On paper, Donald Trump’s decision to choose J.D. Vance as his running mate made perfect sense. The Rust Belt kid turned Yale graduate is an ideal figure to both troll America’s elites and woo its working-class whites. It is the …
How the miners created a new working class
In 1984 I was lending a hand to some miners who were picketing a power station when a police officer kicked me rather viciously in the leg. I suppose he was only doing his job. A few days later I …
The myth of MAGA’s working-class roots
Surely the white working class is to blame? It’s obvious that those who stormed the US Congress on January 6, 2021, were the very same people Hillary Clinton described as “the basket of deplorables”. They’re obviously racist, sexist and xenophobic. …
How Labour lost the Welsh Valleys
Last year, I found myself back in the Rhondda valley and the village where I spent most of my childhood. As I walked through its typically inclement grey terraced streets, I came upon the boarded-up premises of the Ton and …
The happy dysfunction of Dover
Three hours after landing at Heathrow, I was in Chaplins, just off Dover’s Market Square, 15 yards from a sign proclaiming: “Here while searching for his Aunt Betsey Trotwood, David Copperfield rested on the doorstep and ate the loaf he …
Comrade Starmer has never had class
Has Keir Starmer traded in his barrister’s wig for a hammer and sickle? He certainly seems keen for voters to think so, with his repeated pledges to smash “the class ceiling”. The “project” of Labour, Comrade Starmer believes, is to …
Rugby league can save the Brexit dream
It must have taken a lot for Boris Johnson — onetime Eton prop-forward; archetypal rugby union boy — to go begging for the votes of those who play rugby league. But as Britain went to the polls in 2019, Johnson …
The betrayal of white working-class men
Cards on the table: I’m a rampant opponent of white, bourgeois, male privilege. Events such as the Coronation, or another Biden-Trump stand-off, pull this lunacy into sharp focus. Yes, these ludicrous and deranged media-driven circuses may have little to do …
The eviction of England’s rural workers
One wouldn’t expect to see a six-metre-tall witch in a quaint South Oxfordshire village. Nor to watch her be carried through the lanes, draped in branches and vines, to be ceremonially burned. This was not a celebration, but a protest …
Will the working class strike back?
I felt oddly cheerful last Friday evening as I trudged home through the snow, forsaken by public transport that had stopped running. The truth is that, like Slade or Morecambe and Wise, strikes bring back poignant memories of the Christmases …
Why do we pretend to be working-class?
Are we, to quote New Labour in the Nineties, “all middle-class now”? Do we all want to be? Not according to recent polling; far from middle-class norms pervading, British people disproportionately see themselves as working-class.
To understand why, it’s worth …
Can Sunak end the new class war?
Will Rishi Sunak hang the paedos and fund the NHS? This is, after all, the most common British political stance. Every constituency nationwide skews this way: Right on social issues, Left on the economy.
But I’ve not seen anything in …
Starmer can’t afford to be Blair
It was one of the hottest summers recorded in British history. Living standards were under intense pressure from an energy crisis and rising inflation. Industrial relations across the country were breaking down. At a factory in north London, working conditions …
How the elites exploit inflation
I can’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu at the current debate about global inflation. The similarities between today’s spiralling situation and the inflationary crisis of the Seventies are too striking to be ignored.
Nearly 50 years ago, …
How the Democrats became the party of the rich
Ever since Joe Biden’s election, the media has displayed an almost obsessive interest in the Democratic Party’s dwindling popularity among the working class, and its booming support among affluent professionals. The trend has been so dramatic that some Republicans have …