I like the distinction between virtuals and physicals. I’ve never heard that before.

Working class seems like outdated terminology today. Even union membership seems outdated. Many union members today, if not most, belong to public sector unions, whose members earn higher wages and pensions than private sector workers. Yet it’s the private sector that ultimately pays their salaries.

I think one of the issues impacting the west is fewer people working in businesses that generate wealth. Public sector workers like teachers, health care workers and police are all vital to society, but they are disconnected from economy. Their jobs are not directly dependent on economic growth and stability.

If society is dominated by public sector workers, it can be easy to lose focus on the importance of a robust economy. Maybe that’s why so many people do not oppose govt policies that punish the private sector, like shutting down the economy, or imposing restrictions on agricultural and energy production.

IDK. Just spitballing here. Maybe I’m wrong.

A couple of sloppy false assumptions in this article. The 1970s headlines predicting the end of democracy are only ‘hysterical’ in hindsight. Communism was a very real global force and a motivator for some of those orchestrating the picket lines and power cuts. Societal breakdown and authoritarian government were an unlikely, but still real, prospect.
The notion that working class people voted Conservative only out of deference to their social betters is ludicrous. My mum and dad were a textile factory worker and bus driver. They, and people like them, voted Conservative for a variety of reasons, perhaps because they were patriotic, or aspirational, or concerned with freedom. The author’s analysis belongs in the 1970s and should be left there.

Trust an academic to suggest that those members of the working class who voted Tory did so ‘because they were deferential to those they imagined to be their social betters.’ An alternative explanation is that they had no time for socialism.

How can anyone who can write this
“Such voters had often voted Tory in earlier times in spite of being working-class (because they were deferential to those they imagined to be their social betters ….”
occupy an academic position at a university?

Yet another privileged middle class academic with no experience of the real world, let alone the working class, expatiating with unshakeable confidence about the proletariat he knows nowt about. Forgive me if I take this book-learned bias with a bucket of salt. Rule number one: never underestimate the ordinary working people of this country; and never try to second-guess them.

Scargill took the miners into a strike without a national ballot. That meant that it lacked validity and unity. It is one reason why the strike failed and it is often forgotten.

Some questionable assertions here. Firstly, many working class people were not and are not socialist but believe in competition, enterprise, private ownership and the monarchy. Secondly, by the end of the 70s many working class people were sick and tired of the trades unions and the closed shop that held them hostage to organisations that no longer represented their interests. Thirdly, Thatcher knew that a confrontation with the miners would come: yes she backed off against Gormley because she wasn’t ready, but although Scargill’s timing and tactics were poor one of the main reasons for this was that, learning from Heath’s defeat, coal stocks and policing had been well organised by the government.

The strike which I found the most amazing was the New Zealand dock workers went on strike in WWII when the American armada had arrived to fight the Japanese. They would not unload the ships. This amazed the USA military – who just ran them off the docks and used the gear to do it themselves.

”At the height of World War I, in February 1915, workers in munitions factories on the Clyde had walked out, with industrial unrest spreading to factories in Sheffield and Birmingham.”

”Later in the year, 15,000 Clyde shipyard workers went on strike again in protest at the compulsory deduction of rent arrears from their pay packets.”

”In 1943, workers at a factory in London making tail-fins for Halifax bombers went on strike and more than 16,000 women and some men walked out of the Rolls-Royce factory in Glasgow — where they should have been making engines for fighter planes.”

‘‘During the rest of the war, there were strikes all across the country — in engineering factories, the coal mines, aircraft manufacturers, shipyards, and by bus drivers and conductors.”

”Another key area of industrial unrest was the docks. In December 1943, 1,000 dockers went on strike in Middlesbrough and 1944 was considered to be an annus horribilis in terms of strike action, with lightning walk-outs in many ports at full stretch preparing for the invasion of Europe.”

The Australian dock workers had major strikes during WWII, making the war effort worse wile they were part of it.

and now when things are a mess and all need to be belt tightening, well they stop the holiday, and the NHS..

Although in WWII it was Communist directed unions, as in the rest through the 1980s, but now – I think just the leadership still are enemies of the nation in their heads just out of blind anti-British tradition.

“But in a more complicated way, the working class mattered to the Conservatives, partly because they needed to contain its power, but also because they needed to win at least some working-class votes if they were to form a government. And the fact that Britain was ruled by mainly Conservative governments for most of the 20th century shows how successful they were.”

Not, perhaps, because they might have cared that working people had decent opportunities, even if they would go about achieving this situation in a different way to Labour?

It seems an easy claim to make that Labour were for the workers and the Tories for the wealthy. Given that millions of working people voted Tory, were they not voting in their own self-interest?

Forgive me, I really need to read the whole article but this paragraph struck very strongly. It seems to caricature the Right in a very tired way.

Cross my heart and hope to die but I have the idea that there were probably similar numbers of Tories who wanted the best for ordinary British people as Labour people. Am I deluded and, if so, why do they keep winning so many elections?

I suspect that there is another factor in play too. At one time you wanted a ‘job for life’ and feared unemployment. Nowadays many jobs are interchangeable. Within certain limits a desk job is a desk job anywhere. A sales clerk is a sales clerk anywhere. And if you have a particular skill set you can become self employed as a plumber or electrician.
Perhaps people are choosing employment conditions with their feet rather than going on strike?

A large proportion of those striking are not working class. They are relatively well paid public sector apparatchiks. The actual working class aren’t in unions, don’t go on strike, and work large portions of their year to pay the ungrateful shits currently on strike.

“Anyone who can do their job from their bedroom will have shown their employer that their job can be done by someone much cheaper in Chennai or Manila.”
Lazy thinking. A gross over-simplification which only holds if there is someone with the required skills and experience in Chennai or Manila. The more complex and higher value the job, the less likely that is. Case in point: my son showed me a YouTube video this morning about software programmers in Silicon Valley being paid record amounts (well over $1m a year). The fact that you can find people with the same apparenty job title cheaper elsewhere means nothing if you need and can pay for the best.

In our age we are ruled by an educated class that imagines it rules for the benefit of the oppressed against the oppressors.
Thus, your Marxes, your Webbs, your Asquiths, your Lloyd Georges, your Attlees, your Wilsons, your Callaghans were all for the working class. Yay!
But I think the working class would have done a lot better if the ruling class had indulged in a lot fewer wars. Up through World War I the rulers would feature “resumption” of the Gold Standard after their war — i.e., deflation. Workers hated that. Then, of course, after World War II the rulers adopted permanent inflation. Workers hate that too.
Who really cares about the workers? That’s what I’d like to know.

“Working class” is as outdated a notion as “serfs”

Thank you, Richard, for placing “property ladder” in quotation marks, where it definitely belongs. I can’t think of a single other person to do this – even Brendan O’Neill appears to think it’s a real phenomenon.

This article misses the point. Nurses have been going on strike for the last two years by leaving the profession. Much of the working class have already decided years ago that working and paying tax does not match living off benefits and working casually for cash. Many professions such as lorry driving and those in construction are either lacking workers or recruiting immigrants because British people have decided that the pay is not good enough. As taxes rise, this phenomenon will spread into many middle-class professions. People will simply decide that it is not worth working or repaying the student loan or going for a promotion. Our economy will become lethargic and stagnate. Our elite will fail to fund the spending commitments required to keep rioters off the street. One way or another change is coming.

I was a victim of Thatcher’s privatization back in the 1980s whilst working as a Civil Servant for the MoD….she ruined the service!