Anyway, the thing is, I /do/ want to talk about class as the great unifier across other social boundaries, it's just that, among other things, this country straight up lies to itself about what class they belong to like all the goddamn time.
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You're painfully right but class means something different in England. I'm wealthier than my wife's parents in income, but they're home counties tories and I'm Yorkshire bougie.
There will always be a class difference. They has several biographies of Thatcher. I have none. We earn the same.
This is a country where people have claimed to my face that class is about accent, or where you have been born, or any number of goddamn purely cultural features that have FUCK ALL to do with actually existing economic status. This is not class solidarity, this is a kind of nationalism.
It's fascinating the sheer number of attempts to remove class from class politics we've seen. A lot of the intergenerational warfare stuff is this, too.
It was a punt (like elected mayors). Put to the test, it was spectacularly unpopular (like elected mayors). It didn't have any vested interests behind it, so it promptly disappeared (unlike elected mayors).
Call this a spicy take or whatever but while I hate the British state and want it dismantled, I really do think that someone's argument for why they are a country should be better than "being from Manchester makes you inherently working class"
It should be dismantled into its constituent nations and made a trade confederation (or just have every nation become part of the EU again) and that’s it. Britain is a relic of empire.
I don't, actually, think Scotland is any more inherently socialist or whatever than England, I just don't see England as a natural extension of the same political body and a part of the same society. I don't think people can seriously claim the North of England is a country in that sense.
An actually class-based politics would really upset a lot of Brits who currently swear by God that they are working class. It would tax those who say they're not doing well but sit on 150k a year into oblivion. It would prioritise tenants not just over landlords but /over homeowners/
I've met multiple house owners insisting they're victims of the system because they now have to pay taxes. Many people that defend private education and have audacity to say "working class have it better because you get welfare" and most had seen themselves on the left.
It also, among other things, would ask white British "working class" boys to reflect on why they repeatedly end up in better economic outcomes than BAME boys or girls that started at the same starting point when they were 18. it would not shy away from this. it doesn't, which is why you hate it
No, the true upper classes accept that they are rich, but they postulate that they JUST GET ALONG with the working classes (unlike those damned pesty educated 'elites'!) and there is a certain subset of lower-middle-class person who is adamant that they are upper-middle-class. Otherwise, yeah.
But wouldn't a class based politics also do the inverse and demonstrate to *more* people they're working class. Like, a Starbucks barista is working class despite liking ballet or some other arbitrary middle class signifier
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(American brain moment)
There will always be a class difference. They has several biographies of Thatcher. I have none. We earn the same.