You talk about 'posh' people and a 'ruling class'. Lurking behind your comments is the idea of wealth.

Does someone's class depend on where they started, or where they are now?
Sir Fred Goodwin was the son of an electrician (working class), became a chartered accountant (middle class) and joined the ranks of the very rich when he became chief exec of RBS. But never has he been remotely 'upper class' in the Bullingdon sense.

George Osborne and Harriet Harman have the same kind of background and education. Are they the same class? If so, which?

David Davis, John Prescott and John Major all had modest origins. Which one is 'working class' and how can you tell?

If there is a 'ruling class' in Britain (and I'm not sure there is) it isn't made up of toffs on grousemoors any more and hasn't been for at leat 30 years. Real power has long been in the hands of a managerial class of bureaucrats, technocrats and directors of public companies. Lord Myners is a good example, but they come in all shapes and sizes and from diverse backgrounds.

Several political generations ago Tony Benn (posh) opted for socialism while Margaret Thatcher (common) became a Conservative.

You imply that Labour is on the side of the worst off. Yet under Labour, the bottom 10% have got poorer, not better off. The gap between rich and poor (whether it matters is another question) has widened. The chief beneficiaries of Labour's time in office have been hedge fund managers.

Labour used to represent the unionised working class. It never really represented the truly poor or unemployed.

The Conservatives aim to represent the whole nation.

Mike Thomas

So as someone from the working class (and can prove this going back to the Elizabethan era) - I am supporting the wrong political party?

Thank you for putting me in my place, I tug my forelock in deference to my masters and betters.

Sheesh.

Nicholas

"I've always thought that chippiness (a bit like being too clever by half) is something to be encouraged precisely because it makes smug and complacent posh people feel uncomfortable."

What about smug and complacent lefties? Or smug and complacent faux working class champions with £21,000 wrist watches? How would you make them feel uncomfortable?

What a ridiculous article - which demonstrates the bigoted, flawed and puerile thinking of the left. Reinforced of course by Dirty Euro's inane drivel and the conclusion that for you people it is still all about some mythical "struggle" from the early years of the last century.

Fergus Pickering

I wanted to talk about being common and I wrote a post about it. But it didn't get through. Perhaps I can tryb again. Though I am definitely middle class, many people suppose I am common because of my North London accent. My wife, who is from the same class, is seen as posh, because her accent is posh. Southerners often judge Northern accents to be working class, and therefore common, when they re not. Eric Pickles'' accent is a case in ppoint.It is not common. John Prescott's is common as dirt. Tony Blair and his wife both have quite common accents. They have obviously been worked on for poliical effect. David davis, who comes from a lower class background, does not have a common accent. On the other hand, Ed Balls, whose father was an Eton schoolmaster and who went to a public school, has managed to make his accent common. Most Labourites do this. Alistair Darling does not, but then he is a Scot and no English person understands poshness and commonness in a Scots context. What kind of an accent do YOU have Martin. Do you consider yourself Working Class, and if you do, why do you?
Rod Liddle has, to my ear, a rather common accent. Am I allowed to say these things?

DavidDP

"The tories want to in general get rid of tax funded public services and live in an extreme free market society, where people like me would have no public services, no education"

No they don't. I suggest you actually study some political history.

Wily Trout

I don't know any working class people who think they are represented by New Labour. New Labour represents its own client state, exclusively: those funded by the taxpaper.

Andy Carpark

'We live in a country where the two dominant political parties are essentially representative of their class'.

Yes, the political class.

'And why not?'

Because the political class is a malignant and nepotistic clique which has traduced the name of public service in the interest of private privilege and is marinated in patronage and mendacity.

'We should also be proud of living in a country which has developed a major political party (and a moderate one at that) to represent the interests of working people.'

Still got your sense of humour, Mr Bright. It has developed a major political party which depends for its success on the encouraging of dependency and which punishes those who save in order to reward those who don't.

