Just over a century later, Labour — as it is still quaintly known — has begun to rediscover the concept of social class that was once the foremost reason for its existence. Earlier this week, Bridget Phillipson, Minister for Women and Equalities, announced the creation of a new “class unit” within the Office for Equality and Opportunity. “We have been squeamish about class for too long,” said Phillipson. Reporters were quick to identify the unit’s purpose as “improving outcomes for white working-class people”. The government clarified, bashfully, that the class unit would examine disparities across all ethnic groups.

Things do seem to be changing from the era when identity, rather than class, seemed to rule the Left’s moral calculus. In August, the American Democratic politician Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez admitted on ABC’s This Week that perhaps some of the new socially radical politicking that had overtaken the institutions of the Left for a generation hadn’t landed quite as intended. “Woke One was crazy!”, she said.

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In truth, it was never really clear what so-called wokeness had to offer a majority of working-class people in Britain. As Woke 1.0 spread from the USA to our shores, it brought with it a moral diagnosis that resonated in America, where some states had struggled to move on from the Reconstruction era, but bore a smaller relevance to the malaise in much of the post-industrial Britain of the modern era. Prosperity and opportunity had begun to centralize in cities and vanish from Britain’s much less diverse towns and coastal regions. Social attitudes had seen huge progress. Race wasn’t the immovable roadblock in life that it once was.

My generation came to political maturity riding a wave that crested alongside Woke 1.0. We began walking into institutions equipped with a politics shaped by the 2008 banking crisis, the expansion of the EU’s migration covenant and the introduction of the Equality Act in 2010. It was an era where the moral leadership of the Left, once the de facto voice of working-class people, became dominated by people for whom “the white working class” were a distant species.

The former industrial communities of Britain’s regions were something modern politicians left behind en-route to a career in London after Oxbridge — and why wouldn’t the aspirational leave? Margaret Thatcher’s decade long war on local council democracy had left millions with little power at the ballot box. Everything meaningful was now decided in the capital.

Otherwise, the white working class were a group many of the Left had never actually met. They were to be spoken on behalf of in student meetings — the way a primatologist might talk about what was best for the gorillas in their charge at a zoo. Rather than considering the diminishing life chances and outcomes of millions of people on lower incomes as a central part of their politics, my generation were encouraged to adopt a series of niche causes under the doctrine of “intersectionality”. It was as though working-class life was a solved problem and not something collapsing around us.

For this more bourgeois iteration of the Left, the emotional pull of Woke 1.0, and maybe, dare I say it, a bit of traditional liberal guilt atonement, held an appeal that was easy to ratify just by looking out of the front door. We lived in big cities and in Britain’s most metropolitan boroughs, there really are still notable gaps between people’s prosperity that can be predicted based on their skin color. Those who might object to making these concerns the most prominent pillar of our politics could easily be presumed to only do so because of prejudice. In reality, the gaps on the doorstep weren’t nearly as wide as those between metropolitan Britain and everywhere else.

The country we maligned for its supposed backward social attitudes was quietly becoming the most regionally unequal major economy in the developed world. Large swaths of Britain had been torn to shreds by austerity not with a bang but a whimper. Traditional Labour politicians like Ellen Wilkinson or even Ramsay MacDonald would have marched the breadth of the country to do battle on issues like unemployment and closing factories. By the mid-2010s, this was an unsexy, even faintly embarrassing cause — largely forgotten, maybe a bit nostalgic. The odd episode of Benefits Street would present the collapse of working-class communities as something with a cosmic justice to it: they were always lazy, weren’t they? John Harris would conduct a Guardian-sponsored safari around the shuttered high streets of provincial England, furrowing his brow in befuddlement as people told him they were planning to vote to leave the EU, but couldn’t say exactly why.

Working-class institutions, like trade unions, had been collapsing for years. Deindustrialization, something the Left had largely given up trying to stop, had robbed unions of anyone to represent and deprived millions of working-class people of a decent job to go to after school. Culturally, the white working class were becoming unmentionable. They had been absorbed into the wider and varied “white” group by the Equality Act, their life outcomes masked by this sleight of hand.

Those who did mention the white working class — the last few political figures that had lived similar lives, like Angela Rayner, who left school, pregnant, aged 16 to become a care worker — were shushed. As education secretary Rayner spoke about the needs of white working-class boys being “pushed down the food chain” due to the focus on ethnic minorities and women, but was pilloried for her trespass. Even to mention the group seemed to risk resurrecting the ghost of Enoch Powell, like a monster from an Eighties horror movie coming back to life. It was a faux pas to mention the white working class. It could only be assumed that the speaker didn’t realize that working-class people now came in all colors.

None of this handwringing stopped the least well off white working class kids’ educational attainment utterly collapsing. White British kids on free school meals have the lowest higher education participation rate in Britain. They are less likely to spend age 19 in further education than Roma Gypsies.

As rolling the dice on higher education has become the only accepted way of creating social mobility in Britain, it isn’t hard to understand why people in these communities feel a profound loss of hope. The Social Mobility Commission — which will apparently become surplus to requirements following the creation of the Class Unit — places the least diverse former industrial and mining areas, such as the North East of England, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the West Midlands as the places least likely to allow someone to make generational progress. The Sutton Trust’s Opportunity Index shows a yawning gap in educational attainment between London and places like the North East and Cornwall.

Swaths of Britain being completely left behind has been a quietly accepted part of our national story for more than a decade. The story briefly came to a head during Brexit, only to be quickly dismissed by the political Left. The fact that the old Labour heartlands voted for Brexit in spite of what sensible people in London were telling them to do was seen simply as an inconvenience that their betters would need to muddle through. It was the spasm of a palliative patient whose bedside vigil often gave them cause to yawn and glance at their watch — a victory for the far-Right that any right-thinking person would reject.

Nevertheless, the broader political re-alignment that Brexit represented refuses to go away. In the recent Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany, the Alternative Für Deutschland [AfD] party dominated the votes of a community that looks like a facsimile of left-behind Britain: shuttered industries, a low rate of higher education, too disillusioned to bother much with politics. The AfD’s platform hoovered up and sent to the polls exactly the kind of working-class voters that have fallen off Britain’s electoral rolls over a generation of hopeless disengagement. Saxony-Anhalt was an election infused with a sense of the injustice of regional inequality too: 73% of voters there believed that East Germans are second-class citizens. The result is that Neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, ex-Stasi officers and Putin apologists are now more trusted to run a swath of Germany than the old parties of the working class.

Labour’s answer to the British version of this disengagement suggests that some within the party are at last waking up to the anger present in swathes of working-class Britain. However, the tools it has unveiled look much like those that have already produced unremarkable results.

For many years the moral component of modern social justice has amounted to a kind of human flower arranging. How many protected characteristics can you gather and display in your vase to prove that Britain is a caring society?

The creed of modern social justice was that Britain’s growing prosperity would be accompanied by the assurance that more of the beneficiaries would have a certain color skin, or a certain preference for other’s genitalia, or a certain bodily or mental difficulty. Now the working class will be included in this bouquet of virtue.

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It isn’t yet clear exactly how big a change this could be. Perhaps new positive discrimination access schemes of the kind that have become common (and commonly gamed by middle-class climbers) will be developed. Now Britain’s social justice engineers will be encouraged to say: “Look, we have a black person, a disabled person, a gay person AND a poor person.” Where previously an applicant being white and poor only gained one virtue point, now perhaps it could gain two.

The expanding prosperity that undergirded the politics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is evaporating. It hasn’t existed in parts of Britain for a long, long time. DEI politics has shown that it can take the ever-more centralized wealth of Britain and divvy it up among a more diverse fortunate few. It hasn’t shown any ability to provide for the parts of Britain clinging on by their fingertips.

In 2024, the Institute for Public Policy Research published its report, “State of the North”, detailing for the umpteenth time how the Britain that was remade by industry closure during the neoliberal turn was full of sicker people with shorter lives. It showed that wealth inequality was set to grow in spite of a Labour government: there will be an average gap of £228,800 per head between the wealth of those in the South-East and the North by 2030. The authors proposed  “Germany-style levels” of investment — nearly £8 billion a year for 15 years — to start closing the gap, referencing Germany’s history of “solidarity taxes” between West and East since reunification. IPPR proposed that this would be achieved by wealth taxes that mostly land on the South. But then, even that level of investment hasn’t worked to keep faith in the political system of Germany, as downward mobility leaves people hyper-vigilant, hoarding, worried about losing or being forced to share what little is theirs.

Andy Burnham came into No. 10 promising to be a prime minister for “The North”. But his previous economic advisor and Goldman Sachs chief economist Lord Jim O’Neill has already come out strongly against taxing the wealthy regions. His argument: London will need even more investment if any growth is to reach the rest of Britain. The money markets seem to agree that borrowing to restore prosperity to the once proud working-class areas of Britain should come at a punishing cost. A cost it isn’t clear anyone is willing to pay.

Will working-class voters buy into the idea that “social class” can be solved by being granted a protected diversity status? It’s not hard to wonder what someone like Ramsay MacDonald might think of such a measure; “class” was once the entire reason a Labour politician got out of bed in the morning.

But it speaks also to the mindset of the modern political class: that more unity can be created if more people can be given permission to be recognized as “in need” by their betters. The Labour of old knew that working-class people didn’t want this politics of pity: they wanted a politics of dignity. They built institutions, friendly societies, social insurance schemes, working men’s clubs and trade unions as a living demonstration of their ability to stand on their own feet, not reliant on other people to decide whether they can be given a leg up for the sake of meeting a quota.

Clearly, the working class of deindustrialized Britain will need to wait for anything that would mimic the gigantic leaps of change that Labour once provided: homes where there were once slums, work where there was once unemployment, an NHS where there was once sickness, a welfare state where there was once desperation. A New Jerusalem. In the meantime, the white working class can celebrate their induction into the world of DEI. One more flower in the bouquet.

If, however, the mythic figures sit atop their dueling perches, guarding the entry point to America’s political psyche, inside the sanctum lies the most sacred relic of all: the US Constitution. Yet that relic is not the guarantor of liberties that most Americans imagine. Rather, it’s the legal scaffolding of an elite-led counter-revolution — the same one that today lets tech billionaires drop power-guzzling data centers into communities that never asked for them.

In individualistic terms, America remains the most economically “free” country in the world, but also among the most atomized, alienated and unequal. Most Americans don’t realize, however, that it didn’t have to be this way. After all, how many have ever heard of Shays’s Rebellion — a massive class revolt led by ex-revolutionary soldiers, one that almost toppled the government and could have saved working people from 230-plus years of Constitutional tyranny?

To be clear, 1776 is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, the Revolution was arguably the greatest democratic uprising in world history. Much of that national mythos is worth preserving. Three cheers for the war against the Brits. Yet if the struggles from Lexington to Yorktown remain the quintessential Anglo-liberal uprising, a genuine David-and-Goliath triumph, selling that narrative has meant omitting what happened to the common foot soldiers of the Revolution itself.

The glorified writers of the Federalist Papers — John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison — explicitly didn’t want mass democracy. During the Constitutional Convention, launched in spring 1787 and convened meant to hammer out the document’s details, Hamilton pushed for a president serving “during good behaviour”. In other words: an elected king enthroned for life, much like the Supreme Court. Hamilton and his friends also pushed for a congressional veto on all state legislation, in effect allowing for total national and elite-led control of local government. That was shadowed by other elitist institutions, notably the Senate and the Electoral College. Voting, too, was to be the preserve of the propertied few: discounting women, slaves, and poor white men, the franchise in the early US encompassed just 6% of the population.

The true heroes of the early US, then, were the Anti-Federalists. An everyman group of farmers, ex-soldiers, and small property holders — none of them have ever received Broadway hagiographies or had their faces plastered on dollar bills. Yet they were the families who fought and died for the Revolution, risking their lives to overthrow the British and who now expected government both by and for the people.

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How did the wealthy merchants and bankers pushing for the Constitution respond? By economically destroying the little guy. Due to governmental dysfunction — and the fact the poor and propertyless were locked out of voting — a large percentage of veterans remained unpaid for years after the redcoats left. Even worse, many had mortgaged their homes and farms to finance the fight for independence, with the government promising repayment that never materialized. Little wonder these men rose up, under the former colonel Daniel Shays, to resist the injustices of debtors’ prisons and restore what they saw as the Revolution’s democratic spirit.

Not that Shays himself was some permanent rabble-rouser. Born not far from Boston, he fought at Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Saratoga, was wounded in action, and handed a ceremonial sword by none other than the Marquis de Lafayette. It’s a sword Shays was later forced to sell to cover his debts. By the autumn of 1786, the veterans and common folk of western Massachusetts had had enough. Armed bands of farmers — mostly veterans — marched on the county courthouses and shut them down by force, reasoning that a court that can’t convene also can’t foreclose on their neighbors and friends.

And so, for a few months, these insurgents effectively governed the western half of Massachusetts. The Commonwealth’s authority simply evaporated under popular pressure. Then, in January 1787, Shays led roughly 1,500 men against the federal arsenal at Springfield, aiming to seize its weapons and turn them against the state governments, which they believed had been captured by wealthy coastal merchants and big farmers. They never reached the gates. A militia — privately financed by a syndicate of Boston merchants, since the bankrupt state couldn’t afford one — met them with literal cannon fire. Four Shaysites fell dead in the snow. Upon seeing the ruthlessness with which these hired guns pursued them, some of the Shaysites are said to have died from fright. The rest scattered, before being hunted across the hills through a brutal winter.

What would Shays have done if he and his rebels had been able to take the arsenal at Springfield? In an interview with the Massachusetts Centinel, the colonel suggested that, once the rebels were armed to the teeth, they planned “to march directly to Boston, plunder it, and then destroy the nest of devils, who by their influence, make the Court enact what they please”. Given the scale of the betrayal of these revolutionary soldiers — and seeing how American business have dominated the country’s government since — it’s hard to argue against him.

