PAUL SUTTON
In an excellent article, The truth about Labour’s class war, Gareth Roberts focusses on Labour’s class spite, which he identifies as being an intra-attack or civil war, by the progressive public sector middle class on the private sector version. Above all, on their values and self-esteem, using money and mockery as weapons.
He’s spot on about the constant bile of public-sector middle class types – truly horrendous people – with and under whom I worked for 18 years, in teaching. Not all of them are horrible but as a group nobody likes these people – they don’t even like themselves. If anything, Roberts underestimates how intensely these progressives also loathe (and fear) the genuine working class. I saw this constantly, especially in the frequent cruelty many middle-class female teachers gleefully exact on working class English boys. They relentlessly bully them, venting their ideological fury and guilt.
And what is ‘working class’ now? The term tends to be fudged politically – and in fact completely transformed – into ‘working people’. This notorious dishonesty was much discussed in the context of Labour’s lie about ‘not increasing taxes on working people’. Let alone Keith Starmer’s painful convolutions on his ‘tool making’ dad Geoff – who in fact owned a large factory in the badlands of gin-and-tonic Surrey.
.Regardless of this fraudulent approach, class is still the most important social force in this country, though how it’s manifested changes and is often disguised. It underpins so much in our polity yet is very difficult to be honest about.
Needless to say, this checklist below is meant to be provocative and is constructed without any worry for ‘offence’ caused or to reflect my likes/dislikes. It’s written by an unescapably middle-class person, albeit one who felt at ease with very few from that background – either in the public or private sectors. In short, a thorough-going misfit.
To be genuinely working class, I propose that you need to satisfy all of these points, which are sometimes aesthetic and attitudinal aspects yet made without consciously trying to valorise or demonise that class description:
1. Didn’t attend either a public school or a university.
2. Not in public sector management or a corporation’s management, nor work in an office or hold any official position (such as MP or Councillor).
3. Could drink in a pub more than once a week, without eating anything there.
4. Could holiday in Benidorm without worrying or thinking it worthy of comment.
5. Be over the age of 18 and could – in utter extremis – have a fight.
6. Could have someone else think you’re working class, instinctively.
When working, I ticked numbers 2, 3, 4, 5 (just). But I’m a middle-class pub-bore, often misanthropic – and have led a comfortable life. It’s true that my father (as a youth) was in Fagin’s gang of street ruffians, in London’s notorious Squatney. Most of his muckers ended their days on the gallows, at Tyburn. He fought his way up to become a pathologist, and eventually did Sylvia Plath’s autopsy – not a boast any other poet can make. I’m not sure that’s nepotism; maybe I should ask Andrew McMillan?
My wife is from a South Wales mining family, but fails on 1, 3 and 6. She vehemently proclaims her working-class identity, and isn’t happy with my list.
I’m especially fascinated with how the border-line occupations emerge. In saying this, I’m accepting that the classification very largely – but not entirely – depends on someone’s job.
So, is a hairdresser working class? I’d say almost always yes, but sometimes in the position of feeling that they aren’t, and need to prove so. Whereas someone working in advertising or as a policy advisor on diversity (both utterly worthless professions) cannot be working class, regardless of what they claim to think or feel (see especially points 4 and 6).
Nor can any politician (see point 2). I’d say more middle-class professions have absolutely no social value or purpose than do working-class ones; I almost proposed some point on this, but found it impossible to capture the idea.
I’m troubled by one particular point. Many proudly working-class occupations – nursing and sport management (‘science’?), for example – are now things that can be studied at university. I think the motivation to do so is entirely middle class and becomes self-defining. The job can be – and probably is – far better done by someone who hasn’t ‘studied’, despite the skill and technical expertise needed.
However, the most difficult area is the arts, particularly literature.
Where do writers fit in?
One thing I’m sure of. Anyone in that world making a fetish of being ‘working class’ is as likely to have had cello lessons in a Victorian conservatory, and be about as ‘working class’ as Little Lord Fauntleroy, Keith Starmer or Owen Jones. And even if they didn’t, the arts are so full of such types, the question lingers.
On that note, I picked up a poetry collection I’d been sent, helpfully entitled The Working Classic by Aaron Kent, based entirely around the issue of class in poetry. Quite rightly, Kent is angry about left-liberal domination, patronisation and ownership of the arts, often facilitated by nepotism. As discussed, one can’t take anything in the poetry world at face value – not necessarily a bad thing – but his motivation is one I truly applaud.
On the other hand, here’s a poem:
Guess What? I Hate Thatcher
The news says
she was a great
woman, they bullshit
her as a visionary,
a leader, a force
to be reckoned with,
and I, a working-class
scumbag, live with the
wreckage of her hate.
Now, I’ve written some clunkers in my time, and it’s an open-mike crowd-pleaser, no doubt. Lapped up by the progressives, still shouting to free Nelson Mandela and get Maggie out. Red Wedge and all that. It might even get air-time from Jezza Corbyn, on a Hamas march.
But to me it suggests a ‘working-class poet’ may well get buggered – perhaps just metaphorically – performing party tricks and worse, for bourgeois overlords. And to what end?
Thinking it through, I taught for 18 years in a toughish comp, mostly white working-class kids. None of them would have welcomed ranting about their class, let alone writing ‘poetry’ based on it. The huge issue they saw was immigration and the conspicuous disadvantage they felt at, mercilessly added to by constant berating from middle-class lefties, on their ‘white privilege’.
But perhaps this is the best thing ever said, on class and the arts:
Editor’s note: To finish off, I think this poem by Paul, on a different but related subject, it truly first class:
PROLOGUE ON THE LION AT LAST WAKING
Oh for our minds to clear and so defend
this brightest heaven from invasion –
a kingdom stand reclaimed, children play free
and dead monarchs to watch the simple scene.
Then could the once proud British be reborn,
again to guard their shores and by those boots,
leashed like pit-bulls, wait aggro, flag and fist
eager for deployment. Sorry gentle
souls who want only peaceful times – like me –
when in borrowed verse I somehow try to
revive a past besmirched with hate by knaves,
whilst on the hostile beaches of France stand
hordes ready to cross and replace those whose
fathers fought in fields to defend our land.
Sorry again that this broken man dares
to write polemic for millions because
a song still needs singing in vanished voice,
until long-vanquished strength bestirs then roars,
to break Keith Starmer’s courts and prison walls.
Think, when you watch riots, of ripped open
minds and thoughts with power once forgotten
returned, stood steeled and fit to fight again.
Subscribe to AGAINST MONOLITHIC ‘DIVERSITY’ PAUL SUTTON
This article (WHO IS WORKING CLASS NOW?) was published by Free Speech Backlash and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Paul Sutton
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