'I've always thought that chippiness (a bit like being too clever by half) is something to be encouraged'

And I've always thought that chippiness - the defining of oneself in terms of grievance - needs flicking back down the stygian philosophical hole from which it crawled, but hey ho, there is room in the world for more than one point of view.

TomTom

The labour party represents the working and middle class

Dirty Euro is a fantasist ! The Labour Party is the Party of the Apparatchiki; it serves the needs of the Bureaucracy and harvests tax revenues for the preservation of bureaucratic elites.

The USSR was the world's first bureaucratic state backed by control of mass-media - a dictatorship of the proletariat by the bureaucrats....Britain is a similar society with a self-perpetuating bureaucrat class living off the citizenry. Labour is the organising clique of the Nomenklatura

Ray

This is the sort of guff you really should have left behind at the student union.

Bunnykins

Martin, I'm sorry to sound profoundly common here, but was that picture of you taken while you were sitting on the bog?

PAUL GILBOY

That’s total nonsense, people don't entrust their wealth, liberty or leadership to some turnip simply because he has been to Eton. If you’re not good enough you will be found out and sent packing.

Davis Cameron is the leader of the Tory party, because he is the best we have, if he starts to fail he will be kicked so far into the long grass they will find golf balls before him.

Money, power and, self-interest has no loyalty to class and, only a fool would rely on it for succour

Simon Denis

Really this is absurd. First of all there is nothing remotely "unfair" in financial inequalities. Some work hard, others are talented and yet more are lucky. Neither industry, nor talent nor good fortune take anything from anyone. The "disadvantage" is purely relative and illusory, more than outweighed by the benefits done to society by the presence of the wealthy, whether this be through the pursuit of luxury - noted by Gibbon as a benefit to the poor - or the cultivation of excellence in the professions. Above the measure of absolute poverty, whether or not a man achieves anything in this life is down to him. Whining that riches don't fall into your lap is despicable; envy that others have attained them is worse. As for this notion that a free market society might somehow fail to cater for talent, nothing could be further from the truth. Socialists are very fond of looking at a snapshot of the mid-nineteenth century and calling it the results of Liberalism. What they never do is look at the flow of the century as a whole, which shows a process of steadily rising standards of living for all. The pauper who slept in straw under the Prince Regent had a nice solid gutter in which to lay his head by the time of Victoria's accession, which swiftly became a workhouse. Moreover, his numbers fell. The condition of the working class in 1900 was infinitely eased by comparison with only fifty years before. Can any communist or socialist society boast a similar rate of progress? Their survival was wholly due to the imposition of a secret slave economy upon millions of political prisoners. Liberalism by contrast abolished slavery. As for Lenin's infamous lie that the colonies bore the brunt of free market failure, it should first be noted as an admission that the lot of the worker in Europe had undeniably improved. It should secondly be noted that the colonial empires proved to be financial burdens rather than nest eggs, as the post-colonial prosperity of Western Europe testifies. No, sir, your bleating about equality is a busted flush. The Berlin wall fell towards Washington, not Moscow and the sooner we restore the free market to absolute preeminence the sooner we will know liberty and prosperity again.

In2minds

So, Nulabour, “a major political party and a moderate one at that”. Then further on a reference to Henry Porter. Well we can all be selective with our quotes and it's my turn. Porter is like so many other people criticising Nulabour for eroding our civil liberties at a pace and in a manner remarkable for a moderate political party. He said -

“Like Blunkett, Straw and Reid, Charles Clarke is an incorrigible statist with a background in far-left politics. He has never grasped the truth that good government can only exist where there is a balance between government power and individual freedom. For people like him the wisdom of the state is unquestionable: anyone who points to government inefficiencies or doubts the merit of its decisions becomes an enemy, not of the government, but of the state”.