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In the end, though, the country’s greatest ever class rebellion ended in failure. Shays himself was eventually pardoned, though would later die in drunken poverty. But the fright it put into the propertied classes endured. Word of the uprising reached Mount Vernon, and a rattled George Washington was coaxed into running for the presidency. Meanwhile, the rebellion’s shock directly spurred the wealthy establishment’s drive for the new constitutional order, replacing the radically localist politics of the revolutionary era with a system designed to stabilize property relations and restrain popular democracy.

It worked. All the attention on slavery and race in American history overshadows the essential fact that, in most cases, the poor and propertyless were not allowed to vote until the Jacksonian era, some 40 years after the Constitution’s passage. Nor does the document’s malign influence, or the resonance of Shays’s Rebellion, end there. Far from being a quaint historical curiosity, the revolt’s failure was both the spur for today’s legal order and the decisive turning point in American political development: with the Constitution amounting to, essentially, an elite-led counter-revolution where the democratic energies of 1776 were deliberately caged to protect bankers, creditors, and commercial elites from popular pressure. The Presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court — all these elements were explicitly designed to curb democratic energies and ensure that property holders were protected from the “factionalism” of the “mob”.

The anti-majoritarian architecture built in 1789 continues to imprison American governance to this day. Beside the absurdity of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — which allows money to be treated as legally protected “speech” — nothing illustrates this better than the data-center boom. No one except tech billionaires wants these things: certainly not in their own communities. And yet they pop up everywhere, including the now-notorious “Stratos Project” in northern Utah, funded by investor Kevin O’Leary, and which would immediately require more power than the entire state uses in a year. Just like the spread of Walmart in earlier decades, often against the will of the communities the shopping centers invaded, the spread of data centers is enabled by precisely the tyranny of property holders the Constitution was built to make possible.

The shadow of the nation’s Constitutional counter-revolution extends to nearly all the great economic problems of American life. The same logic that crushed the Shaysites — creditor over debtor; centralized elite over localist self-rule; property rights over political rights — runs through American political economy to this day, from the Wall Street bailouts after 2008, to wars fought for corporate interests, to the relentless algorithmic extraction of the gig economy.

If the civics-touting Right remains in hock to the Constitution, the Left’s critique isn’t much better either. For all the supposed radicalism of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ undertaking was merely a continuation of the trend among elite storytellers and academicians who ignore class entirely, and instead seek to turn the Founding into a different kind of myth useful to their political project. For Hannah-Jones and rich readers of the New York Times, certainly, it’s useful to make race and gender — not class — the Founding’s dominant feature.

How, then, might we build a better tomorrow? In the first place, by recognizing that the Constitution wasn’t totally hopeless. The Bill of Rights, of course not pushed by Hamilton, Madison and the other Federalists, enshrined John Locke’s idea of limited government into law, and opened an eventual pathway for liberal democracy globally. In other words, then, the future rests not on the DSA socialism of Zohran Mamdani, nor on the Sanderistas, but on returning to the localist tradition Shays  tried to defend. It’s a tradition Anti-Federalists sought to preserve as much as possible: hence their insistence on an extensive list of governmental “thou shalt nots” throughout the Bill of Rights. Yet if this exists entirely in the realm of what political theorists call “negative rights” — in other words freedom from rather than freedom to — this is ultimately a mischaracterization of the Anti-Federalists and their politics. Without our Anti-Federalist strand, the fight to end property restrictions on the right to vote, which propelled Andrew Jackson into office, would never have been completed. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal probably wouldn’t have been possible either.

If, in other words, fighting the Constitution means encouraging “localism”, that’s less abstract than the term implies. For instance, it would mean turning antitrust law, mostly dormant for two generations, against the tech monopolies, just as trustbusters once stymied the railroad barons. It would also mean encouraging right-to-repair laws, letting people own the machines they buy outright, while keeping banks accountable to the towns they lend in — instead of hands-off regulation-haven states like Delaware.

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More generally, reviving the American Revolution means reducing the power of the national government over the states: both the intention of the 1776 revolution and the only way a true democracy can function. Recall, again, that the revolutionaries were committed to small-“r” republican governance, which meant as many people as possible participating actively and often in the political process. Pretending that the system we have now is a “democracy” in line with the intentions of our 1776 founding is in itself a betrayal.

The time for change, in short, is now. Tech monopolies and their ruthless gaming of the legal system are gutting whatever’s left of the Revolution’s democratic spirit. The trillionaire class that AI’s rise will produce is the final boss stage of the elite-led counter-revolution that began in 1787. As we speak, the elite are exploiting the supremacy of property law provided by the Constitution to ensure technology serves no one but their makers, keeping the few rich and the many surveilled. Technology itself, though, remains neutral. The material conditions of the present — remote work, decentralized production, drone-assisted agriculture — may, practically for the first time since the Revolution itself, revive the localist, democratic spirit the Constitution was designed to suppress.

Whether this happens depends on something the localists have been trying to tell us for 40 years. In his 1985 book Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah warned that a republic organized around private accumulation forgets the language of the common good — and loses the civic muscles self-government actually runs on. To paraphrase Michael Sandel, we have traded the citizen, who helps govern the forces that rule his life, for the consumer, who is merely ignored by them. That trade, in a sense, is the counter-revolution’s deepest victory: a whole people taught to mistake being unbothered for being “free”. The key question now is whether Americans can recognize their own revolutionary inheritance before the counter-revolution completes itself and all working-class children are illiterate, device-addicted serfs who own nothing and “like it”.

Today, alas, things feel very different. Where “the Left” once connoted strike-prone shop stewards and horny-handed socialist rabble-rousers, today the new bogeymen for the City, the business lobbies, and the political Right tend to be soft Left MPs, picked from the serried ranks of Russell Group Labour Students societies and the progressive middle classes. And if the TUC is currently looking to downsize from its Bloomsbury pile, hardly surprising when the labor movement is now so diminished, the unity so vividly inscribed in Meadows’ sculpture also feels very far away, and it’s unclear whether even Andy Burnham and his protruding Northern vowels can do much to bring it back.

The most obvious example of union fracturing is in its schools. The NEU, Britain’s largest teachers’ union, is currently in a bitter dispute with three of the country’s largest general unions: Unite, Unison and the GMB. In essence, the disagreement centers around who gets to organize teaching assistants. That, you might think, is a rather arcane, technical dispute. Yet it has ignited fury within the Labour-affiliated mega-union, and could, according to a source familiar with the matter, even result in the teachers’ suspension from the TUC.

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How to explain these oddly high stakes? Because, I’d argue, they reflect broader divisions at the heart of the union fraternity — on how to combat new threats to the Left and Right, and how to deal with the realities and disappointments of the Labour government now in office.

The old Labour Party’s Clause Four once promised to “secure for the workers, by hand and by brain the full fruits of their industry”. That was because there was an acceptance that cognitive, intellectual labor was a core part of the production process, a commodity to be exploited by capital just like any other. Sections of the Left still maintain a similarly expansive definition of class identity. Mick Lynch, the former transport workers leader, recently claimed that “if you don’t own the means of production, you are working class. If you have to get up when the alarm clock goes off and do a job and you depend on your earnings rather than your assets then you are working class.”

But this Marxian approach, attempting to unite all wage-earners within a diverse proletarian cause, is broad enough to deprive the term of any useful meaning or specificity. A definition that includes doctors, academics, bank managers and creative consultants within the same category as minimum-waged warehouse workers strips the former of those nuanced and overlapping privileges, accrued through what the French sociologist Bourdieu called habitus: the social mores, soft skills, personal tastes, lifestyles, education and values of people who share the same background.

These differences aren’t merely superficial — least of all in Britain — but indeed result in wildly opposed political visions. Polling last week revealed that trade unionists were more likely to support Reform than the Labour Party. The Unite leader Sharon Graham, who has openly toyed with the idea of disaffiliating from Labour, said that the numbers were “damning but not surprising”, that “Labour has abandoned the working class”, and that, therefore, “the working class have abandoned Labour”.

But that isn’t quite right. Instead of a homogeneous blob moving en masse away from their traditional partisan loyalties, we find that the working class is no longer an intelligible or coherent political bloc at all. The masses have been replaced by a networked mess of competing cultural-political factions, separated by educational, generational and linguistic chasms. Certainly, those headline polling figures conceal predictable fissures. Among trade unionists with a university education, for instance, Labour was still the more popular party, gathering 34% to Reform’s 19%. Among non-graduates, however, the percentages were roughly reversed, with Reform gaining 36% to Labour’s 22%. While the Greens performed well among younger trade unionists, winning among 18-24 year-olds, their support nosedives for older members.

Beyond the numbers, meanwhile, these tensions are clear enough on the doorstep somewhere like Makerfield. In this Reform-friendly, white working-class seat, whether Burnham can still make the old language of work, place and solidarity sound vaguely plausible is being billed as an existential test for broad-church Labourism. It is, one activist tells me, a chance for “proof of concept”: reuniting the Left’s core vote under the Labour banner while also peeling off a nice chunk of Reformers. If the labor movement’s inherited unity is now more bronze sculpture than living reality, Burnham allies pray that it can now be revived by his inchoate brand of Mancunian normie populism.

If it’s tempting, however, for the Left to appeal to the putative “common economic interests” of lecturers and Deliveroo drivers, the country’s actual conditions prompt the opposite conclusion. Whether they like it or not, for example, professional-managerial workers are the beneficiaries of low-skilled migration, providing them with a cheap services class and the pleasant air of cosmopolitan vibrancy so beloved of the urban creatives, hipsters and the boho intellegentsia. No less important, these same professionals are largely insulated from the worst effects of intensifying competition for housing and jobs. That may explain why pollsters record that the white collar so-called “ABC1s” are less likely to think immigration is too high than the manual workers in the “C2DE” cohort; the lowest decile of earners saw an over-supply of cheap migrant labor squeeze their wages even before the Boriswave.

On climate policy, meanwhile, adherence to net zero and all its commandments might be sacrosanct for some workers — a general mark of basic decency, say, for a sociology professor. But for those remaining in our dilapidated manufacturing sector, “net zero” is more likely to be associated with high energy costs and the decimation of heavy industry.

Unite and the GMB, both representing workers in the oil and gas fields, are regularly found arguing in favor of North Sea drilling, setting out the case against net zero, and questioning the “just transition” and “climate jobs” rhetoric of the mainstream center-left. They support Heathrow expansion, heavy infrastructure spending and a robust, developmentalist industrial strategy. Both unions are also reticent about adopting aggressive anti-Reform attack lines; they’re fully aware that a significant part of their membership base fully supports a Right populist agenda.

In contrast, though, the NEU has willfully engaged Nigel Farage in public rows, describing Reform as “racist” and “far Right”. The Reform leader has reacted in kind, last year telling a meeting that he was “anticipating a teachers’ strike very quickly” if he wins a general election. Why? Because, he claimed, “they are poisoning our kids” with critical race theory. For his part, Zack Polanski has spoken at both the NEU’s annual conference, and at the University and College Union, the body representing lecturers.

In the end, that rather abstruse row over teaching assistants should be seen in this context. For the teachers, flirtation with the Greens and a kamikaze approach to relations with fellow trade unions represents an opportunity for a political breach — with a movement that it thinks has become too conservative, too set in its ways, too unwilling to confidently challenge Reform with a strangled cry of “No pasáran!”.

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All this is new, even compared to the glory days of Meadows’ statue. Way back in 1900, the Labour Party was formed as the Labour Representation Committee, intended as the parliamentary wing of the trade union movement. Now, though, the old congregation is splintering into sects. And if it’s too early to know what all this means for the future of trade unionism in Britain — let alone for the party that receives around £10 million in union funds a year — the question now must surely be: what will Andy do?

Happily for Graham and the other union bosses, Burnham is surely better placed than most Labour politicians to paper over the movement’s fractures. With a bold economic offering, he may even persuade enough voters that Labour can go beyond the comfort zones of the progressive graduate class, rediscovering its radical roots. But a byelection victory, if it happens, will not by itself restore the lost unity of the Left, because the seams now running through the labour movement are not merely failures of what Westminster calls “comms”. They are rooted, rather, in our nation’s divergent experiences and incentives. As the old rallying cry went: “The workers united will never be defeated.” But the next defeat, especially if it comes from an insurgent Faragism fueled by working-class disaffection, could leave a decaying broad-church labourism with little more than rusty statues.

Now, on the 250th anniversary of her birth, Austen is less an author than an institution. She belongs more with the House of Lords and the Bank of England than with Thackeray and Trollope. The British have an insatiable appetite for studies of her, however coy or twee. If you want to retire tomorrow with a fat bank balance, write a book called Jane Austen and Dogs. There aren’t actually any dogs in her fiction, but no matter. The Secret Sex Life of Jane Austen would do even better if you’re prepared to lie through your teeth for a couple of hundred pages. Studies of a gay Austen, predictably enough, abound.

It is with Austen, though, along with Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth, that the novel in Britain becomes a serious literary form, not simply a matter of Gothic horror or soppy romance. Before she came to write, the genre was seen by polite society rather as The Sun is regarded in Oxbridge senior common rooms: despised as swashbuckling or sentimental trash, rather than a medium of serious moral inquiry. Austen was well aware that she was up against a widespread contempt for what she was creating, but refused to concede that fiction was just fantasy for upper-class women with too much time on their hands.

One might also claim that she invented the typical English prose style. Reading her work, the bluff, hearty tones of Henry Fielding now seem antiquated, along with the sanctimonious moralizing of Samuel Richardson. In their place, we have a style of writing which is good-humored but not quite genial, reasonable and temperate yet also quietly devastating. It’s this supple, self-assured prose, laden with ironies and obliquities, which descends from Jane Austen to George Eliot, Henry James and E.M. Forster, and which even finds a resonance as late as John Le Carré. Fiction of this kind is mannered but not elaborate; sharply satirical, yet intent on keeping its cool. The very shape of Austen’s sentences, with their delicate equipoise and complex symmetry, reflects the social and moral values she upholds. Previous novelists tended to deal in epic characters and events, but Austen is one of the first English writers to find moral significance in such minor but critical matters as remembering to light a fire for someone in their bedchamber, or failing to wait for a companion who has gone off to fetch you a key. What the Henry Fieldings of this world would scarcely have noticed becomes of momentous importance to an author on whom nothing is lost.

