Karl Marx, one of the most evil men to ever live, once said: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” He said this, of course, in an ethnically homogeneous society that was only just beginning to see the benefits of the fruits of capitalism that would revolutionise global economics, pull billions out of poverty, remake healthcare and education and warfare and entertainment and liberate our species from the grinding zero sum games that had hitherto held back prosperity. He was, in short, completely wrong. As he was in everything else.
This has never stopped a certain subsection of leftists from following Marx with this obsession, even into the 21st century, where class considerations feel a total afterthought for most. Bereft of literally any ideas for how to stop Britain’s slide into complete immiseration, though, Labour have decided to try to stir up a bit of class warfare.
Pat McFadden (MA Edin., worked his whole life in Politics with 20 years as an MP and was Tony Blair’s Political Secretary in 10 Downing Street before that) has announced that from next year, internships in the civil service will only be available to those who are “working class”. This will be determined based on what one’s parents did for work when the applicant was 14. Judging someone based on who their parents were is supposed to count as left-wing progress, somehow.
There are, obviously, absolutely laughable flaws in this. The Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie has remarked on the “absolute madness” of this definition, with its “wholesale preservation of a Victorian fetishised ‘working class’ concept at the bottom.”
And the Conservative Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Alex Burghart has laid out on X some of the filthy, disgusting bourgeois whose offspring will be banned from daring to apply to these internships. These include children of social workers, doctors, police sergeants, musicians, corner ship owners, secretaries, personal assistants, call centre agents, clerical workers, and nursery nurses.
Young Jamie may be bright, but unless Papa can send him to a private school, he must moulder in a comprehensive
But if your old man drives a train, protected up to the wazoo by overmighty trade unions and on more than £80,000 a year, then you, my friend, are an oppressed victim of the class system and may apply to help overthrow the system from within!
I have enjoyed considering the perverse edge cases, and the class commissars whom Labour will obviously appoint to adjudicate whether someone looks enough like their imagined version of the proletariat masses chafing under the fascistic British state. A burning early test for them: If someone is the son of a toolmaker, but they went to Oxford and became a Knight Commander of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, a learned member of the King’s Counsel, and a Right Honourable member of the Privy Council, oh and His Majesty’s Prime Minister, does that count as working class?
The fact is that class is just not a very big factor in most people’s lives these days. There are some bien pensant Guardian journalists who seem to suffer embolisms at the thought of shady aristocrats running the country, but in reality these harmless anachronisms haven’t been in charge for, frankly, too long. With the shameful removal of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords, the “upper class” are even less relevant to today’s Britain.
Instead, we are in the grip of a managerial elite, whose membership can be attained by having the right opinions on a range of establishment, left-wing statist issues. These people don’t much mind what school you went to or what colour your skin is, as long as you have the right opinions. Be from a less well-off background and want to eschew a handout in favour of a hand up, however, and the middle-class resentment flashes into view. Worse yet, be a member of an ethnic minority but refuse victimhood status, and you will be called a race traitor.
It was just this experience, down to that exact slur, that made former Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi a Tory. Confronted by a smelly Trot at UCL fresher’s fayre, Zahawi was offered a copy of the Socialist Workers Party newsletter. A polite refusal warranted a stream of abuse, which propitiated an angry march to the UCL Tories stall and an immediate signing up.
On the topic of race, the Civil Service has long had certain internships open only to people with certain skin colours. Does that scheme also have race commissars who sit in judgment over whether someone is sufficiently non-white to count? Isn’t it all just so damn tiresome now?
There are policy arguments against this pathetic kind of gesture politics — of which bringing back engines of social mobility like grammar schools are the best. The current snooty opposition to them speaks volumes about the new middle classholes and their worldview. Young Jamie may be bright and hard-working, but unless Papa can send him to a private school, he must moulder in a comprehensive class in order to slightly drag up the average there.
The grammar school allowed these strivers a way out of that fate, and in their heyday produced an unbroken string of mid-twentieth century prime ministers, from Wilson to Major. That line was broken, of course, by Fettes educated Tony Blair (boarding fees next year £54,000).
Because the new managerial class hated the idea of meritocracy, they abolished almost all of these amazing institutions, preferring to tilt against aristocratic windmills that no longer exist. Instead, they seem to think that a token internship scheme for the Untermensch will solve all the problems they have created.
In reality though, class consciousness is a luxury belief for a bien pensant middle class whose ideas on how to run a state have left us with a horrendous, looming sovereign debt crisis, third worlders stabbing and raping their way across our continent, and people fleeing Britain for gauche (yet safe, prosperous and ambitious) redoubts like Dubai.
And we don’t mind whether it’s Tarquin or Tyrone who gets us out of this first class mess.