The fury of Porter, like his position as the foremost reporter in the UK on this subject (civil liberties), is impressive. It is an inconvenient truth for some people, like recent Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and current incumbent Alan Johnson and others, to admit this state of affairs has come about. This is akin to pretending that the most memorable feature of the maiden voyage of the Titanic was a strong smell of fresh paint.

So to summarise, Nulabour moderate? Only in your dreams and may Nulabour sink without trace at the next election!

Beer Moth

The Class War is alive and kicking people out of jobs Martin. Those who have lots of money (rich bankers) are given more; those who have little (the Redcar steelworkers) are given their P45s.

Another 1700 examples of the 'lazy Brit workers who don't want to get their hands dirty'

The reason we don't get too animated about this is because other animosities in our society are now greater still.

Snowman

In the bygone days, Labour may have indeed batted for the working man, not true now. It’s those on the transfer payments of one form or another who’re backing them. Why do you reckon Labour’s getting the high poll ratings, equalling roughly the number of their client base, ha?

If Brown and Darling get it right, and UKIP eats into the Tories’ vote, they may still end up as the largest party in the House.

Dirty Euro

Am I allowed to reply to TomTom and Nicholas who have made as usual deeply offensive posts to me.
Nicholas you are an offensive aggressive bully. Every single time a make post you appear with an aggressive bullying response. The battle for good health, education social justice did no end last century.
TomTom the civil service elites are tories grow up.

Quiet Integrity

The Labour Party has had its day. The term 'working class' no longer refers to the hard-working, disciplined, morally-upright backbone of Britain c.1930. It is the hard-pressed, disdained middle classes who are the new 'working class,' working flat out to pay for everyone else's leisure, plasma screens and designer trainers.
The people that benefit from Labour's policies are the underclass, who know neither work, discipline nor moral behaviour. This is why we face the problems of society breakdown: fecklessness and idleness (e.g. unemployed girls that get impregnated by irresponsible males, in an era of effective contraception on tap, are rewarded with money and a home.) Contrast this with responsible pairs who both work (and therefore must fend for themselves) deferring childbearing and even limiting their family size to one child, so they can meet the associated outgoings. It's akin to running a breeding programme with the worst stock of a species.
It upsets me to hear Gordon talking about 'hard-working families' when his policies have favoured lazy, non-working non-famlies.
The underclass shouldn't be allowed to hide behind the working class banner.

Sir Graphus

Could I put a bit more tactfully then, Dirty Euro? Once the Labour Party represented the working class, back in the days when we had a large manufacturing base. It is now exclusively the party of the public sector. Once upon a time the average Labour MP’s career progressed through being a shop steward. Now he/she’s more likely to have progressed through local govt.

It’s a huge difference. The average Labour MP used to have experience of the problems of the working man. Now he has experience of dealing with the issues that Councils deal with, and views the world through Council service tinted lenses. This is why issues like gender equality and multiculturalism have been at the heart of Labour party debate, while the working man has felt estranged enough to start voting BNP in large numbers. It’s also why public expenditure and the state payroll, and public sector salaries have expanded so disastrously over the last dozen years.

Dirty Euro

Sir Graphus The BNP are an extreme right wing party who would privatize and cut. I have already said I do not care what the background is.

Sir Graphus

We know what the BNP are, Dirty E (actually, that’s a good name for a rapper, have you considered a career change?). We know what they are, but that’s not the question. That working class people are voting for them is an indictment of the fact that they no longer feel represented by the Labour party. I’m sure you’ve read a mile of Rod Liddle and I need say no more.

You’ve had Mandy being “intensely relaxed about people getting stinking rich”. You’ve had Brown applauding the City. We’ve had the expansion of white collar (middle class) public sector jobs, but no proper investment in infrastructure, the sort that would get the industrial North back to work. The working class have nothing, though, these last dozen years.

Fergus Pickering

Dirty Euro, you can reply to anyone you like, old son. It is still, more or less, a free country. People are even free to be Dirty Euro and talk balls from arsehole to breakfast time. That is a quote from Harold Pinter, one of your lot.