Given this miniaturizing way of seeing, more typical of a woman of the time than a man, Austen has sometimes been accused of overlooking the great historical events of her time (the Napoleonic wars, for example). Yet nothing could be more crucial to the social history of her age than the fortunes of the landed gentry and aristocracy. By and large, it is these men and women who populate her fiction, and generally speaking they aren’t looked upon in a favorable light. This is partly because Austen wasn’t of their number herself. She was the daughter of a clergyman of modest means and earned at most £1,000 from her writing, but her family had connections with the wealthier gentry. In this sense, she was on the fringes of the social order she observed, half in and half out, familiar enough with its ways to portray it convincingly yet enough of an outsider to be dismayed by its selfishness and arrogance — the appalling Lady Catherine de Bourgh of Pride and Prejudice being a memorable example of the latter.

Later novelists in Britain would find themselves in an equally ambiguous position. The major Victorian novel — the Brontë sisters, Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy — is the product of the lower-middle class. Its authors are close enough to the common people to dramatize their lives from the inside, but at the same time aspiring, reasonably well educated and on terms with their social betters. If the internal exile finds himself in a painful place, caught between alternative identities and chronically anxious, it’s also a peculiarly creative one. From Henry James, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound onward, 20th-century “English” writing is dominated by literal émigrés rather than spiritual ones.

Austen’s position, then, in the genteel society of her time was an awkward one. As a semi-outsider, she found herself upholding the ideal values of the gentry and aristocracy in the face of an actual upper class which consistently violated them. She was sufficiently part of that class to have a quick eye for the size and value of a landed estate, and the likely social status of its proprietor. She rarely sees anyone working on the land. All the same, what she sees around her, as well as good sense and sound judgment, is a landed class which is investing more and more in trade and the financial markets; and though Austen had nothing against honest tradesmen, she saw this as threatening to undermine the social order she esteemed. In her eyes, the gentry weren’t just a bunch of entrepreneurs, but the linchpin of a whole paternalist way of life. Hence the ritual trips to poor tenants’ cottages and the dutiful tending of low-life sickbeds which figure in her fiction.

But social mobility was on the increase, as the impecunious younger sons of baronets were in pursuit of the daughters of city merchants. There is a chink in even the most closed family known as marriage, through which insidious influences may enter. Urban wealth, moral frivolity, glib metropolitan manners and ruthless self-interest were invading the tranquility of the English countryside. The custodians of English culture were at risk of being infected by various forms of moral anarchy, from the disowning of parental authority to the giddy pursuit of fashion, from sexual flightiness to the worship of money.

Further reading

Inside the Jane Austen theme park

By Tanya Gold

Throughout Britain, finance capital was flying to the aid of mortgaged estates about to sink without trace; but in Austen’s eyes, there was a high price to pay for this liaison between city and country in terms of conduct and manners. Manners for her meant not the passing of beefburgers without dropping them on your partner’s lap, but a whole other set of moral values that were now under siege: kindness, considerateness, patience, sympathy and deference. Grace and good breeding were matters of virtue and self-discipline, not simply drawing-room airs which any charlatan might assume. There was a new cult of spontaneous feeling abroad, which would later be called Romanticism. For Austen, all this was dangerously subjectivist and self-indulgent; there was something to be said for sensibility, but it needed to be firmly restrained by sense.

One could write much of this history by tracking the fortunes of the word “gentleman” in the English language. A merchant or industrial capitalist, however prosperous and well-connected, couldn’t be a gentleman in Austen’s time, but his public-school-educated son certainly qualified. In Emma, Robert Martin is a “gentleman-farmer”, man deemed “respectable and intelligent” by the head of the local gentry, Mr Knightley; but this doesn’t mean that Knightley would invite Martin on a shoot or propose marriage to his sister, since he isn’t gentlemanly enough.

A growing alliance was being sealed between landed, mercantile and industrial capital by the public-school system, in which the sons of dukes learnt not to patronize the offspring of cotton barons. The had to learn to be less proud, and the middle classes less prejudiced. The result was a powerful ruling bloc which later in the 19th century would prove easily capable of taking on and defeating the burgeoning working-class movement. Over the Channel, in revolutionary France, the nobility and the bourgeoisie had faced each other across the barricades; in England, the two classes combined in a spirit of moderation for which the nation became renowned. If ever we decide to drive on the right, we shall do so gradually.

Further reading

Spare us another Pride and Prejudice remake

By Poppy Sowerby

Yet if Austen was an astringent critic of upper-class society, she delivered that critique with a stylishness and lightness of touch which were themselves part of that social order. The question is how to unite sobriety of judgment with vivacity of spirits, a combination brilliantly illustrated by Elizabeth and Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. The ideal is to be both good and fine. You need sprightliness but not levity, independence of thought but not errant individualism. Emma Woodhouse of Emma has too much liveliness, whereas Fanny Price of Mansfield Park has too little. Austen’s own prose is an exemplary fusion of the instructive and the entertaining.

Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice remarks that she first became aware of her affection for Mr Darcy when she set eyes on his elegantly laid-out estates. The reader suspects for a moment that this is ironic, as though Elizabeth were to confide that she first fell in love with him when she saw the size of his bank balance. But there is no irony intended. What Elizabeth means is that the way Darcy has laid out his estates is a moral as well as aesthetic affair — a matter of sound judgment, a sense of proportion, an aversion to vulgar spectacle or useless ornamentation. A man’s taste is a guide to his soul.

In the end, there is no clear distinction between the moral and the aesthetic; and this is true of Austen’s own fiction, which blends artistic pleasure with moral insight. The problem, as the novels themselves reveal, is that there are people in the world who have the manners of an angel and the morals of a tomcat.

Most weekends, these merry few come together to experience hunting. Some are active participants, others remain on the sidelines. As one gentleman tells me, half-joking, half-nostalgic, it’s not an old man’s game to get out in the fields. Yet they’ve all been coming out for years to hear the hounds, and see parts of the country they otherwise wouldn’t know.

At midday, the hounds take off, flanked by men in green hunt coats. At first, I watch from the roadside, but soon we’re all clambering through brambles and over rusty barbed wire in search of the elusive hare. We traipse for hours across muddy sheughs, with the last remaining beagle pack in Northern Ireland. And soon, it could all be gone.

If the rumors are true, a total Northern Irish ban on all forms of hunting with dogs could be proposed this side of Christmas. John Blair, the Alliance Party politician who instigated a public consultation earlier this year, last tried and failed to spearhead a successful prohibition in 2021. For the moment, Northern Ireland remains the only part of the UK in which hunting mammals with dogs remains legal. Hare coursing was made illegal in 2011, but the region generally enjoys fewer restrictions than on the mainland.

Suggested reading

Humans are born to hunt

By John Lewis-Stempel

Though any proposed ban in Northern Ireland would come as a Private Member’s Bill, it’s intriguing that the anti-hunting lobby is backed by a representative of a party set on “bridging the bitter divisions in our community”. After all, there are few cultural activities in Northern Ireland which enjoy such cross-community, cross-border support as hunting. Indeed, that’s one of the key reasons it’s survived.

The soft border between Northern Ireland and the Republic encourages a fluid culture, with people traveling across the divide for everything from work to grocery shopping. Nowhere is this clearer than in the rural way of life, with Northern Ireland alone hosting 11% of the United Kingdom’s entire agricultural workforce. People travel all across the island to purchase new farming machinery, for instance, or else attend agricultural shows and livestock auctions. They get to know each other, and form relationships without being held back by politics.

The same is true of hunting, with enthusiasts frequently visiting packs in other parts of the island, spending a day or a weekend on an outdoor staycation. And why not? Legislation north and south of the border enjoys many similarities, with both still permitting hunting with dogs. It perhaps helps, too, that liberalization of the sort to transform the Anglosphere over recent years is proceeding much more slowly in Northern Ireland.

Then there’s the question of class. In England, likely to soon be hit by its own proposal for a ban on trail hunting (the hunting of scents laid by humans, rather than the genuine article laid by animals), the practice has long been stalked by accusations of snobbery. “The hunting ban in England and Wales was passed because, in the words of Labour MPs, it was ‘class war’,” says Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance.

Yet in Ireland, both north and south, the same divisions don’t really apply. Northern Ireland, especially, doesn’t have the kind of regional upper crust you might find in Lincolnshire or Devon. That’s largely because aristocrats have historically been reluctant to settle here, with smallholdings still the general rule. As for the south, the old Anglo-Irish elite has long since departed, with the IRA systematically burning around 275 “big houses” between 1919 and 1923.

This relative egalitarianism means hunting here is a far cry from cliches common across the Irish Sea. “The vast majority of hunting in NI is done on foot and generally [is] the center of local rural communities,” says Owen Mulcahy, secretary of the Irish Working Terrier Federation, confirming what I experienced during my afternoon in Armagh.

Not that hunting’s opponents care much about that, with many dismissing it as vicious. Typical here are the comments of Emma Reynolds, the current environment secretary in Westminster, who has said that hunting with dogs is “not humane and cannot be justified”. The truth, though, is that hounds spend most of their time out hunting puzzling out the scent. The dogs only chase the mammal — whether fox, rabbit or hare — once they see it. And, even then, a chase will rarely last more than a couple of minutes. These animals are fast, intelligent, and wily; they can, and regularly do, escape the dogs.

Besides, the time from catch to kill is seconds, and the escape of wounded prey is unheard of. As Roger Scruton observed in 1998, other less controversial methods of pest control, like shooting and trapping, “offer a fate far worse than the instant death that is administered by a pack of hounds”.

At any rate, it seems that class politics is now coming to Ireland, both north and south. Consider the fate of hare coursing; though banned in Northern Ireland, it’s still legal in the Republic. Tellingly, meanwhile, Sinn Féin, long the party of Left-leaning Irish nationalists, voted against banning “traditional rural occupations such as hunting and hare coursing” at its all-Ireland party conference in 2023.

In this regard, then, Sinn Féin arguably represents the island’s rural voice, which politicians like Blair seem hellbent on ignoring. Just like his latest efforts, the Alliance member promoted a public consultation ahead of the 2021 hunting ban bill. According to the resulting survey, commissioned by the League Against Cruel Sports, there was “strong support from the farming community to ban hunting with dogs”. Yet the Ulster Farmers’ Union (UFU), the largest democratic voluntary organization representing farmers and growers in Northern Ireland, wrote an open letter to the Northern Ireland Assembly lamenting that neither Blair nor his team had engaged with them.

Last month, meanwhile, the UFU unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in the Alliance-led Department for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in Belfast, citing “total frustration” with their conduct. Not to be outdone, a coalition of organizations and experts on hunting with dogs, named Northern Ireland Says Enough (NoISE), lately made requests about what risks a potential ban would pose to their lifestyles. Among other issues, they raised questions regarding alternative forms of wildlife management, loss of income, and mental-health detriments associated with a ban on hunting with dogs. According to the coalition, Blair’s responses lacked detail.

Suggested reading

In defence of shooting

By Patrick Galbraith

I asked Blair about what impact he believes a ban on all forms of hunting would have on community cohesion in Northern Ireland. He reiterates that a ban “has received widespread backing” from across the community. “The aim of the legislation is not to undermine cross-community engagement,” he continues, “but rather to encourage activities that unite us without causing harm to animals.” According to Blair, there are plenty of other cross-community opportunities, “from sporting events to the arts” which don’t “involve the killing of animals”.

It perhaps bears mentioning that Blair is a keen fisherman, who argues for further support and development of angling in Northern Ireland. Why the killing of fish is to be championed, and the killing of mammals condemned, remains rather opaque. Is it based on a view that sea life is less able to experience suffering than mammals, or maybe that anglers have worked harder to reduce the suffering of their catches?

Or, perhaps, Blair is simply beholden to the culture war, and abhors hunting without the need to rely on evidence? Whatever the truth, and with a new ban looming, Northern Ireland’s hunters are worried about what comes next — not just to their hobby but to their wallets too. Mulcahy tells me the alternative usually proposed to hunting is trapping. But, echoing Scruton, each trap costs roughly £350 each, and that’s before you factor in the suffering faced by animals who then need to be gassed or shot. “It’s all emotional misconception,” Mulcahy adds. “Ireland’s wildlife [is] caught up in a game between the ignorant delusional armchair naturalists and practicing hard-working farmers and hunting practitioners with experience of humane and balanced control measures.”

From Downton to Bridgerton to Saltburn, aristos continue to hog our screens, big and small. But as a class they have been in visible decline. The Whigs — those original wokes — delivered the early blows, repealing the Corn Laws and widening the franchise. Then came the fin-de-siècle pounding: Harcourt’s death duties of 1894, which were the first serious taxes on the rich; by 1946, they had reached a respectable 75%

The interwar years found the aristos properly on the skids, with huge tracts of land sold off. Brideshead Revisited is in great part a whinge about precisely this. In the postwar period, Manny Shinwell, minister of fuel and power and unreconstructed class warrior, pulled the aristocracy down another peg. He requisitioned Wentworth, that preposterous estate of some 365 rooms where guests were issued confetti to mark their trail back to bed à la Hansel and Gretel, and had it torn open for an opencast coal mine. Rhododendrons and holly trees fell like nine-pins before the ripper shanks.

By the Seventies, their kind were truly on the back foot. The V&A’s doleful 1974 exhibition, “The Destruction of the Country House”, invited the public to mourn the plight of the poor aristos. It opened in December, just two months after miners had kicked out Edward Heath, the only instance in postwar European history where working-class muscle toppled a ruling party.

