You may laugh. You may have gasped in disbelief. But yes, it’s true, we now have a new socio-economic classification, known collectively as the ‘working class, benefit class, criminal class, and/or underclass’.
This, is at least, is the latest addition to the list of ‘traditionally disadvantaged groups’ especially welcomed by The Camden People’s Theatre, North London, in a job advert – alongside the more familiar(-ish) categories of ‘D/deaf and/or disabled’, ‘neurodiverse’, ‘LGBTQ+’ and that other newby for our times: ‘global majority’.
This new umbrella category was made known on X by charity worker Anne-Marie Canning on Monday, and the advert has since gone viral, attracting much derision, not least for its anachronistic and confused taxonomy. As the art consultant and writer Manick Govinda put it: ‘I’m from a working-class background of Mauritian-south Asian descent. I feel completely patronised and insulted by a neo-Victorian classification system.’ Another asked: ‘who identifies as “criminal class?” The Krays?’
Most who did express incredulity were aghast, foremost, at the crude lumping together of ‘criminal class’ and ‘working class’, as if the two were somehow overlapping or simply the same thing. ‘I have never seen this expression about socio-economic diversity before,’ remarked Canning. ‘It seems insulting on many levels to many people.’ Yet it should not surprise us that the evangelists of woke ideology should display such ignorance on matters of class.
The issue of class used to be at the of centre of left-wing politics, which once was concerned with either alleviating or eradicating material inequality in society. Ever since the left becoming embourgeoised in the 1980s in the 1990s, and then consumed by identity politics in more recent decades, the issue of class in liberal-left circles has drifted off the radar to become almost invisible.
You seldom hear the progressive left talk in terms of class, let alone class consciousness. It has become so consumed by race and gender, those thoroughly middle-class concerns, that it has developed a blind spot on class. At the more extreme end of race-obsessed progressive thinking there is the belief that ‘whiteness’ pervades and defines society, and that being white automatically confers privilege – even if a perusal of school league tables or a trip to an English seaside town will tell you precisely the opposite. Some self-styled progressives today think that being at the vanguard of fighting sexism involves addressing discrimination within the exclusive Garrick Club.
‘Life is a battle between good people and evil people,’ wrote Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, paraphrasing today’s consensus. ‘Furthermore there is no escaping the conclusion as to who the evil people are. The main axes of oppression usually point to one intersectional address: straight white males.’
You will not find much white privilege in areas of Dover or Blackpool
You will not find much white privilege in areas of Dover or Blackpool – or America’s Rust Belt – or among people in working-class Red Wall areas in the north of England, who by the end of the last decade rightly perceived themselves abandoned by a metropolitan Labour party that had been established to safeguard and advance their interests.
Where there is some vague consciousness of class today among middle-class progressives, it is one marked by scorn and derision. This lordly condescension was made abundantly clearly after the 2016 Brexit vote. In his book of last year, Values, Voice and Virtue, Matthew Goodwin noted how those who voted in favour were then described as ‘bigots’, ‘clowns’ and the ‘lumpen mass with… half-formed and fully formed prejudices.’ Matthew d’Ancona wrote of a revolt of those ‘who just don’t like people of foreign extraction’, while another Oxford graduate, Laurie Penny, wrote how ‘the frightened, parochial lizard-brain of Britain voted out’.
‘Chavs’, as they used to be casually known in the 2000s, before that term became non-U, are a group it remains acceptable to mock: their elder numbers are today sometimes known as ‘gammons’. The epithets change, yet the way working class white people are routinely caricatured, either openly on TV, or through snide innuendo, has altered little in recent years. They remain credulous oafs who voted Brexit on account of their xenophobia and bovine stupidity.
Keir Starmer may display greater sympathy and a greater understanding of the tangible concerns of his party’s traditional base, but still the metropolitans remain as stubbornly detached as ever. Their wanton ignorance still abounds. As does their lofty, Victorian fear of the great unwashed.
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