Roughly 46% of the cabinet had parents with working-class occupations – well above the average for the rest of the working population, according to sociologists Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman’s new book, Born to Rule: the Making and Remaking of the British Elite.
Therefore the working class is well less than 46% of the population. The actual rich are already defined as the 1%. Which means that the majority – a significant majority – of the country is bourgeois.
Which is fine – but that does mean we need to run the country for the majority, the bourgeois, doesn’t it? Wealth cascading down the generations for example, as the certainties of financial independence from the State are supported by not having inheritance tax…..
The thing with this, I love a working class boy made good. Had a chap join us who was living on a council estate. He’d gone on an evening class, spent his money on a basic computer, worked hard, top of the class. And he was just a natural. I spent a lot of time nurturing that guy. He knew the coding, but not office etiquette and so forth.
And I have a lot of respect for people like Margaret Beckett and David Blunkett who came from poverty and worked hard to get to university.
The problem is that most of the Labour cabinet don’t strike me as being like those people. I like Wes Streeting. He’s got a better idea about how to fix the NHS than the Conservatives did for 14 years. But Lammy is thick, Rayner is a fishwife,. Nandy and Haigh are non-entities.
A little tip for non-English readers. English class systems are based on pre-18th century life. Thus you may have to work to survive-unless you’re a politician of course, when you merely have to wander around a big building in London occasionally-but this by no means defines you as working class.
To be working class, you have to toil in hot factories, making things under dreadful conditions for a mere pittance that barely sustains you and your family, while being whipped by a fat sadistic capitalist. Such factories no longer exist , of course, as that would destroy the planet and the capitalists are no longer allowed to be fat as they must slim down to save the NHS. Thus the class system is largely imaginary, but at the same time very real…
The ability to hold several conflicting or imaginary ideas in your brain is a technique that has been perfected by socialists. The government requires all the citizens to undergo training to cure their natural instincts and become lovely cuddly socialists who follow Islam although they detest religion…
parents with working-class occupations
An odd distinction. So that would apply Viscount Linley’s children, because their old man is a chippy?
Yeah. I can imagine you really need yet another book by a couple of Yids on the British class system. That’s going to be informative for you.
Defining class is a minefield but you cannot go too far wrong with the old adage that a working class man washes his hands before having a piss.
Polly has spent a lifetime in the extremely English activity of knowing what’s best for the Common People, while patently being and remaining an aristo herself.
I take it that she accepts their self-reported accounts of their proletarian origins.
So Starmer’s father was just a toolmaker, not the owner of the Oxted Tool Company, with his factory and his employees. I mean, you could class him as a petit bourgeois capitalist or even (the horror!) middle class.
On those grounds my offspring may report me as a casual labourer around a harbour.
my dad wasn’t a toolmaker, but he worked in a factory . i used to work in the civil service. after graduating but never became leader of the labour party. I’m confused .
It’s hard running a country for your own bourgeois class, though. Your fellow middle class lawyers and managers have got degrees, professional experience, and financial acumen. Whatever you do for them, there will always be someone inclined to argue and tell you how you are wrong.
It’s much easier running the country for an immigrant underclass. They’ll always be grateful because whatever you do it’s better than the shit-hole they came from, they’ll thank you for letting their cousins in, and besides they can barely speak enough fucking English to complain.
Basically two types of workers, those who shower before going to work, and those who shore after coming home from work.
Shower
I’ve no doubt that a good percentage of the cabinet had working class parents. You can boost the numbers greatly thanks to the ambiguity of whether you father was a working class tool maker working in a factory, or if he was the bourgeois owner of a tool making factory.
“Roughly 46% of the cabinet had parents with working-class occupations”
So? They’re all grown-ups now. Allegedly.
@Jimintheantipodes
Brits shower? More than once a week? When did that start? Must be after I left.
“Which means that the majority – a significant majority – of the country is bourgeois.”
Or being paid out of transferred wealth (from wealth creators) to do jobs that produce no profit – like civil service, “outreach”, not-for-profit rackets, climate change/gender/race equality compliance officers, etc.
We could add those working in the public services (service perhaps a misnomer) like NHS, police, whose cost exceeds the value of output, therefore also wealth destructive.
JohnB:
“We could add those working in the public services (service perhaps a misnomer) like NHS, police, whose cost exceeds the value of output, therefore also wealth destructive.”
Don’t know about NHS but policing is like plumbing – you don’t know what they’re doing if they do a good job, you just know it when they do a bad one.
Now British police these days seem to be doing a bad job (not there so I don’t get a street level view). So complaints are warranted.
I feel you can always trust a man who tucks his shirt in his underpants.
@BiC
© Bill Tidy, RIP (The Fosdyke Saga IIRC)
How much of that 46% (and the *undisclosed* comparative number) depends on the chosen definition of “working-class”?