To be sure, there were holdouts. American nouveaux riches came galloping to the rescue of cash-strapped British anciens pauvres through canny marriages. The aristocracy itself was padded out with parvenus: the infamous “beerage” of nouveau peers who had merely brewed enough pints or befriended the PM to warrant their elevation.

Some piles these days host festivals. Noseley Hall in Leicestershire, for instance, was until recently the unlikely home of the psychedelic trance festival Noisily. Then we have the aristocratic rhotacists who stwuggle with their Rs flogging themselves on YouTube, the likes of the Viscount and Viscountess Hinchingbrooke, who scrape a living from posting lifestyle videos for the gawping pleasure of the lower orders.

More from this author

Mario Vargas Llosa’s illiberal conversion

By Pratinav Anil

The contemporary trend is less marriage than outright sale. Highland acres have been snapped up wholesale by Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish fashion billionaire who is now Scotland’s largest landowner. Meanwhile a great many native landlords, far from being wellie-wearing custodians of tradition, have abandoned their home. The 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, sniggered at English girls as “round-shouldered, unsophisticated garglers of pink champagne” before decamping to France for a dissipated life. Many of his peers now live off private wealth management funds on the Riviera.

But for most aristos, the decline has been grim. Eleanor Doughty’s Heirs and Graces, a modern history of the aristocracy, is a surprisingly candid and stylish peek into that well-heeled world; surprising because her acknowledgements brim with such reassuringly posh names as Lady Celestria Hales, the Duke of Buccleuch, and Thomas van Straubenzee, not to mention her throwaway reassurance that she has one foot firmly anchored in the clubs of St James’s. Still, she lapses into a certain breathlessness at times, succumbing to titular gewgaws: “Though we are friends on Facebook, I cannot help but always call him Lord Derby.” But then, this is the sort of book where Stuart Hall denotes not the founder of the New Left Review but a country pile of that name in County Tyrone.

Doughty parades before us the symptoms of decline: braces of yachts sold, Van Dyck rooms denuded of Van Dycks, visiting grandees of yore replaced by wide-eyed day-trippers with lanyards. One architectural historian noted a Lazarus-like lady of the house who, unable to afford maids, “exuded a sour smell of unwashed clothes” — a mephitic reversal of the old order, where aristocrats wrinkled their noses at the poor.

Worse than the stench, it seems, is their boorishness. Freed from pecuniary cares, one might have expected these families to take up learning or cultivate a little sprezzatura. Instead, they plodded into finance, ignorant of their own collections. Henry Somerset, showing guests his Canalettos, could only remark they were “very like the house”. The decimation of foxes was the only pursuit that quickened his pulse.

The decline in servants worsened things. The half century on either side of the First World War coincided with rising wages. Thousands of footmen and scullery maids took city jobs, leaving aristocrats to fend for themselves. Suddenly Job was less the Old Testament character than a métier one might be forced into. The Earl of Arundel became an insurance salesman after a stint as a Formula 3 driver, Baron Milne a chair-caner, Baron Kenilworth a horticulturist, and the son of the second Viscount Monckton — what else? — a monk. Baron Teviot found a job behind the butcher’s counter at Sainsbury’s before becoming a bus driver. Baron Feversham, for his sins, made porn flicks.

Contact with commoners no doubt proved salutary for these men. For, by and large, the non-working aristocracy has remained insulated from shifts in social attitudes. Indeed, they have effectively sat out the 20th century as if in a time-warp, clinging to arch-conservatism even as the lower orders have embraced progressive ideas. It is no accident, then, that the Lords has always lagged a generation behind the Commons. Women peers only arrived in 1958, amid spluttering opposition from the 28-year-old Earl Ferrers, who moaned: “Shall we in a few years’ time be referring to ‘the noble and learned Lady, the Lady Chancellor?’ I find that a horrifying thought.”

On divorce, too, they trailed behind popular sentiment, sneering long after the rest of the country had stopped caring. There were, it is true, emancipated outliers. Mollie Buccleuch, known as “Midnight Moll”, maintained a sprightly reputation for seduction well into senescence. The 7th Marquess of Bath lived as a polyamorist with 74 “wifelets” while remaining married. But such figures were the exception, not the rule.

Throughout the 20th century, many made a show of ordinariness — roast beef on Sundays, cottage pie on Mondays — in stabs of working-class cosplay that conveniently ignored their own preference for endogamy. Eton in the Seventies could still field classes with two earls and a viscount; another student recalled classmates named Guinness, Charrington, Whitbread, and Worthington: “it made me drunk just to look at them.”

To be fair, there were aristos like Tony Benn, who disclaimed his title, and the red toff Wogan Philipps, the only member of the Communist Party of Great Britain to sit in the Lords. But such class traitors were rare. The majority clung to their exclusivity. At their most accommodating, the Bolshie levellers among them go no further than insisting their tenants address them by their Christian names.

Suggested reading

Britain's new Class War

By Terry Eagleton

Aristocratic decline has been good for us proles. Many of its ranks happily disposed of their white elephants to the National Trust, which has done noble work rescuing crumbling porticos and pergolas — though its deferential tone still grates on the average republican who visits such establishments for reasons of architectural interest rather than to admire aristocratic twee. Much of the art was absorbed by our national collections, with Kenneth Clark, the soi-disant socialist director of the National Gallery, astutely scooping up treasures for the people. Back in 1873, a land survey revealed that 710 people owned 80% of this isle. This vampiric monopoly, the statesman John Bright complained in 1871, had “divorced the English from the soil”. It is no bad thing that the monopoly was smashed, clearing space for hoi polloi. Home ownership increased from 10 to 70% in the 20th century.

And yet, for all the decline, the aristocracy persists. Doughty reminds us there are still 796 families with hereditary titles. They hold some 3.2 million acres — three-quarters the size of Wales — and remain, as the great political theorist Tom Nairn insisted, not so much a quaint relic as an active abetter of our “national backwardness”, impeding our progress toward a truly classless society. Even Ken Livingstone, that tribune of municipal socialism, Nairn lamented, was prone to going moist-eyed before the queen in his lime-green hat sporting wobbling baubles — making him resemble “some form of royal bird-scarer”, as The Times conjectured.

Pace Bagehot, Nairn argued, Britain is not a “disguised republic” with its real rulers the modernizing commoners and the ancient nobodies merely for show. Republics are built upon equality among the orders. This has never been the case in Britain. As Nairn puts it: “No amount of fulmination about the immorality and cost of the system can hide a basic truth: the aristocracy is an expression of mass conservatism… People enjoy the monarchical twaddle, and show very little sign of being robotized or brainwashed.” The upshot is continued deference to nobs. The sort of people who fly into a rage when a lumpenproletarian type jumps a Tube turnstile will in the same breath wax rhapsodic about Elizabeth Windsor: yes ma’am; thank you for your service; three bags full, ma’am.

This rings true. The British working classes have never despised the aristocrats as their continental counterparts did. Here, as in sub-Saharan Africa and the subcontinent, deference to bigwigs remains the default mode. Britain’s peculiar solidarity is inverted: high and low are united in despising the middle — with its associations of thrift and moderation, education and culture, museums and literature, its self-preening moral seriousness and pseudo-high-mindedness, dedication to an assortment of causes, disdain for such vices as whoring and heroin. As the working-class comedian Billy Connolly put it: “The serious upper class, the proper bigshots, they’re all nuts and they are a great laugh. The working class are all fucking nuts as well and they are a great laugh. It’s just the middle that sucks.”

It’s fun to épater la bourgeoisie, no doubt, but the worldview has consequences. Britain today suffers the highest homelessness rates in the Western world, the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe, and a public realm in visible decrepitude — drafty homes, leaky plumbing, collapsing trains, a health service on life support. We tolerate this partly because our culture still whispers that some are born to better things. The cult of the aristocracy, and its royal apex, supplies the nation with a pensée unique: a defense of hierarchy, inequality, and indeed decline.

With our love of twee, pomp, and ceremony, we are an anachronistic society, much like the fictional Kakania in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. As Nairn puts it, we live in Ukania — a broken, fractured society held together only by the weak glue of monarchic attachment. Britain’s regions and nations are bound with a royal tint of Ruritanian nostalgia, its protocols and etiquette: misty-eyed guff about past glory, Second World War memorabilia, and endless “yes, ma’ams”. Nations are usually built on a sense of comradeship. Not so in Britain, where a surrogate nationalism has formed around the enchantments of the aristocracy and the Crown — around the “glamour of backwardness”. The Windsor-worshipping queues during Truss’s brief tenure made this plain. It is hard to escape the conclusion that our fascination with the aristocracy has reduced us to a nation of groveling gimps.

My Oxford Year is the story of a fit American with nice teeth and a — gulp — “library fetish”. She inevitably falls for a sexy young don, telling him: “I just love being among those dusty old first editions.” She is, in short, a book girlie. For those spared this Gen-Z trend, that means she sees hardbacks as substitutes for intellectual curiosity; they are material objects to be conspicuously tucked under a cable-knit arm, flashed at sensitive young men, or leafed through with a steaming hot mug of chamomile tea. Bliss!

You’ll have sensed some vitriol here. I won’t conceal it. The other day I was browsing a secondhand bookshop in Manhattan, of course in an entirely unpretentious way. As I scanned the shelves for something thin and cheap to read on the subway, I sensed a change in the air: a floppy-haired poseur slinked in and demanded of the shopkeeper a “first edition of anything by Simone de Beauvoir”. He was surely trying to shag some gender-studies major, but he’d have to wait a little longer; the store was fresh out of The Second Sex. Rats! No, really. This is New York.

I digress. Rest assured that My Oxford Year, which I took the trouble of zooming through, is a hot lot of nonsense. Specifically, it embodies a breathless Anglophilia that reminds me of the plump, bum-bagged tourists who used to shuffle down Broad Street when I was at Oxford, lumbering into Harry Potter-themed shops and brandishing Amexes at perplexed Oxfam volunteers. Netflix succeeds only in flattening the city and its academic life to a collection of patronizing cliches: “That is a serious bit of crumpet,” yelps one student who we are expected to believe is in his early 20s and not, in fact, Norris from Coronation Street in disguise. The sexy don inexplicably drives a silver Aston Martin (UCU strikes where?) and does charmingly British things like hiding from love interests in chip shops and offering students Victoria sponge. When our tiresome protagonists finally start kissing, they do it a lot, particularly when it rains. In one such moment, they lurch into an archway in the Bodleian courtyard, somehow avoiding being brained by the camera of a Chinese tourist.

Suggested reading

How did Oxford become so lame?

By John Maier

All this is washed down with a frothing goblet of dialogic slop. “Poetry can be taught, but really it should be lived,” we hear. “Maybe it’s not the amount of time you spend on earth, maybe it’s what you do with it.” Predictably, given the film was produced by the same sobsmiths who made 2014’s young-adult nightmare The Fault in Our Stars, the love interest is bumped off. No contrition here for the spoiler: watching it was punishment enough. But even a dose of tragedy can’t win round all viewers. I find myself urging the producers to make things interesting, go full Titus: bake him into the Victoria sponge.

Are all fictional Oxfords doomed to flop? An open-top bus tour of recent depictions suggests that, yes, the city has jumped the cinematic shark. The typical Oxford films — Saltburn, The Riot Club, even the sepia-tinged Stephen Hawking flick The Theory of Everything — all portray the city as a mirage of sunny quadrangles, orange lamps in foggy lanes and eccentric, alcoholic tutors. Of course, Oxford can be all these things (the latter most of all), but it is also defined by coffin-sized showers with gritty floors, MDF furniture in brutalist staircases and relentless, Soviet-style JCR meetings steered by the spottiest and most insufferable people you’re ever likely to meet. The outsider longing of many of these films trades in what the cultural critic Paul Fussell called “tourist aesthetics”: viewers crave quaint magic, and so aren’t shown the things that make Oxford decidedly unexceptional. It is, after all, just another university. Accordingly, there are tyrannical student representatives, bird-brained political discussions and clubbers staring, dead-eyed, at the searing light of the McDonald’s menu. Charming, I suppose — but not in a way that Netflix could understand.

Imaginary Oxford is caught in a sort of time warp, where clipped Wodehouse accents warble about titles and country houses, and the university’s defining class dynamics are boiled down to tailcoated bully boys molesting studious girls from t’ North. But go to any college bar and you’ll find that the students who are most chuffed about being at Oxford are invariably the “outsiders” — non-public schoolers; the fey Londoners shipped in from St Paul’s roll their eyes at this “boring” and “small” consolation prize. You’d never catch them in a college puffer; a ratty sweater from Portobello Market will do. Being detectably dazzled by the city marks you out as a yokel.

One recent portrayal that does understand this is the Wadhamite Christopher J. Yates’s The Rabbit Club, a new mystery novel which takes in the true absurdity of Oxford life. In this book, class is structural, ambient and inescapable — but despite centering another young American protagonist, Yates doesn’t reduce it to cricket sweaters and boyish baronets. Instead, we meet a cast of theatrical try-hards who mainly swallow, rather than spit, their privilege. One such character is the deceptively named T-Bone — or rather, Thomas de Beaune, “future fifth Baron of Hoick” and heir to De Beaune’s bank. After summering in Jamaica, T-Bone returns with dreads and public-school patois (“a little sumting from the byar”). Netflix, take note: the most incorrigible poshos are the ones who deny it. A secret society based, I presume, on Piers Gav is the site of “pink and pallid” pigs’ heads — Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton might well make a cameo. The only construction I did not recognize was the posho nature of the society’s organizing committee: the modern-day Piers Gav was infiltrated long ago by a league of mulleted pansexuals who at least do the honor of pretending to be deprived. But, as the novel is set in the Nineties, I’ll let it slide.

Suggested reading

Are you too clever for Oxford?

By Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

Yates approaches the mythos of Oxford in the only way that seems appropriate: by skewering its sacred texts. Brideshead Revisited is said to be a guidebook for wide-eyed first years — the VHS, not the novel, we’re assured — and characters try to be as foppishly eccentric as they might, but beneath the Savile Row shirt the polyester always pokes through. The sense of sweating under grandeur is well wrought: in our Californian character’s eyes, hungover bile vomit, discounted Tesco finds and Scottish people are just as much part of the Oxford experience as gruff porters and casual Latin. Yet they rarely make it into the pantheon of Netflix.

Americans yearn for Old World gravitas. Oxford’s imitators stud the American East Coast, where 18th-century founders laid down flagstone floors and piled pastiche Gothic revival turrets high to create ersatz versions in the Ivy League. Crests, dining halls, tutors: the world was complete in every possible way — every way, that is, except in the presence of the class dynamics which underpin British, and therefore Oxford, life. The next time I suffer through an American in Oxford on screen, I want to see them wade through these tensions. Otherwise, what’s the point?

To any Netflix executive no doubt clinging on to my words, I offer a nugget of wisdom: stop telling British people how quaint we are. Like the “Oxford” hoodies hawked to coachloads of Yanks, it’s cheap, fake tat — and it will never wash well.

But offstage, all is not well. For this Beckham-Peltz alliance, between a footballer’s scion and a billionaire American heiress, has come at the cost of disharmony in the Beckham bloodline. The lore runs deep: what began with a spat between Queen Victoria and her future daughter-in-law over who would design her wedding dress (Nicola opted for custom Valentino over Posh’s own label) has deteriorated into a transatlantic battle of wills, with the eldest Beckham son shunning his father’s 50th birthday celebrations in London for the comforts of LA, a dynastic death blow which has kept the red tops going for weeks. And just before it was announced that David had at last snagged a knighthood, the final flourish in a decades-long hustle to accrue national-treasure status, it emerged that Brooklyn and Nicola had engaged the services of Jenny Afia to stop their PR going into tailspin. That’s Meghan and Harry’s lawyer, if you didn’t know. It seems errant celebrity sons and their Lady Macbeth wives are keeping the bright minds of Lincoln’s Inn in the finest horsehair.

What marks out nearly every player in this psychodrama is a distinctive deficit of flair; David’s brilliance at football is the only spark of talent in that entire extended family — the rest is luck and marketing. Victoria could not sing (roadies would turn her mic off during Spice Girls performances); Brooklyn cannot play football, model, photograph or cook. His younger brothers, Romeo and Cruz, dabble in fashion and music like all the other bottom-set nepo nippers. Nicola Peltz, the daughter of a billionaire, wrote and starred in a film about poverty last year. It was not well received. This clan’s rise to knightly success is purely the work of publicists — and it is this which makes the parable of the prodigal Beckham son in many ways the most telling story of our time.

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For in the Beckhams, we see the revival of the celebrity dynasty, the family as a brand. Like the Medicis before them, they have risen to aristocratic respectability though cynical spin: weddings double as brand mergers (OK! splashed out a record-breaking $1 million to cover Posh and Becks’ wedding), and children are bequeathed dukedoms in the form of little brands and film cameos. Thus the Beckhams reveal the true cost of nepotism: the desecration of skill and value in public life, the disappearance of a celebrity meritocracy where you were expected to be able to sing, dance or otherwise earn your adoration. They are little better than A-list Machiavels like the Kardashians or Molly-Mae Hague, who are simply “famous for being famous”. In such a world, the eldest Beckham child is cursed with an empty empire; he has been given the stand — riches, attention, business backers — but he has absolutely nothing to say.

The new royal court in which Brooklyn wages war is as ritualistic and rotten as any before it: there is confession (Brooklyn is rumored to be concocting a tell-all memoir of his eventless 26 years so far, in the style of Prince Harry’s Spare), portraiture (carefully choreographed dynastic lineups with out-of-favor members pointedly absent), assassination (deadly press briefings), succession (the careful delegation of nepo gigs), and exile (Brooklyn to Beverly Hills, away from his family’s newly settled kingdom — the Cotswolds).

Brooklyn’s conduct towards his parents, much like Prince Harry’s, reveals a vacuum of character which exposes the unfairness of undeserved fame: all the set-dressing and charitable works in the world cannot distract from the fact that we have allowed the wrong people to become famous. The parallel with the prince doesn’t stop there: the Peltz-Beckhams and the Sussexes are said to have held an exiled-son summit in Montecito. What outrages us about these two hit dogs, Brooklyn and Harry, is that despite all the privilege imaginable they dared to complain, driven by horridly un-American concerns like “boundaries” and “their truth”. The last resort of the overtherapized offspring, going “no contact” with one’s family, has reportedly now been taken by Brooklyn — a telling echo of “Megxit” apparently steered by Nicola, another slightly older American bride viewed with suspicion by the British public.

Yet the British public isn’t exactly team Becks either: part of our contempt for Brooklyn derives from disdain for his parents, and their own meteoric rise. Many still see them as arriviste; it was not long ago that Victoria had a spiky bob and bulletproof breast implants, and David has at great pains shaken off his once-mocked Chingford accent. This couple has undeniably made it — David is guest-editing none other than Country Life in October, with flat caps, tweeds and spaniels guaranteed to erase any memory of his bleached Nineties curtains; they have also made it easy for their children to follow suit.

But Brooklyn has so far floundered, going through something of a career identity crisis in the process. The footballer-cum-model-cum-photographer-cum-chef’s latest venture, a hot-sauce brand called Cloud 23, has been beset by trademark disputes — but his bigger problem is the mishandling of his personal brand, the ultimate selling point for anyone in the food aisle frowning over a celebrity product. Whereas David somehow cobbled together an aura of sophistication convincing enough to flog Haig Club whisky, it would be difficult to swallow a glob of Cloud 23 without imagining Brooklyn smirking in an apron.

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In the absence of talent or wit, Brooklyn must self-publicize relentlessly to retain his birthright. This is about vanity, yes — but also money. For the Beckham clan is also the Beckham conglomerate, in which children are spin-offs, subsidiaries, each expected to perform value for the business empire. In Brand Beckham, Victoria is the creative director; David is the legacy label. Brooklyn is the floundering prototype, launched too early. Romeo and Cruz are R&D projects, constantly retooled until the right note is hit. Harper, just 13, is a publicist’s dream: the only girl, she is primed for singing or modeling or, later down the line, a marriage alliance.

David and Victoria, for whom playing nice isn’t showing results, need only wait for their mutinous son’s bid for independence to fall on its face. Any attempt at freedom is cursed; this family has produced chicks with wings already clipped. Brand Beckham is too big to fail, and will crush any struggling subsidiaries.

Whether he realizes it or not, Brooklyn is doomed to lose the Battle of the Beckhams. He is destined to be a leisure prince, but through some misguided sense of his own value has instead been larping purpose which, owing to his privilege, he has never needed and is now too old to acquire. But this troubled son must soon accept that his inheritance is simply equity in his parents’ brand: his fame is not a reward for excellence. Get off the motorbike, get on a plane, and tell your mom and dad you’re sorry, Brooklyn. After all, who on earth would you be without them?

Every football fan will tell you that their stadium is a special place. But in an era when the Premier League is dominated by Gulf petrostates, American billionaires and sportswashing autocracies, the 133-year-old Goodison Park stands out. Its old wooden seats and rickety stands, thronging with an aggressive Scouse crowd, distill the mood of a world-gone-by, a throwback, a museum-piece of an old game and an older culture.

The Grand Old Lady juts suddenly upwards from a sea of low-rise, red-brick Victorian terraces. The match-day turnstiles adjoin narrow residential streets, drawing fans into blue-tinged, cramped urban corridors and tunnel-like choke points around strip-lit bars where passing pedestrians jostle with smokers drinking out of plastic cups and Elton John covers belt out of the speakers. Goodison has the highest proportion of season ticket holders as match-day attendees in the league, meaning the crowds are still made up mainly of locals who go to every home game, often down several, usually patrilineal, generations.

The walk to a home game induces a feeling of old-time coziness, like entering a Lowry print — a portal to a different age which doesn’t end inside the ground. We Toffees still welcome a “Toffee Girl” in milkmaid fancy dress to throw sweets into the crowd on match-days as part of an old club tradition. Navigating most of the four stands involves narrow caverns, with fans crammed like sardines towards laughably outdated bars with only a small hope of being served a warm lager or a Bovril before the second half.

But no more. The stands will fall silent for the last time on Sunday after a final match against Southampton — at least until the promised move of Everton’s women’s team gives the ground a renewed feel, and a new, much-welcome but probably more subdued lease of life. Having spent almost a decade under the disastrous stewardship of an Iranian oil magnate, who many said to have been the pawn of a sanctioned Russian oligarch, the club will move to a brand new stadium on the Liverpool waterfront under new ownership in time for the 2025-26 season.

For a while, Everton FC has been as integrated into the globalized, contemporary cash nexus as any other top-flight club, just without being particularly good at operating this new, transnational business model to its advantage. Rather than building patiently upwards with sensible signings of unknown talent from far afield, the boardroom cowboys attempted to short-circuit the game via botched investments in overpriced and aging players, not to mention a superstar manager tasked with leapfrogging us to success. All the while, the structures of the club were corrosively undermined as the owner involved himself in transfer business over the heads of coaches and directors of football. But now, we have just been bought by a film mogul. Dan Friedkin, the new owner, was also Tom Hardy’s Dunkirk stunt pilot, and so will be familiar with our habit of spinning certain inglorious episodes as evidence of the superior spirit of plucky warriors turning things around against the odds.

Any yet, despite the club’s obvious assimilation into all the sullied, pecuniary culture of today’s footballing elite, Everton somehow manages to exude the aura of a scrappy David against cooler, modern Goliaths. We have nine historic first division titles to our name, more than “Big Six” global mega-brands Chelsea and Tottenham put together. But it’s been a while since Everton won any silverware — an FA Cup three decades ago, and no first division title since 1987.

The biggest eruption of Evertonian roars I can remember have been for last-minute winners, the occasional derby victory, or riotous scenes in the midst of ugly relegation dog-fights. Not, alas, for lifting trophies. But any lower-league supporter will be able to attest that these moments of joy are felt just as viscerally, just as intensely, as the lifting of a silver cup at the apex of the football pyramid.

When my dad watched Everton as a young man, he saw plenty of that. We were even known as the “School of Science”, for our progressive, cutting-edge style of play. It was the Guardiola-ball of its time. With honorable, short-lived exceptions, for most of my life a more recent moniker has seemed more apt: the Dogs of War. What we lack in finesse, artistry and star power has been amply compensated for in effort expended and dogged determination. Some likened the approach of our last manager to “Brexit-ball”, meaning defensive, stubborn, not pretty, with lots of long balls reminiscent of the traditional English game.

It’s no accident that two of the biggest “club legends” of recent years, the embodiments of the Everton spirit, have been Séamus Coleman — a long-serving, passionate Irishman bought from Sligo Rovers for the wild sum of £60,000; and Duncan Ferguson — the only man to have been jailed for a foul committed on a football pitch, who famously “filled in” two burglars who had broken into his house in the heyday of his playing career.

A lot of the Evertonian self-image built up over 30 years of hurt is down to the relative success of a strange group of upstarts based just a mile from Goodison, in the same postcode in fact. Readers may have heard of them — Liverpool FC (the junior team in the city by 14 years compared with us, original founders of the football league). And they have just been crowned champions. No matter: their victory will provide much-needed tourist income for a cash-strapped local economy on Merseyside. It’s a matter of real-life poetic justice that our final local derby in Goodison ended as a 2-2 draw after a 98th-minute equalizer from Everton’s big, six-foot, northern English defender who joined the club on a free transfer, prompting scenes of insane, blue bacchanalia.

But the rivalry between the two clubs almost reflects the Janus face of the city itself: Liverpool — brash, swaggering, sharp, bolshie; and Everton — the perennial underdogs, down-on-their-luck, forever gritty, embittered, aggrieved, and ready to argue, with a chip on both shoulders. If Liverpool’s Anfield draws in visitors from across the world for a glimpse of some melodic chanting and Scouse braggadocio, then Goodison is more associated with the atmosphere of a bear pit, full to the brim with naked aggression interspersed with moments of glorious, reckless, chaotic abandon.

For the three previous seasons we have flirted haphazardly with dropping to the second tier, circling the plughole, like the turd that won’t flush. No other team has spent as long in the top flight as Everton. Leaving it would destroy us, a final nail in the coffin; a last, humiliating deflation after years watching the slow, painful decline of a former giant turned garden gnome.

It’s been a harrowing, sorry saga that has removed cumulative millennia off the life expectancy of tens of thousands of Evertonians through nervous exhaustion. Now, as we await a new stadium, many hope we are turning a corner. But our move begs the question: who are we without Goodison Park? Goodison is Everton. Everton is Goodison. How will we adapt to life apart when so much of our own collective Everton ego is wrapped up in the walls of a big blue behemoth among some of the most deprived streets in northern England?

If Goodison Park represents a time capsule, a monument to the old version of the working-man’s game and proletarian nostalgia, the new stadia have adopted built environments that reflect the spirit of the modern sport: more open, more anonymous, more accessible, inclusive, infinitely better but infinitely worse, an almost computer-generated aesthetic with a big gift-shop ready; day-trippers first, “legacy fans” second. What does it profit a fan if he gains a trophy, but sells his soul? Maybe, just maybe, we’ll find out.

But make no mistake, for all the incongruity of a place like Goodison in the modern age, something priceless, something important, something rooted in the relationship between people, history and place, is now lost forever.