With whate'er gall thou sets't thyself to write
Thy inoffensive satires never bite.

That's from one of my lot.

HairyNoddy

DirtyEuro .. the BNP are not free market capitalists as you seem to think, quite the opposite.

They are national socialists who would nationalise whole swathes of the country's industry again. We'd be back in the 70's again if they were to get in. This is one policy of theirs which puts me off voting for them next election.

Have a look at their website, although it may be wise to wait until you get home from sixth form to do so.

ianhorton

Ray has hit the nail fair and square on the head.

Dirty Euro

Fergus Pickering As you called me an asshole. I find you post rude and offensive. You are a vulgar scumbag. You call me rude insults I will fight back. and a bully. You motivate me to realize this country rewards bullies with high wages. No wonder it is on the decline, with thugs like being over promoted.

HairyNoddy More vulgar people, in ignorance. The BNP have admitted they want grammar schools. The party has recognised "old-style socialist methods" of simply taxing income away from the rich "turned out to have harmful effects", it would instead seek "non-destructive means to reduce income inequality".

In other words they are not a redistributive party. The exact pure enemy of left wing people. Lbaour should tell the working class this. The are worse than the tories.

Jeremy

Fergus Pickering:

"Dirty Euro, you can reply to anyone you like, old son. It is still, more or less, a free country. People are even free to be Dirty Euro and talk balls from arsehole to breakfast time. That is a quote from Harold Pinter, one of your lot.

With whate'er gall thou sets't thyself to write
Thy inoffensive satires never bite.

That's from one of my lot."

Two stunning quotations. I've never read Pinter, although I have toyed with the idea on occasion. Which play is that from? Or rather, if you can recommend me a Pinter play which rewards the effort of reading it, then I would be pleased to hear the title.

Although the rhyme is very simple, the beauty of the second is suggestive of Shakespeare. Is that right? And if so, from which play does it come?

Sir Graphus

Dirty E; I suggest you are a tad too easily offended, particularly as you aren’t shy of dishing it out, from time to time. This can be a robust forum at times (a little too robust at times, if you ask me; can you all tone down the personal insult a tad, please).

Bunnykins

Jeremy, I know you weren't addressing me, but Pinter's plays are mucky, toe-curlingly embarrassing and utterly dated. Would it be too posh a thing to say they have the look and feel of an afternoon spent in the Fourth Form at Tower Hamlets comprehensive circa 1973. So if I were you, I wouldn't waste my time. Dirty Euro, don't get so easily offended....or is that also a class thing?

HairyNoddy

DirtyEuro: The BNP are a party with an explicit agenda to nationalise key industries, the information is their on their economic policies page. I posted a relevant quote from that page but it seems to have got lost in cyberspace. In any case, you are wrong about them being a privatising party.

Dirty Euro

Sir Graphus I do not dish out to people. If people insult me I insult them back. I do not see why this has to be a foul mouthed forum.

Jeremy

"...Pinter's plays are mucky, toe-curlingly embarrassing and utterly dated."

I can empathise with that.

"...they have the look and feel of an afternoon spent in the Fourth Form at Tower Hamlets comprehensive circa 1973."

Could there be any higher recommendation than this? I can hardly wait. But I have yet to be given a title. And nor have I been given the source for what sounds like a Shakespeare quote.

Herbert Thornton

The old distinctions of Class are not yet dead, but it is hard to understand why they continue to seem so important to some people, when a far more important - and dangerous - distinction is being allowed to form.

The new one consists of two Classes. One is composed of Infidels and the other is composed of Muslims. Sadly, it is obvious that the main parties prefer to pretend that no such division exists. The only party that understands how deep the new Class division is, and what it portends for Britain is of course, the BNP.

