already very high levels of homeownership, and booming house prices thanks in part to post-crash quantitative easing.9 Older Britons are the most socially conservative on issues such as immigration, Islam, LGBTQ rights and feminism.
Younger Britons, meanwhile, have suffered one of the worst wage squeezes in the industrialised world, as well as collapsing levels of home ownership combined with a depletion of social housing, driving them into an unregulated and rip-off private rented sector.10 They are saddled with debt for daring to aspire to a university education which benefits all of society; services they rely on have been decimated; and cuts to social security have hammered low-paid young workers. They have the most progressive social norms of any generation, articles of faith they quite understandably believe are under attack. It is this divide in economic security and social values that surely explains the political chasm separating the generations.
Younger Britons have not all become radicalised socialists. Thatcherism promised that they would be liberated from the deadweight of the state and collectivism, allowing them to freely realize their potential and prosper. But rather than finding freedom, their lived experience is insecurity, which is a prison. That insecurity does not just define the lives of those born into working-class families but many of those born into what would traditionally be described as middle-class backgrounds. The young are not separate from today’s lived working-class experience; they are integral to it.
When Labour faced electoral devastation in 2019, the understandable focus was on the so-called Red Wall, the constituencies in the North and the Midlands represented by the party, in some cases, for generations. This specific electoral calamity was portrayed as the mass defection of working-class voters. Again, an understanding of class must intersect with age. The last available data from British censuses is 2011; the trends they picked up have surely only accelerated since. What they reveal about the seats Labour lost is instructive.
In Kirkby-in-Ashfield, the over-sixty-fives population increased by 41.3 per cent between 1981 and 2011, while the under-twenty-fives population fell by 15.5 per cent. In the same period in Bishop Auckland, the older population jumped by 34.8 per cent; the younger population fell by 24.9 per cent. In Redcar, the figures were respectively 29.6 per cent and 24.3 per cent.11 The very regional inequalities nurtured by Conservative policies ended up benefiting the party: because while younger voters from working-class communities still overwhelmingly supported Labour, they took their votes with them to safe urban seats.
That is one reason why, in 2019, Corbyn’s Labour secured a higher share of the vote than Ed Miliband in 2015 or Gordon Brown in 2010 but significantly fewer seats. Any progressive project whose objective is political power must win over more older voters without sacrificing the aspirations of a younger generation who have been increasingly proletarianized: that is, ever more defined by the insecurity of modern wage labour.
There have been other trends since this book was published which encourage some hope. Attitudes towards the welfare state favoured a slash-and-burn approach: 55 per cent believed social security benefits were too generous in 2011, compared to just over 40 per cent who believed cuts would damage too many people’s lives. By 2017, 56 per cent believed cuts would damage too many lives.12 While in 2014, 34 per cent believed most unemployed claimants were ‘fiddling’ that figure had fallen to 22 per cent by 2016.13 By 2020, 47 per cent believed that a majority of people receiving benefits were in need and deserving of help, with another 11 per cent opting for all or almost all; just 6 per cent opted for a minority being deserving and in need.14 Acquiescence to the cuts in public spending had been nurtured by encouraging millions to believe that taxpayers’ money had been frittered away on the undeserving and the lazy. But as those cuts broadened out to include in-work benefits for low-paid workers, and as Labour under Corbyn stopped playing the game of competing with the Conservatives in demonizing benefit claimants, attitudes shifted.
But while the latter half of the 2010s were experienced as the gravest crisis since the war, the pandemic of 2020 shifted the goalposts of upheaval. Here was a crisis defined by class. As a national lockdown was belatedly imposed, middle-class professionals could work from home, protecting themselves from a potentially deadly virus, while low-paid workers such as cleaners were compelled to risk their health by continuing to travel—often by public transport—to their workplaces. Given statutory sick pay was a derisory £95.85 a week, many low-paid workers afflicted by the symptoms of coronavirus with bills to pay and families to feed simply chose to keep working. That the government was compelled to implement a furlough scheme was testament to the fact that millions of workers are always just one pay packet away from extreme hardship. Each Thursday at 8pm, millions clapped key workers from windows, doorsteps and balconies: but it became increasingly noted that those applauded were underpaid and badly treated.
While the relatively well-to-do could make savings during this crisis—they were no longer forking out significant sums in restaurants or on leisure pursuits or foreign holidays, for example—the low-paid found themselves spending a greater proportion of their squeezed incomes on essentials. Those in precarious self-employment and the gig economy—an ever-growing proportion of the modern working class —were hardest hit. Homeowners were offered mortgage holidays, while private tenants were only granted a stay of eviction, often meaning a build-up of rent in arrears.
There was a profound class dimension to those who became infected or who would die from coronavirus, partly due to who was most likely to be exposed: such as care workers, security guards, shop workers, chefs, and taxi drivers. The underlying health conditions which most imperilled those who contracted coronavirus—such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease—were most likely to affect the poor. By the beginning of May, those in the poorest English and Welsh communities were more than twice as likely to die as those in the most affluent.15 Coronavirus was a public health crisis, a social crisis and an economic crisis: and each had profound class dimensions.
There are two other emergencies which relate to class, too. As I write these words, protesters in the US are being teargassed, batoned and assaulted by police officers following the killing of George Floyd. Mass demonstrations inspired by Black Lives Matter have erupted on the streets of Britain and other countries, too. At the forefront are courageous working-class people of colour. It is a reminder of how an understanding of class must always intersect with an understanding of other forms of oppression. Working-class black people on both sides of the Atlantic are more likely to be concentrated in low-paid and insecure work, to suffer from poverty and unemployment, and to face systemic discrimination at the hands of a racist justice system. There is no one single working-class experience: economic exploitation can intersect with oppression and discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, or a combination of some or all. No genuine emancipatory movement is worthy of the name if it erases the multiplicity of lived realities among the working class.
The other burgeoning crisis is the existential threat of the climate emergency. As it is, 9 million die prematurely each year because of pollution, fatalities which are distributed disproportionately among the poor and minorities.16 Poorer communities are more likely to be flooded.17 In every crisis, it is the affluent who are best placed to protect themselves and their property. As the risk of extreme weather, flooding, droughts and destabilised food supplies increase, it will be working-class communities who suffer most, while the wealthy shield themselves from danger. But staving off the emergency will not only protect working-class communities but transform lives, too. The mass insulation of homes and the installation of solar panels on roofs will slash emissions and reduce fuel poverty. The mass expansion of renewable energy industries will create skilled jobs, particularly in areas economically devastated by deindustrialization, austerity, and potentially the pandemic. Investing in affordable public transport will reduce dependency on cars and improve living standards.
When this book was written, the funeral rites for class politics had been conducted. That is certainly no longer the case. The new danger is of a populist right positioning itself as the champions of a besieged working class on the battlegrounds of a culture war. If Labour—a