Despite living with this linguistic diversity, the British are astoundingly bad at identifying accents, not to speak of imitating them. They can usually spot a Scot or a Cockney but are hopelessly at sea when it comes to the subtle distinctions between Manchester and Leeds. Everyone knows that that a series of richly rolled r’s and z sounds indicates the West Country, but not many people know that the natives of Ulster call children “weans” and say “What’s strange?”, meaning “What’s new?” They also have a unique form of intonation which makes it sound as though they’re always complaining, which some years ago during the Troubles they usually were.

If the British accent is a myth, so is a working-class one. There’s no distinctively working-class way of speaking in Britain. It’s rather that working people tend to speak with the accent of their region, whereas the middle classes tend to speak Standard English, which is common to all parts of the country. Even so, the grip of Standard or BBC English is loosening, and along with it ideas of correct or “educated” speech which have been with us at least since the 18th century.

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The effect of this is hard to overestimate. Over the centuries, millions of British people have been brought up to believe that their way of talking was improper. Since most of the people around them spoke improperly too, this didn’t matter much of the time; but it meant, for example, that people would think twice before asking them to read out a poem or give a brief speech at a wedding. Language is power, but the great majority of men and women had to make do with a second-class form of power, one contaminated by a verbal virus known as an accent.

This assumes that there are people who speak without an accent, which is as absurd as supposing that one could speak without vocal cords. The fact is that there is no such thing as an accentless form of speech, any more than there is a non-specific way of walking. An accent simply means a particular way of pronouncing a language, and Queen Camilla’s way is quite as particular as Katie Price’s. But there are styles of pronunciation which are socially acceptable and others which are not. The problem is that acceptability is entirely relative. It’s probable that a well-educated late 18th-century gentleman would have pronounced “Duke” as “Dook”, “obliging” as “obleegin”, and “cup of tea” as “coop of tay”. It’s unlikely that he would get to read the TV news if he was around today.

Standard English itself grew out of a regional dialect, roughly the area containing the key centers of London, Oxford and Cambridge. It was part of a strikingly successful attempt by a rising middle class to consolidate its cultural power. Just as they needed a common currency, so they needed a shared way of speaking by which they could recognize each another instantly, without going to the trouble of inventing a secret handshake or wearing a old school tie. “A pat on the back” now sounded like “a pet on the beck”, while “barth”, which was once amusingly rustic, was now polite usage for “bath”. “Really” came to sound like “rarely”, though the two can almost be opposites (as in “I really/rarely enjoy dancing”), and in Sloanish circles “It’s my birthday” became hard to distinguish from “It’s my bathday”, suggesting that you took a bath only once a year.

There are also variations in volume. Generally speaking, people get louder as you travel from Brighton to Lancaster, and there’s a myth in Northern Ireland that Protestants speak louder than Catholics. Some of the public school boys I encountered as a student at Cambridge in the early Sixties seemed to bray rather than speak. This was because only oiks like myself were anxious about other people overhearing their conversation, whereas those with true social authority didn’t give a toss. I was once sitting in a Cambridge hairdresser’s along with a dozen or so other customers when a large young man in cravat, hacking jacket and knee-high boots put his head round the door and bellowed to the barber “Johnnies, Albert!” (“Johnnies” meant condoms in those days.) It’s true that barber’s shops were one of the few places where you could buy such goods in those sexually repressed times, but the transaction was usually hushed and furtive, like buying hard drugs today. There was nothing hushed and furtive about the Right Honourables who swaggered along King’s Parade and hooted in cinemas at the feeblest joke.

It wasn’t long, however, before these young men would be fit meat for the satire of Monty Python. In the post-Beatles era, some ex-public school students at Oxbridge began to roughen up their accents, talk down their noses, and even introduce the odd glottal stop into their speech, as in “ta’oo” for “tattoo”. Old Etonians with orange hair and silver nose rings began to make their appearance among the dreaming spires. Anyone who addressed you with a cheery “Ow yer doin’, mate?” was almost certainly from Harrow or Winchester. Rishi Sunak slurs a little when speaking to ordinary people (you expect him suddenly to whip out a flat cap), just as Harold Wilson’s style of speech became more Yorkshire the further north he traveled. Prince William and Prince Harry speak like regular guys, whereas their father does not.

It’s all a far cry from the encounter between Oliver and the Artful Dodger in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Alone and tearful in London, Oliver runs into a “snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy” who says “Hullo, my covey, what’s the row” to which Oliver replies “I am very hungry and tired. I have walked a long way, I have been walking these seven days”. It’s hard to know how someone brought up in a workhouse can produce this impeccable piece of Standard English, but there’s a Victorian literary convention which holds that virtuous people tend to speak in this cultivated style. Oliver turns out to be of genteel birth, so perhaps his posh English is genetically determined. You can’t have a hero who drops his aitches, any more than you can have an archbishop who drops his trousers. Moral and linguistic propriety go hand in hand. A gentleman has both good morals and good manners, the latter reflecting the former. As in the novels of Jane Austen, problems arise when someone is socially a gentleman but morally a total bastard.

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A good deal of British humor springs from quick changes of linguistic register. Legendary comedians like Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, and Kenneth Williams all trade in abrupt shifts from the tones of the civilized middle classes to a blunter, more popular idiom. A pretentious flight of fantasy is punctured by a sudden crude or mundane comment. Taking poshness down a peg or two is a familiar British pastime, one that reflects the nation’s fondness for self-deprecation, but it’s particularly striking when the refined and the rough-spoken are combined in the same person. What marks the British sensibility isn’t so much pathos as bathos — sudden swoopings from high to low, all of which depend on an acute sense of the way language is bound up with rank and authority.

Speech divides as well as unites: if they haven’t heard you properly, the working class say “ay?”, the lower-middle class say “pardon?”, the middle class say “sorry?” and the upper class say “what?” In their slovenly way, the upper class are also supposed to say huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, which suggests that they’re as indolent in their speech habits as they are in most other things. The effort of pronouncing consonants is simply too exhausting for them, and can be left to their gamekeepers. Military speech, by contrast, is traditionally clipped and precise, as though everything you say takes the form of a command. Its briskness is also meant to dispel emotion, which can get in the way of killing people. It’s hard to tell someone you love them, or ask them to pass the salt, in the tones of the late Lord Montgomery.

Even so, some kind of Standard English will probably survive as long as the so-called public schools do. Most governing classes in history have educated their children apart from the common people, and teaching them a distinctive way of speaking, or even in some cases a different language altogether, has traditionally been part of that privilege. What kind of distinctive speech doesn’t matter: it might well have come about by some historical quirk that the idiom of urban Lancashire became socially dominant, so that the King would speak like Liam Gallagher and call Prince Andrew “our kid”. In that case, one would probably also come across dissident Oxbridge students with silver nose rings who sounded for all the world like David Dimbleby.

The amount of wealth hoarded by Russian businessmen is staggering. Forbes estimates Akhmedov’s 2025 net worth at $1.6 billion. To put that into perspective, imagine an immortal being, perhaps a vampire, traveling to the New World with Christopher Columbus in 1492. Every day since then, the vampire somehow acquires the equivalent of 1,000 contemporary American dollars. He never spends any of it. Perhaps he just stacks the money in coffins. The vampire will become a millionaire by sometime in 1495. In 2025, though, he’ll still be less than a fifth of the way to having a billion dollars.

Akhmedov is clearly very wealthy. Yet if he were an American, he wouldn’t even make it into the list of the 400 wealthiest US citizens. Why, then, does Russia have “oligarchs” while America apparently only has rich people?

Occasionally, Bernie Sanders will use the o-word to describe people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, each of whom have hundreds of times the net worth of Farkhad Akhmedov. When this happens, the most common rebuttal is that Russian oligarchs typically owe their wealth (at least in part) to their political connections, whereas American billionaires became wealthy through the power of the free market.

It’s true that plenty of Russian oligarchs owe much of their wealth to a particularly brazen form of corruption. In the Soviet era, economic resources were, in theory, the collective property of the whole population, though in practice they were controlled by an unaccountable state bureaucracy. After the collapse of the USSR, no one asked the Russian people whether they wanted to enter an era of capitalism or experiment with some form of democratic socialism instead. There was no popular referendum on whether to privatize public assets. Instead, in many cases, canny bureaucrats simply turned state enterprises into their own private fiefdoms, while the population at large underwent economic shock therapy.

There are three big problems, however, with the idea that America’s ultra-wealthy capitalists aren’t oligarchs because they made their fortunes the “right way”: in the private sector. The first is that the distinction between the two systems is less clear than it might seem at a quick glance. In post-Soviet Russia, private-sector actors grew astoundingly rich off the state, as one economic order was surpassed by another. But many ultra-rich Americans also benefit plenty from political connections, and none of them are too proud to accept government handouts.

The richest man in the United States, Elon Musk, has earned tens of billions of dollars directly from government contracts. That’s many times more than the total wealth of a typical Russian “oligarch”. And that’s not to mention SpaceX and Tesla, which, as Chris Isidore writes, both “got started” (and “survived their early days”) thanks to assistance from state and federal policies, government contracts and loans. That’s the foundation on which Musk’s fortune was built.

More generally, the American tech sector, often celebrated as a powerhouse of private-sector innovation — and certainly the source of a great many billionaires — has benefited dramatically from the blurred lines between private wealth and state policy. The only TED talk I ever recommend that people watch is one by the economist Mariana Mazzucato, who goes through the components of an iPhone one by one and discusses where they come from. Pretty much everything that makes a smartphone “smart”, from the GPS to the touchscreen to Siri to the internet itself, stems from public-sector innovation. The breakthroughs happened in the Department of Defense or in public universities or via researchers in labs funded by grants from the federal government. In a less explicit way than the Russian oligarchs, America’s tech oligarchs have found ways to convert state investment into private profits.

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The second and deeper problem with the denial of American oligarchy is that an oligarch isn’t just someone who gets rich the wrong way. “Oligarchy” is government by a small group of powerful individuals. What makes someone an oligarch is that they exercise great power, not that they benefit from association with those who do.

The power of American plutocrats plays out on multiple levels. First and most obviously, American business magnates have direct power over the lives of vast numbers of employees. Musk or Bezos can replace any particular Tesla or Amazon worker far more easily than that worker can replace the source of their livelihood, and so these men run their businesses like miniature dictatorships. This economic power translates in turn into massively disproportionate political influence.

These days, in fact, America’s billionaire corporate overlords exercise more oligarchic power over the political process than their counterparts in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. As Larson writes, when Vladimir Putin consolidated his personal rule, his “mandate was to bring” the oligarchs “back under control”. The informal “entente” held that Russia’s ultra-rich would scale back their interference with politics, and not “complain too much when Putin’s state locked up political opponents”. In exchange, a more stable regime would secure their property and wealth.

American oligarchs have made no such compromise. When Musk is mad about a potential spending deal in Congress, for example, he can spend all day rage-posting about it on X, and explicitly threaten to finance primary challenges against any Republican congressmen who votes for the deal. Few politicians would dare ignore such a threat. Even the billionaire who currently serves as President of the United States hesitates to butt heads too directly with Musk on contentious issues. After all, Musk’s riches put Trump in the White House. Compared to Musk’s $455 billion, Trump’s fortune of $6.61 billion is almost cute.

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Nor are the oligarchs confined to the Republican side of the aisle. Kamala Harris had 83 billionaires donating to her campaign. According to a report from Americans for Tax Fairness, Harris received $143 million in billionaire donations — though this looks modest compared to Trump’s $450 million. Even so, those 83 billionaires would almost certainly have exercised real political influence in a Harris administration.

The relentless concentration of private wealth, and with it the political influence of the wealthy, has metastasized in recent decades under Republican and Democrat presidents alike. American oligarchs have shot into the financial stratosphere, at least in part, due to the decades of market-fundamentalist public policy first popularized by Ronald Reagan but continued by the likes of Bill Clinton (who gave us Nafta and a grimly Dickensian “welfare reform”) and Barack Obama (who responded to the 2008 crash by bailing out banks and leaving homeowners underwater). Even Trump, who campaigned as a “populist”, spent much of his first term pushing lower taxes for the wealthy and slashing the regulatory state. And the somnolent administration of Joe Biden wasn’t prepared to reverse this trend.

If this process has been slower and less dramatic than the birth of the Russian oligarchs at the close of the Soviet era, its results have been far more striking. Four Americans (Musk, Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison) are expected to become trillionaires within the next five years. And following a decades-long, highly effective business offensive against union organizing, the vast majority of American workers are unorganized. America’s labor laws are vastly less favorable to union organizing than regulatory regimes in otherwise comparable nations. “Sympathy strikes”, for example, where one group of workers joins a strike to help another win their demands, are illegal. But it is perfectly legal to “permanently replace” striking workers. This leaves us with no political force that could meaningfully stand up to the power of America’s oligarchs.

We could at least start by acknowledging that American oligarchs exist. It is an act of moral evasion to insist on using morally neutral terms to describe “very rich” Americans while we call their comparatively poor cousins in hostile nations “oligarchs”. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step is admitting that you have a problem.

In truth, though, I think the speech matters. For in its populist appeal to Main Street over Wall Street, it reflects the revival of something we haven’t seen in years: class politics. Rather than appealing to racial subgroups, or sex or gender identity, Biden instead spoke, however fleetingly, to those many millions of Americans who care more about their paychecks than the color of their skin.

Nor, of course, is the 46th president alone. Increasingly, both main parties realize that to win at the ballot box, they must appeal to the middle- and working classes, as proven by Trump’s roughly 10-point lead among those two-thirds of Americans without a college degree. Yet, if that speaks vividly to radical shifts across US socioeconomic makeup, it remains unclear if politicians on either side of the aisle are truly willing to back blue-collar workers — especially when the oligarchs continue to have such a grip over them all.

For all Biden’s warnings about oligarchy, the elite did very well during his tenure. Consider the numbers, with the wealthiest Americans increasing their collective net worth by a remarkable one trillion dollars over his time in office. The monopolists, for their part, have been generous in their turn. In 2020, to give one example, Biden received 25 times as much funding from tech companies than Trump, and over three times as much from Wall Street. Among electronics manufacturing firms, many of whom build their products outside the country, the margin was a remarkable $68 million to $4 million.

