Frank Cottrell Boyce writes:
“How,” said my son when the tweet story broke, “did an
Instagram of a white van get to be a bigger embarrassment for Labour than the
fact that they have completely embraced a Tory cuts agenda? How is that a
bigger betrayal?”
Perhaps Dan Ware is not a Labour voter. In previous times it would have been perfectly all right to have a go at him.
But nowadays the working class is not seen as a section of society with a complex mix of aspirations and interests, but as something more like an ethnic grouping.
In the tweet scandal, Ware’s flags are not a political statement but a cultural practice, and laughing at them is like laughing at the Sami for sticking to their nomadic lifestyle.
We are the stories we tell.
When you ask someone my age what class they are, they tell you a story. They don’t describe their economic realities or cultural expectations. They tell you what their parents did. Or their grandparents. How they got here.
For my – incredibly lucky – generation that story has usually been one of social mobility. You could choose how you told that story. You could change your accent, talk about your struggle, make jokes about your frightful parents.
Or you could choose to stay close to your roots and thank the Lord you were born at a time of massive economic expansion.
I’m not making a judgment here. Some people’s parents probably were frightful. They might have had good reasons for moving far away.
Emily Thornberry had a story like this – an admirable one. She’s from a council estate. Did well. Chose a life of public service
You chose your story. But that’s no longer the case. Social mobility has all but ground to a halt.
First generation middle-class people are seeing their children not rising up the ladder, as they did, but sliding down it.
To work close to power now – in the media or in politics – you mostly need to have the sort of parents who can bankroll you through years of internship.
The result is that people from working-class backgrounds don’t get to tell their own stories – in parliament, the press or on TV – the way they used to.
There’s a banner you see a lot on the Kop at the moment. “Scouse,” it says, “not English.” At first sight it’s the polar opposite of Ware’s “English, not European” flags.
But it expresses the same mix of emotion – an intense sense of belonging to something that is not represented at Westminster. It’s the emotion that powered the Scottish referendum
Because if the working class is now viewed as a kind of quaint ethnicity, then so are politicians.
In a kind of hideous mirror image of the benefit-scrounger libel which they have used to power through their cuts, Westminster politicians have come to be seen as a class apart.
They have their own peculiar way of talking, and their own strange cultural practices – flipping, for instance, and expenses fraud.
This is terrifying because “they’re all the same” is the age-old rallying cry of the fascist.
It’s not Britain that’s broken, it’s Westminster, seen as serving no interest but its own. We need to formulate a new covenant between parliament and the people.
We need a debate about what the state should be doing. Why is it, for instance, that it can finance banks and wars and HS2, but not housing?
Thatcher’s selling of council houses is the origin myth of both boom Britain and bust Britain. A consumer frenzy based on property prices locked a generation out of the housing market.
It would be good if that photograph of Ware’s house sparked a debate about what Westminster is actually for.
Perhaps Dan Ware is not a Labour voter. In previous times it would have been perfectly all right to have a go at him.
But nowadays the working class is not seen as a section of society with a complex mix of aspirations and interests, but as something more like an ethnic grouping.
In the tweet scandal, Ware’s flags are not a political statement but a cultural practice, and laughing at them is like laughing at the Sami for sticking to their nomadic lifestyle.
We are the stories we tell.
When you ask someone my age what class they are, they tell you a story. They don’t describe their economic realities or cultural expectations. They tell you what their parents did. Or their grandparents. How they got here.
For my – incredibly lucky – generation that story has usually been one of social mobility. You could choose how you told that story. You could change your accent, talk about your struggle, make jokes about your frightful parents.
Or you could choose to stay close to your roots and thank the Lord you were born at a time of massive economic expansion.
I’m not making a judgment here. Some people’s parents probably were frightful. They might have had good reasons for moving far away.
Emily Thornberry had a story like this – an admirable one. She’s from a council estate. Did well. Chose a life of public service
You chose your story. But that’s no longer the case. Social mobility has all but ground to a halt.
First generation middle-class people are seeing their children not rising up the ladder, as they did, but sliding down it.
To work close to power now – in the media or in politics – you mostly need to have the sort of parents who can bankroll you through years of internship.
The result is that people from working-class backgrounds don’t get to tell their own stories – in parliament, the press or on TV – the way they used to.
There’s a banner you see a lot on the Kop at the moment. “Scouse,” it says, “not English.” At first sight it’s the polar opposite of Ware’s “English, not European” flags.
But it expresses the same mix of emotion – an intense sense of belonging to something that is not represented at Westminster. It’s the emotion that powered the Scottish referendum
Because if the working class is now viewed as a kind of quaint ethnicity, then so are politicians.
In a kind of hideous mirror image of the benefit-scrounger libel which they have used to power through their cuts, Westminster politicians have come to be seen as a class apart.
They have their own peculiar way of talking, and their own strange cultural practices – flipping, for instance, and expenses fraud.
This is terrifying because “they’re all the same” is the age-old rallying cry of the fascist.
It’s not Britain that’s broken, it’s Westminster, seen as serving no interest but its own. We need to formulate a new covenant between parliament and the people.
We need a debate about what the state should be doing. Why is it, for instance, that it can finance banks and wars and HS2, but not housing?
Thatcher’s selling of council houses is the origin myth of both boom Britain and bust Britain. A consumer frenzy based on property prices locked a generation out of the housing market.
It would be good if that photograph of Ware’s house sparked a debate about what Westminster is actually for.
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