Working Class Zeroes - Introduction

EVERYBODY OUT!

WORKING CLASS ZEROES

25 OF THE WORST SELL-OUTS AND TOADIES IN BRITAIN

Introduction

As I compiled my list of Middle Class Holes, every now and again I crunched up against somebody who just didn’t qualify. Sometimes this was quite a surprise; all British people have been calibrated to infer social class almost unconsciously, so we get thrown when the signs and signals don’t match with our expectations. There were quite a few names squarely in the frame who had to be struck off after a little googling, people you’d swear blind were semi-posh but turned out to be genuine commoners. (An LBC host and a self-help guru, for example …)

Occasionally the opposite occurred - Jess Phillips, Stella Creasy - but not as frequently.

I began to move these names on to another list, and to ponder them as a sub-category. What were their qualities, as individuals and as a collective?

But they weren’t the only type - there were also the public figures who made great play of their humble roots, and who had been feted by, and adopted as mascots by, Middle Class Holes.

I instinctively flinch from the idea of class traitors or sell-outs, scabs or blacklegs. But as I looked down my list, I had to admit that some of them really are ghastly cashers-in on their upbringing, what American economist Thomas Sowell calls ‘the mascots of the Anointed’ (the Anointed being, basically, the American version of Middle Class Holes). The Good People absolutely adore a working class person who parrots their mantras. It opens so many doors for you.

On the one hand, I can’t help but admire the industry of working class people who follow the money and go with the cultural flow. The idea that you owe something to your class is a pernicious one. This leads to ‘solidarity’ and collectivism, and all that grotesque - and eventually deadly - nineteenth century Marxist claptrap.

But was I trying to have it both ways here, I wondered? To scoff at the idea of class ‘integrity’, but also to simultaneously fold my arms and tut about people who followed the high-status path in public life? Was I myself falling into the trap of thinking that working class people ‘should’ act in a particular way, the warm, twinkly scamps?

I had a good think, and realised that what I object to is the attempt made by such people to dress up their adherence to the culture of their ‘betters’ as anything but self-interest. It’s especially revolting when high status nonsense beliefs are portrayed as some sort of enlightenment or moral crusade, to which the cashing-out commoner is adding gritty ‘street’ authenticity.

Pull the other one. Being a mascot is the softest, cushiest gig you can get. We can see this by flipping the board and examining what happens to the working class people in public life who don’t follow the acceptable middle class rules - so Angela Rayner and Maxine Peake are adored, while Morrissey and Róisin Murphy (and plenty of other people you’ve probably never heard of) get it regularly in the neck, because - sadface - they’ve let the semi-posh down.

The Working Class Zero is, essentially, an enabler of the Middle Class Hole, fluffing and fawning and helping along their progressive project as it wrecks the country.

A bit of personal history. Coming from where - a very Tory town (until recently) in the Home Counties - and when (born 1968) I do, working class people who are left wing have always seemed a little odd and unfamiliar to me. I was 14 when I first met people who didn’t automatically think Tony Benn was a laughable nutter, or that CND weren’t gullible idiots, etc. I met them at my grammar school, and they all lived in the Chalfonts, so the association between leftism, or at least radical leftism, and the middle class was fixed in my mind in a way that isn’t so much the case for people older than me, or from different parts of the country. The attitude towards unions and strikers among my peers was very much that of the exasperated factory workers to them in Carry On At Your Convenience - rolling their eyes to heaven and sighing ‘here they bloody go again’. (I should mention that my parents didn’t take an active interest in politics at all. Most people didn’t.)

When I first came across the concept of ‘false consciousness’ I screamed with incredulous laughter. This term, coined by Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács in 1923, was briefly summed up by American sociologist Ron Eyerman as ‘the distorted perception and beliefs an individual or a social class acquires through their life activities in capitalist society’. In other words, the proletariat don’t know their own minds and have been duped from seeing the One True Way by wicked capitalists, who use them as their pawns.

This is - obviously - incredible snobbery. ‘They are too thick to see that they’re being exploited’ is an accusation that can reasonably be levelled at some working class people in some situations, as it can reasonably be levelled at plenty of other people, in some situations. Applying it as a general rule is, ironically, patronising semi-posh guff of the highest order. I speak as somebody who studied for a degree in which we were sent to raise the class consciousness of people playing bingo. This was in 1991, but I cringed so very hard that I still haven’t fully uncringed.

The decline of manual labour and the mind boggling rise in living standards have transformed the Western world over the last century. But the class system remains.

My bingo experience sums up the actual dynamics of class in modern Britain for me - in fact, since 1991, they’ve only got worse. We are a crowd - you are a mob. We are for unity and harmony - you sow division at the behest of shadowy forces. We make informed choices - you are hair-trigger, feral, gammon bigots who will kick off at the drop of a hat.

Wretched, scary or funny

You only have to look at the contrast between the protesters demanding the closure of asylum hotels and the counter-protesters ‘standing up to racism’ (sic) to see the British class divide at its starkest, still going gangbusters. As ever, the progressive middle class wanks itself silly at the thought of grass roots working class solidarity … except when it actually happens.

Culture reflects this. Pride and Made In Dagenham and Billy Elliot tick all the correct boxes. But there’ll never be a feelgood musical or movie about the camaraderie in Crowborough. Similarly, the almost overwhelming horror of the rape gangs still hasn’t registered in the cultural zeitgeist - the victims were just too unfashionable, the perpetrators too much of a hot potato. (I should add here that just being left-wing and working class doesn’t make somebody a Working Class Zero - there are still quite a few reasonable people like this about, though sadly almost none in actual politics).

Bearing all that in mind, I think I can be allowed a soupçon of scorn for the Working Class Zeroes who have thrown in their lot with the people who patronise, lecture or just look away.

* * *

A few quick rules I’ll try to keep to - I won’t be doing anybody I actually know, or have known. The person can be spectacularly successful and/or wealthy, but if their roots are working class, in they go. Once again, it’ll be only British people. And each subject must earn their place by revealing something interesting that’s specific to them.

Onward, brothers and sisters!

NEXT TIME on Working Class Zeroes - I’ll have a chia seed-enhanced risotto with a freekeh base and sesame humous in a clementine drizzle, and some heroin please