The 2016 referendum on EU membership marked the first time in generations that the once industrial working class flexed its political muscles and helped to change the direction of the country – against the almost universal advice of the ruling political, business and cultural class. Three years later, the same voters proved pivotal to the result of the 2019 general election, with the so-called Red Wall crumbling and 120 years of class-based partisan loyalties melting away as dyed-in-the-wool Labour voters abandoned the party, handing the Conservatives their biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s heyday. After decades of being ignored and left behind, working-class voters seemed to be central to politics again. And this resurgence came not a moment too soon; working-class voters have continued to face the prospect of being economically marginalised, minimised in cultural life and abandoned educationally.
Sadly, for too many this new-found working-class voice is a source of regret rather than celebration. A new and insidious snobbery, aimed squarely at these voters, has taken root in part of elite society. For too many people, these election results didn’t just mark a political disagreement, they also represented an unacceptable displacement of the natural order of things.
All of a sudden the ‘wrong people’, apparently uninformed and driven by bigotry, had proven decisive in electoral events. As a particularly angry editorial inForeign Policy magazine put it, the divide was seen as ‘between the sane and the mindlessly angry’.1 To disagree with the status quo was to display a level of ignorance that shouldn’t just be disagreed with but blatantly disregarded as ‘insane’ or based on mindless stupidity. This effortless superiority, writing off much of the country as barely worthy of being taken seriously, has become the calling card for much of contemporary progressive Britain.
Large parts of the often liberal, professional elite seem to believe that working-class views are not of the same worth as professional views; working-class jobs are not as valuable as middle-class jobs; and working-class places are less desirable to live in than middle-class places. This has created a new snobbery, through which it has become socially acceptable for the economically successful to look down on working people.
What actually constitutes working class is obviously a discussion that has raged for centuries. For the purposes of this book, we’ll largely define working class based on education (not in receipt of a degree) and occupation, although it is also worth noting that the majority of people still define themselves as working class, despite decades of commentary suggesting the opposite. The British Social Attitudes Survey indicates that 60 per cent of people regar