Fergus Pickering

Jeremy, tyhe Pinter quotation is from 'The Caretaker'. Pinter's opinions aren't worth a button, but his language, particularly in his early plays, has always struck me as poetic in the extreme. The second quotation is not Shakespeare, but someone almost as good. It is from Poet Laureate John Dryden, his masterpiece MacFlecknoe, which is only 200 lines long. Enjoy it. I am sure you will.

Nicholas

Dirty Euro:- "Nicholas you are an offensive aggressive bully. Every single time a make post you appear with an aggressive bullying response."

No I'm not. I'm an insurgent responding to fascism. You DO write inane drivel. In fact you can hardly string two words together most of the time. I respond aggressively to idiotic socialist trolls like you, particularly you (even though I try to promise to myself I will ignore you) because you articulate everything I detest about socialism and articulate it so badly that I cannot even admire your prose. In fact it is not even prose but gibberish, parroting the most ridiculous leftist slogans from an ill-structured thought process. This is not to be considered bullying though because I represent the underdog majority and you speak on behalf of the occupying minority power. It's not I who has created over 3,000 new laws since 1997, sunshine, or who puts microchips on your wheelie bin or wants to forcibly retain your DNA, hold secret trials and make you have an ID card, or who spies on your emails or any of the other bullying, coercive crap that your comrades have imposed on us.

Like most insufferable socialists you can dish it out but not take it. Do you ever stop to think how offensive and divisive some of your ridiculous socialist soundbites are? Do you ever stop to think that there are plenty of decent, working class, moderately paid people who vote Tory and that they have a democratic right to do so without you slagging them off? Or do you really think we are all BNP racist toffs?

Nicholas

Oh, and another thing, Dirty Euro, you wrote: "The battle for good health, education social justice did no end last century."

You think good health, education and social justice has improved since 1997? Or will improve because of some socialist "struggle"? Old people are dying in filthy hospitals while the socialist apparatchiks running quangos created by your party of the working class are earning more than ten times the average salary and your glorious leader (the real one not the pretend one) is running around brown-nosing Russian oligarchs with a wrist watch that cost more than the average salary. Children are leaving the state education system unable to read or write or add up. Social justice has never been so injust, so divisive or so threatened by racial and religious tensions, the erosion of civil liberties, the imposition of socialist social engineering and deliberate mass immigration. Your comrades have had 12 years in power and everything is WORSE. Plus we are busted as a nation, massively in debt. And you have the bare faced audacity to come on here whining about your stupid socialist "struggle", parroting your stupid, outdated communist slogans and complaining about bullying?

Jeremy

@Fergus Pickering

Thank you, Fergus.

john miller

And of course the Millibands, with their trust funds and charitable trusts - you remember, Gordon was going to abolish these until it was pointed out to him that lots of his Cabinet, Balls, Darling, Harman and of course the Millibands, would be just a tad upset - yes, the Millibands, never had a job, filthy rich, Labour aristocracy, they are finely in tune with the common weal.

Gordon, the son of the manse, felt the plight of the poor close to his bosom during his last budget. Well, perhaps I have the wrong part of his anatomy. In any event, he was quite happy to put the poor further into poverty just to be the first Labour Chancellor to reduce the basic rate of income tax.

Of course, his moral compass points him in the direction of eliminating poverty by Tuesday of next week, but if anyone is physically equipped to do the Nelson trick, it's him and he doesn't stint himself does he?

Christopher Chantrill

A lot of dead cats swinging around, and rightly so.

Labour representing working people? What a laugh. Labour has demolished the working class. They couldn't have done the job better if they tried.

In the US we do too have a party for working people. It is called the Republican Party. It is a coalition of people who work for a living. Unlike the Democratic Party.

Dirty Euro

Christopher the republican party are against low income working people have subsidised healthcare. They hare working people. They thibnk it is OK to give prisoners healthcare but not low income people.

Martin Bright

Bunnykins: "Martin, I'm sorry to sound profoundly common here, but was that picture of you taken while you were sitting on the bog?"

Now that's funny. You don't know the half of it!