We’re not all middle-class now: Owen Jones on class in Cameron’s Britain

The author of Chavs discusses Selina Todd’s “impassioned, much-needed” new book The People, noting how most Brits still stubbornly self-identify as working class.

By Owen Jones

(Photo By Not so satanic: a Bradford mill, now a Unesco heritage site. However it is a myth that most working-class Britons worked in industry. Photo: Getty)

The People: the Rise and Fall of the Working Class (1910-2010)
Selina Todd
John Murray, 464pp, £25

Everyone is talking about class these days: even Tory modernisers excitedly debate how their party can woo working-class Britain. It is easy to forget that until all too recently it was consigned to the fringes of the national conversation. “Class is a communist concept,” Margaret Thatcher declared in 1992, with typical stridency; John Major hailed “the classless society”; Prescott and Blair announced that “we’re all middle class now”. Pretending class was no longer an issue was convenient, helping to shut down scrutiny of how wealth and power are distributed in modern Britain. That is why Selina Todd’s impassioned, comprehensive history is a much-needed contribution to the revival of thinking about class in Cameron’s Britain.