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All the while, American business continued to consolidate, just as it has for a generation. The Review of Finance notes that three quarters of industry has become more concentrated since the late Nineties. This has been most notable across finance, where big banks have doubled their market share since 2000. The same is true elsewhere: a coterie of tech firms now account for a record 35% of market cap. No wonder only 22% of Americans were optimistic about the economy by the end of Biden’s term, even as confidence in his economic leadership had fallen to just 40%.

Taken together, then, Biden’s fall stemmed from an enormous miscalculation. Elected as a moderate, he ignored polls that suggested most Americans were more concerned with their economic prospects than issues like climate change and foreign affairs, let alone social justice manias around trans rights. Nonetheless, the Democrats followed the lead of their oligarchic funders, many of whose biggest contributions have been focused on exactly these side issues.

When the election came, no wonder so many blue collar Americans tried their luck with Trump: including a remarkable number of minority voters. Once again, the statistics here are clear, with 40% of Asians voting for him, well above the 30% in 2020, even as some African Americans headed to the GOP as well. Blue-collar Latinos went heavily for Trump too. The point is that this realignment largely happened on economic grounds, with minorities ignoring Trump’s past litany of racist comments because he offered them a more expansive economy, particularly in blue collar professions. All the while, they saw little promise in the tsunami of promises offered by Harris and her bozo vice-presidential partner Tim Walz. Knowing a winner when they see one, America’s billionaires duly came out for the Republicans too. That included Elon Musk, of course, but also prominent investment bankers like Bill Ackman.

Taken together, what does this revolution show? That class and economics now play a greater role in American politics than skin color or national origin. If you want to secure minority voters, the new President clearly understands, you appeal to them not as identity groups but as individual people, and families, looking out for their own self-interest. Nor is this really revelatory. America’s working-class remains more aspirational than those in other Western countries. That’s equally true of non-white voters, many of whom appreciate that the politics of race is an impediment to the American Dream. Most of the middle-income people who lately lost their homes to fire, in the minority LA suburb of Altadena, hardly benefited from a city government more obsessed with race and gender than protecting property. No less telling, Democratic policies on water and climate have created what attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls a “green Jim Crow” — where working-class minorities face increasing headwinds in terms of jobs and housing.

This matters: and not just morally. Minorities, after all, encompass over 40% of working class Americans, and will constitute the majority by 2032. To win back the White House, then, Democrats will need to ditch all their woke baggage and focus on addressing the everyday concerns of working-class people, especially the non-white variety. In practice, that’ll involve focusing on bread-and-butter issues. When it comes to education, for instance, this could include expanding charter schools, or else developing skill academies for well-paid blue-collar jobs. When it comes to crime, meanwhile, just enforcing the law would help. That’s clearly a novel idea for some progressives, but would have a real impact on the security of inner cities.

Rhetorically speaking, the Democrats also have that new pro-Trump oligarchy to fall back on, with progressives like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez increasingly railing against a corrupt cabal of kleptocrats goose-stepping America towards fascism. Never mind that Democrats didn’t seem concerned when the tech elite marched in lockstep with Biden four years ago. (Probably the more egregious hypocrite here is Chuck Schumer, who tried to reposition himself as an anti-oligarch radical despite serving as an unofficial consigliere for varied Wall Street ghouls).

At any rate, how likely is it that the Democrats can change course? Backing such things as legalized drug injection sites near schools, as just happened in deep-blue Denver, suggests that not all progressives are ready to take the plunge just yet. As they face the reality of working-class desertions, in fact, the progressive wing of the party will likely move even further to the Left. People like AOC already don’t distinguish between “good” billionaires and “bad” ones. They just think billionaires shouldn’t exist at all, even as they push for even more redistribution, a program that ultimately looks suspiciously like American Peronism. It hardly helps, of course, that the loudest proponents of radical economic change are often the very same Democrats pushing for unpopular shifts on transgenderism or reparations.

An arguably even bigger problem for liberals is that, their new populist guise notwithstanding, they’re still reliant on many of the oligarchs that Biden now denounces. That’s clear enough in the figures. The Elons of the world have kissed Donald Trump’s greasy ring, but when it comes to “dark money” from the ultra rich, Democrats have tended to be greater recipients. Just as important, the Democrats have become so dependent on affluent professionals, including across the vast government apparatus, making any appeal for redistribution tricky. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, has explicitly said Democrats should avoid “true economic populism” because it “is bad for our high-income base.”

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The Trumpistas face a different class challenge: though one where those troublesome oligarchs still feature heavily. Having won over much of the middle- and working-classes, gaining even in outer borough New York, they now have to find a way to build a common agenda with the billionaires. The recent brouhaha over H1-B visas — essentially allowing for the import of temporary tech workers — revealed the gap between an oligarchic elite addicted to procuring cheap foreign labor and those countless Americans who might want such jobs for themselves or their offspring.

One thing is certain: most oligarchs are not social democrats. Rather than a competitive economy, they represent what Aldous Huxley called “a scientific caste system” where the highly credentialed and technologically dominant have almost total reign. Artificial intelligence, the crack cocaine of the digital age, will accelerate this process, eliminating both high- and low-paid jobs, as power gravitates to those who control the algorithms. This new aristocracy, whatever its current political affiliation, already regards itself as intrinsically more deserving of their wealth and power than the old managerial elites, let alone grubby corporate speculators. Coming from the ADD tech world, they tend, if anything, to be more followers of Ayn Rand than any populist theoretician.

Trump’s dilemma, in short, will be how to please these nabobs while preserving his working-class base. Expect continued battles between populists — including JD Vance and Josh Hawley — and more libertarian, profit-driven Trump whisperers. In particular, expect conflict over Social Security, which Trump has pledged to preserve, and tariffs, despised by most libertarians and their billionaire funders. Then again, in a land where class is king, such bickering is surely to be expected.

Dear Mother and Father,

Shame you can’t congratulate me. I am, I know, a disappointment to you. You hoped I would follow in your footsteps and become a literary critic or expositor of abstruse texts. Instead, I stand before you as winner of the 2025 Paddy Power World Darts Championship, for which the prize-money far exceeds all you’ve earned from the 22 books you’ve written together over the course of 40 years. I don’t gloat. I seek only your approval and your love. Millions of adoring fans around the world applaud my skills and call my name — Frederick “Fatboy” De Selincourt — but you hang your heads in shame every time I enter the arena to Morrisey’s You’re the One for Me, Fatty. I have dedicated every nine dart finish I’ve ever thrown to you, yet still you disown me.

Where did it all go wrong, you ask. Well, the answer to that is straightforward. It went wrong when you, daddy, saw me plucking feathers from my cot pillow and throwing them at mummy. “I’ll buy the boy a set of plastic darts,” you said in an unlikely fit of populism. I remain surprised that you even knew where to buy darts from. Didn’t you once say you only ever shopped at Foyles. “And don’t forget a dartboard,” mummy said, out of concern for the furniture.

Do I need to remind you that I threw my first maximum from the pram and regularly hit nine dart finishes before I could walk. “One hundred and eighty!” were the first words I ever spoke. You could have stopped me then but you were too busy touring Third World universities for the British Council. Faute de mieux, I became a darts player on the altar of your careers. When I told you I was to be apprenticed to Jocky Wilson you raised no objection, thinking horse riding — while not exactly the career you’d wanted for me — at least opened doors to a better class of person than I was ever likely encounter in the Ally Pally.

For 18 months I sharpened Jocky’s arrows and fluffed his feathers and for a further 18 sat at the oche to watch where he placed his feet as he threw. I know what you’re thinking, but had those been Nureyev’s feet you’d have applauded the conscientiousness of my studies. But what’s the difference?  Is not excellence excellence? When people refuse to call darts a sport or even an art because — they say — it amounts to no more than chucking a primitive missile at a narrow strip of sisal fibre, I remind them of Jane Austen’s description of writing as painting with a fine brush on two inches of ivory. How often did you read me that passage when I was growing up! How well I remember you arguing with each other about its applicability to Jane Austen’s prose at its best. You scoffed at me when I said I believed Jane Austen played darts with her sister Cassandra in the garden of the Austen house at Chawton. But could she have described those two inches of ivory had she not been familiar with that narrow band of dartboard in which I earn my living? How many maximums did Jane Austen throw? Which was her double of choice? Those are discussions for another time.

Let’s not argue about nomenclature — sport or art or neither, darts enable the human spirit to achieve greatness not by spraying grand gestures around but by fixing on a fine detail of existence and concentrating all its fire power there. Jane Austen or Tolstoy? Your preference was always for Jane Austen. As is mine. You can keep your Olympics and your Test Matches and your Cup Finals. Give me darts at the Alexandra Palace any time. Precisely because of their smallness, those tiny treble bands on a dartboard are more challenging to creativity than a wicket, a goalmouth or a finishing line. Or the Battle of Borodino, come to that.

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You have commented over the years on my adiposity. How can a pair of fleshless neurasthenics such as you, who chew their fingers to the bone for art’s sake, have produced someone my size? Eat less, you have pleaded. Exercise more, you say, forgetting how many miles I walk every day from the oche to the dartboard and back. My dear mother and father, do not think I am fat because I am indolent or because I cannot say no to cakes and ale. I am fat because I love darts.

You don’t need me to tell you that Julius Caesar wanted men about him that were fat. “Sleek-headed men” he feared because they thought too much. Sleek-headed men, for that very reason, make poor darts players. There comes a moment in the life of every darts player when he loses his instinctive rhythm, cannot remember how he throws, how tightly he holds his darts, how much flight he gives them.  Many a promising career has ended that way.  Had listened to you, I would not be Champion of the World today. Let a darts player lose his insouciance and he’s finished. And whoever saw an insouciant thin man?

Our bulk belies our subtlety. More than that: our bulk is integral to our subtlety. Some law of nature decrees that for one dart to follow another into those two inches of darting ivory which determine the difference between success and failure, between genius and mediocrity, they must be thrown by fat men. You cannot think darts into a treble or a bullseye. You dare not pause long enough to give reflection a sniff. You must throw with a sort of cultivated disdain that is not given to the thin.

If only, my dear parents, you had snatched enough time from your cerebral labours to watch a game of darts. Actually watched one. You would, had you done so, I am sure, have marvelled at the contrast between the overflowing physical abundance of the man throwing and the refined and dainty precision with which he throws. It is a contrast at once aesthetically satisfying and philosophically baffling. How can it be? See an arrow fly in slow motion, see how much it arches and how far it deviates, and it is a miracle it ever finds its target. Would you not imagine the thrower of such a missile to be a person of near supernatural exactitude? And now look who he is!; ‘Tis I, your clumsy and in all other regards bumbling and maladroit son.

The crowd who cheer me don’t bother their heads with any of that. They pour beer down their throats and sing Stand up if You Love the Darts. But you, mother and father, aficionados of art in all mysterious manifestations, are just the people to understand dart’s artistry and yet, out of small-minded snobbery, you look away. And so you miss the marvel and the rare beauty of it. A cheetah can run, a tiger burns bright in the forests of the night, but only your fat, clumsy son can, without raising a sweat, hit a treble-20 from eight feet away whenever he wants to.

Shame you aren’t here to see me lift the trophy.

Your loving son and Champion of the World,

“The Fatboy”

Adapted from Howard Jacobson’s substack, Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson.

Suspended and disgraced, the host’s future already seems in doubt, especially now that several other women have accused Wallace of unseemly sexual conduct. Yet if he’s since apologised, albeit partially, what’s striking is less his vulgarity — and more the eagerness of powerful men to blame women for their own misconduct, relying on cynical class justifications as they go.

Though the scandal is only a few days old, it seems clear that Wallace has form in the crassness department. Quite apart from the “tart” innuendo, 13 other people have accused him of inappropriate behaviour, including senior BBC presenter Kirsty Wark. At one point, Wallace allegedly talked openly about his sex life. Elsewhere, he apparently took his top off in front of a female worker, saying he wanted to “give her a fashion show”.

Wallace’s conduct for other channels is also being scrutinised. During the filming of one Channel 5 series, a female co-worker claims he often made inappropriate sexual comments, including discussing spanking and domination.

These allegations aren’t exactly surprising. If true, Wallace would only be the latest male celebrity to treat female colleagues with disdain. Yet whatever the truth — and investigations have been launched — I’m most struck by his defence. “In the newspapers, I can see the complaints coming from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age, just from Celebrity MasterChef,” is how he put it on Instagram. “This isn’t right.”

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And though he’s since abandoned that line, Wallace’s apology for the apology doesn’t feel much better. “I wasn’t in a good head space when I posted it,” he said of the original video. “I’ve been under a huge amount of stress, a lot of emotion, I felt very alone, under siege, yesterday, when I posted it.”

It’s clear, at any rate, that Wallace basically sees himself not as an abuser, but as an innocent victim. He isn’t alone either. “Fuck it, someone has to say it,” intervened proud anti-feminist Brendan O’Neill. “There has been more liberal media fury over Gregg Wallace telling Kirsty Wark a dirty joke than there ever was over the years-long violation of white working-class girls by grooming gangs.”

Beyond the self-pitying tone, what unites both Wallace and O’Neill is their reference to class. Wallace, certainly, has always liked to portray himself as a man of the people, a cheeky chappy from Peckham who left school at 15. No less striking, the presenter has often played up this disreputable image. He’s freely admitted to “clumping” people: in 2013, around the same time as the infamous “tart” comment, he punched a man for allegedly touching his girlfriend.

Whatever the truth to this self-image, at any rate, Wallace’s insinuation is that posh women are victimising salt-of-the-earth men. This is classic divide and rule, and God knows Britain has enough class anxiety (and sexism) that it may convince some. “It either didn’t happen or was harmless bants,” is how one male poster put it, even as another dismissed the “old-aged women” just looking for attention.

