Working people | Theodore Dalrymple

This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.

Baroness Taylor, a member of the British nomenklatura class, is reported as having said, “The government is committed to keeping taxes on working people as low as possible.”

What is significant here is the expression “working people”. It is clearly a term of art, for it is not intended to mean people who work. Many multimillionaires continue to work, often very hard. The expression is a typical example of the nomenklatura’s use of words to convey connotation without denotation, the better to justify its hold over society.

If there are ‘working people’, there must be ‘non-working people’

What are the words “working people” intended to connote or conjure up in the minds of those who hear them? If there are “working people”, there must be “non-working people”.

The connotation of “working people” is that of those who have only their labour to sell, as against those who live on rent and returns on capital alone, that is to say that very tiny number of men who, in socialist iconography, sit atop the globe in frock coats and top hats, clasping money bags marked dollars or pounds in their plump hands whilst smoking fat cigars.

“Working people” work long hours, shovelling coke into furnaces, whilst always being on the edge of hunger if not of outright starvation.

As a characterisation of our society, this is clearly somewhat inadequate, given that 75 per cent of the adult population works — at everything from rubbish collection to microsurgery. Actually, if there is a true rentier class today of any significance, it is that of the nomenklatura class and their apparatchik subordinates: but even of them, it cannot really be said that they do not work.

Often, alas, they work only too hard, though most (but not quite all) of what they work at is prevention of the productive work of others. They live in an Orwellian world in which facilitation means obstruction and co-ordination means the production of chaos: for the achievement of which they are well paid — by non-working people, of course.