Is it possible to change your class? Not just superficially – in moving up and down the hierarchy of social standing – but change it inwardly so that you transform your very sense of self? Conservative leadership contender Kemi Badenoch seems to think so.
Speaking on Chopper’s Political Podcast this week, the shadow housing secretary said that although she grew up in a middle-class family, she became working class when she took a job at McDonald’s while studying for her A-levels. Explaining her conversion, she put it baldly: ‘I grew up in a middle-class family, but I became working class when I was 16 working in McDonald’s.’ She elaborates:
Just understanding how many people there were single parents, and they were working there to make ends meet. There’s a humility there as well. You had to wash toilets, there were no special cleaners coming in. You had to wash toilets, you had to flip burgers, you had to handle money.
Back up. Now, I came from a middle-class background, but even before the age of 16 I understood the concept of washing toilets. I had working-class friends from Ladbroke Grove, and none of them had special cleaners coming in. I even knew how to handle money. Such aloof language only makes her frank assertion, intimating a transformation of selfhood, appear even more strange.
Badenoch says that her time at the fast-food restaurant was the ‘first time I ever interacted properly with people who didn’t come from the sort of background that I came from’. That seems fair comment. That no doubt proved valuable experience for later life as a politician. But mingling with another tribe doesn’t make you a member of that tribe. Slumming it with the proles, that venerable middle-class right of passage, is only ever meant to be a temporary indulgence. Sure, you might have mingled with working-class people. But as to literally becoming working class as a consequence? Did she? Can anyone?
Watching someone feign a proletariat persona or manners is very funny
Feigning poor origins or humble status has been the holy grail for social acceptance ever since the 1960s, when, during that cultural revolution, no-one seeking credibility wanted to be regarded as posh or privileged any more. Dropped aitches and glottal stops started to be heard on television and radio. Harold Wilson pretended that he smoked a pipe as matter of habit.
That state of affairs remained and remains. It’s why Tony Blair deliberately altered his speech while appearing on daytime television. It’s why Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch still resonates. It’s why so many people find Jacob Rees-Mogg such a hilarious aberration: he sounds posh, he is posh, and he doesn’t even try to hide it.
Yet Badenoch’s claim chimes with the times. We live, of course, in an age of identity politics, and what you are and into what social category you fit – or, more importantly, present yourself as – is deemed of great significance. This is why the culture wars show no sign of abating. People still argue over what it means to be man, woman or trans, or quarrel over the importance of racial categories and bicker over pronouns.
The more downtrodden or oppressed the category to which you belong (or have chosen), the more kudos you will gain. Or that’s what people like Badenoch seem to think. For most ordinary people, watching someone feign a proletariat persona or manners is very funny. Think of the ludicrous middle-class character Rik from the 1980s comedy, The Young Ones, with his revolutionary poetry and appeal for ‘punks, and skins and rastas’ to join together against the fascists. Or the suburban Alan Partridge asking his builders ‘see the match?’, without having the remotest idea what match he was talking about.
That’s why Badenoch’s intervention has aroused much derision. Sure, you can grow up working class. But no-one becomes working class.
It’s all the more surprising considering what a stalwart opponent Badenoch has hitherto been of identity politics. It’s ironic that even she should be now have appropriated the language of identity and oppression by proxy. Her unconvincing claim to working-class personhood seems on a par with men identifying as women. It would seem, on the surface, that she has unwittingly become another casualty of the culture wars.
To her credit, Badenoch has at least recognised that there is such a thing as class difference, and that poor people come in all colours and both sexes. Class has always been the blind spot for the purveyors of identity politics, who forever and exclusively talk of race and gender. In her position, Badenoch could so easily talk about both, but thankfully never does.
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