The truth, though, is that while Wallace may wallow in his Freddie Starr shtick, it’s a style that was already going out of fashion 40 years ago. That Wallace could make lazy jokes about women as late as 2014, when he claimed MasterChef was a job that “requires” a male host, says much more about him than his accusers.

If, moreover, Wallace’s class-bound defence is part of a long tradition of male chauvinism — that women should just smile more; that they should revel in the winks and the wolf whistles — the final implication is just as insidious: that sexual harassment is either enjoyable for the women targeted, or else it simply never happened to start with. If you don’t laugh, or brush it off, you’re a prude. If you complain, you’re a ball-breaking bitch. Either way, the offending man is never to blame.

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There’s one last irony here too. Quite aside from the terrible pressure on women to force out a rictus smile whenever some dinosaur makes a nudge-nudge-wink-wink joke, transgressing a boundary and violating their self-worth, Wallace’s class defence just doesn’t work on its own terms.

Yes, a few of Wallace’s accusers are “middle class” — not, of course, that that matters. But others, young women in junior positions, certainly aren’t, especially compared to the man himself. Let me put it differently. Who, in the end, has more power: a veteran male presenter earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, or a female colleague on a zero-hours contract and no job security? Faced with these plain economic facts, that Gregg Wallace drops his aitches becomes utterly irrelevant.

To be fair, and whatever he’s finally found to have done, Wallace never tried to hide who he was. Others likely did: including the executives who tolerated his behaviour for so long. Hopefully, now, the days when sexual misconduct could be dismissed by a bit of harmless banter are coming to an end.

Until that day finally arrives, expect the usual defences to be wheeled out. But if some desperate man asks what the world is coming to, beg them to reflect on who the victims really are — regardless of how they speak or where they went to school.

The Labour equivalent of such a figure was John Prescott, a man who supported the illegal invasion of Iraq and the shackling of the trade unions, but who did so in a Yorkshire accent which proclaimed him a man of the people. He drove a Jaguar and was touchy about his status, but who cared when he could down a pint of bitter in one go? The British love a lord, but they love a character even more, and Prescott was nothing if not that. Forthright, bellicose and bloody-minded, he catered for the British admiration for those who refuse to be anything but themselves.

English individualism is very different from the American variety. Individualism in the United States is a strenuous, muscular affair, a matter of conquest and dominion, of expanding one’s powers and flexing the will. In England, it’s a more a matter of lovable eccentricity, of doing what you like in quiet defiance of social convention. Individualists in English culture don’t blazon their name on high-risers but stand in pubs with a parrot on their shoulder (I used to know an Oxford don who did just that). They run the London Marathon dressed as washing machines or share their bed with a chimpanzee. If we feel affection for these oddballs, it’s because they vicariously fulfil our own desire to flout social convention while being too timid to do so. It was why so many voters warmed to Boris Johnson, another political jester. It’s also one of the reasons why we like toddlers, who are incapable of doing the conventional thing and are just ruthlessly, spontaneously themselves. The modern mantra “I like to be myself” is appealing because in a world of images and fantasises, so many people feel that they can’t be, or that they don’t have a definite enough identity to express. On the other hand, Saddam Hussein liked to be himself as well. Being themselves is some people’s problem.

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If the political establishment indulges such idiosyncratic figures, greeting their antics with a patronising smile, it’s not least because it knows they are basically harmless. The jester may beat the monarch around the head with a bladder of dried peas, but that’s what he’s paid to do. As Shakespeare puts it in Twelfth Night, there’s no harm in a licensed Fool. Prescott’s role was to give Tony Blair political cover. While Blair and his cronies invited the rich to get even richer, the bruiser from Hull was at hand with his blustering, no-nonsense, syntactically chaotic style to make such policies sound as authentically socialist as Keir Hardie. It was as though a creature from a working-class that was rapidly becoming extinct had somehow managed to survive into the modern age, like a wolf boy discovered deep in the forest.

Prescott was so much a one-off, as a solitary plebeian character among a bunch of suave public schoolboys, that (ironically enough) he lent credence to the middle-class liberal myth that the working-class has all but disappeared. Not only the working class, in fact, but social class as such. The dressed-down mateyness of the modern office, where you call the boss Pettikins or Lover Boy, is part of a decentralised, network-based, team-oriented, information-rich, open-neck-shirted capitalism very far from the old social hierarchies and exclusions. Leftists, however, aren’t particularly concerned with whether the CEO wears sneakers to work. They are more struck by the fact that (as The Communist Manifesto predicted) capital today is concentrated in fewer hands than ever before, while globally speaking the ranks of the destitute and dispossessed continue to swell. Class is about property and power, not about whether you pronounce “basin” to rhyme with “bison”. Far from being an outdated notion peddled by a diehard far-Left, it is the dreary reality of everyday life for most citizens of the world. The fact that Etonians learn how to slur their speech, or that the European aristocracy are honoured to hobnob with Mick Jagger, has signally failed to usher in the classless society.

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On a global scale, nothing could be further from the truth than the claim that class no longer matters. Most of the mega-cities of the south of the planet are stinking slums rife with disease and overcrowding — slum-dwellers represent one third of the global urban population. The urban poor more generally constitutes at least half of the world’s population. Alongside the garment makers and casual labourers there are hawkers, hustlers, sex workers, food and drink sellers and rickshaw pullers, which is to say an immense layer of unemployed or sporadically employed workers. Taken together, they from the fastest growing social group on the planet. In Latin America, this informal economy now employs over half the workforce.

The original proletariat wasn’t the blue-collar, male, working-class. It was lower-class women in ancient society. The word “proletariat” is derived from the Latin word for producing offspring, meaning those who were too poor to serve the state except by producing potential labourers from their wombs. They had nothing to yield up but the fruit of their bodies. Today, in an era of Third World sweatshops and agricultural labour, the typical proletarian is still a woman. White-collar work, which in Victorian times was performed mostly by lower-middle-class men, is nowadays largely the reserve of working-class women, and it was also women who staffed the huge expansion in shop and clerical work which followed the decline of heavy industry after the First World War.

The concept of social class is linked above all to the name of Karl Marx, who writes of the industrial manual workers he calls the proletariat. Yet as a citizen of Victorian England, Marx was well aware that such workers didn’t constitute the majority of the working-class. By far the largest group of wage labourers in his time were domestic servants, most of whom were women. Even when Britain was famed as the workshop of the world, manufacturing workers were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers. So the working class is a much broader category than men who wield hammers or operate machines. What has declined on a global scale is industrial employment. But that doesn’t mean that the working class has disappeared along with it. The middle-class liberals will have to think again.

Today, there is a white-collar working-class as well as an industrial one, which includes a great many technical, clerical and administrative workers. Marx himself noted this expansion in his own age, remarking on how industrial capital was constantly drawing more technical and scientific labour into its orbit. When he writes of “general social knowledge becoming a direct productive force”, he anticipates what some would now call the information society. There’s also been an immense growth in the service, information and communications sectors of the economy. None of this, however, has changed the nature of capitalist property relations. It’s also worth recalling that work in the service sector can be just as heavy, dirty and disagreeable as traditional industrial labour. The legendary shift from the industrial to the post-industrial, or from production to consumption, means, among other things, that those who are exploited now work in call centres rather than coal mines. Labels like “service” or “white-collar” serve to obscure the massive differences between, say, airline pilots and hospital porters, or senior civil servants and hotel chambermaids.

In one sense, the working-class is spreading rather than shrinking. As the philosopher John Gray puts it, “The middle classes are rediscovering the condition of assetless economic insecurity that afflicted the 19th century proletariat.” Many of those who used to be labelled lower-middle-class — teachers, social workers, journalists, technicians, middling clerical and administrative officials — have been subject to a relentless process of proletarianisation, stripped of control of their own working conditions and plagued by financial insecurity. The working-class proper then, can be taken to include both manual labourers and the lower levels of white-collar workers. And this constitutes a massive proportion of the world population, estimated by some economists to be around 2 or 3 billion men and women, the working-class seems to have disappeared rather les successfully than Lord Lucan.

From Peterloo to the Eighties miners strike, the treatment of organised labour in Britain has been for the most part a shameful story. Killed, gagged, deported or imprisoned, vilified by the media and denounced as power-hungry demagogues, the leaders of the labour movement have paid dearly over the centuries for their efforts to win decent wages and working conditions. From time to time, some among their ranks have been incorporated by the political establishment so that they may use their inside knowledge of working people to persuade them to back off from such inconvenient demands. When that fails, one can always send in the police horses. John Prescott has been much praised since his death as a bridge and mediator, a canny power-broker and negotiator, all of which is a polite way of saying that he maintained the style of a working-class militant with absolutely none of the substance.

We learn just how stiff in Meet the Rees-Moggs — arriving onscreen next week — as strangers shout aggressively at the infamous politician as he crosses the road or buys his daily chocolate éclair from Greggs. In return, they invariably get a polite “thank you!” and an awkward little wave. In the run-up to July’s General Election, someone writes “POSH TWAT” in marker pen on a Vote Conservative sign outside his mother’s house. With insistent amusement, Rees-Mogg jokes to his family that the culprit must be “very easy to spot”: “an angry socialist giant who has a very vulgar knowledge of language”.

The man seems absolutely determined not to take anything personally, ever. And his loyal wife Helena is equally stoic, sporting the sort of highborn expressionlessness and barely moving mouth that the lower classes can only hope to achieve with Botox. “Other careers are available,” she murmurs to two of the couple’s six children after warning them about their father’s impending election defeat, after 14 years as an MP. Later, she tells the camera resolutely: “As Churchill said, KBO.”

But just why do people detest her husband so much? In the past, protestors have thrown bottles at him. Random passers-by have told his children that their father is a “horrible person” and that “lots of people hate him”. For the second year running, he appears on The New European “shit list” — out this week — dedicated to rooting out “the sneaky, the snobbish, and the snide”. Indeed, the new TV series is predicated on the idea that Rees-Mogg is “one of the most divisive politicians in Britain”, as stated in the title sequence.

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Yet the first two programmes do nothing much to explain the animosity. Instead we get a Great British Bake Off-style portrait of an amusingly donnish oddball, complete with an arch-sounding pizzicato soundtrack in case we didn’t already get the point. In the interactions we see between Rees-Mogg and others, it’s as if half his mind is whirling away on some other thing entirely. When Jacob was first courting Helena, she tells us, she couldn’t think of much else. He, meanwhile, was gazing lovingly into his wife-to-be’s eyes and seeing her ancestor Thomas Wentworth the 1st Earl of Strafford, by far and away his favourite adviser to King Charles I.

We also get to see Catholic Jacob in his own private chapel, rhyming “Mass” with “arse” and showing off his reliquary, which includes a bit of Thomas More’s hair shirt. There’s a scene with the whole family dressed in black tie at the dinner table, three small boys included. And then there’s Jacob inadvertently giving the lie to Conservative fears about what’s bound to happen under a nanny state, as his own ever-indulgent nanny Veronica lets him off from eating his vegetables. Now ancient, she is filmed ministering to young Alfred, Anselm, and Sixtus the sixth and last — each of them approaching the Platonic form of the adorably naughty schoolboy — while the elder three Rees-Moggs are off at boarding school.

The puzzling question remains. It can’t just be all the money, the stately home, or the languid drawling that people object to, nor even the rampantly Right-wing views; such things are hardly scarce in the Tory party at large. One determined critic in the first episode says that Rees-Mogg “seems to despise people who are poorer than him”. Yet, on the contrary, all the evidence of the documentary suggests he approaches everyone, rich or poor — including, for that matter, his own wife and children — in exactly the same way. Namely: as if he is forcing himself into social interactions for the sake of some higher purpose.

Another explanation for the degree of opprobrium to such a relentlessly mild and amiable man is the perception that the whole Honourable-Member-for-the-18th-Century act is a put on. Perhaps revealing a little too clearly their own snobbishness, writers at The New European this week called Rees-Mogg a “fake aristo”. Likewise, in 2017, Polly Toynbee wrote that he was “about as authentic as that Downton Abbey shot where they left a plastic bottle on the mantlepiece”. In Nancy Mitfordesque vein, The Guardian columnist continued: “The double-breasted posh-speak, Latin tags and ludicrous names for his six children are all pastiche panache, a country house charade.”

But again, I don’t think so — or at least, not if you believe Michael Ashcroft in his admittedly sympathetic biography Jacob’s Ladder. For one, though Rees-Mogg is indeed not an aristocrat nor ever claimed to be, sexist Toynbee seems to be ignoring the clear influence of his impeccably pedigreed wife upon the family lifestyle (full name Helena Anne Beatrix Wentworth Fitzwilliam de Chair). For another, schoolfriend after schoolfriend lines up to tell Ashcroft that, as a youth, Jacob was just as fogeyish, money-obsessed, and downright strange as he is now.

Says one old pal, recalling eight-year old Jacob: “He used to sit behind me and read The Financial Times.” As an 11-year-old shareholder, young Rees-Mogg attended the Lonhro AGM, quizzing directors from the floor about their plans to buy The Observer. At Eton, he declared the dropping of the tailcoat requirement on very hot days an “unnecessary slacking of regulations”, refusing to follow the trend. And a friend recounts that, at Oxford, he “was bullied unmercifully by people who took the piss out of him because he was such an anomaly, even among his own class”.

Futilely contesting the seat of Central Fife for the Tories in the 1997 General Election, including several former coal mining towns in which unemployment was rife, Rees-Mogg was viewed as a “figure of complete ridicule” according to onlookers but remained unbowed. “I’ve worn a suit every day since I was 14,” he told The Scotsman. “I’m not about to change now.” He also told reporters, without any apparent sense of foreboding, that Veronica the nanny would be coming up North to help him campaign.

No, I think the real reason people hate Rees-Mogg is not that he is fake, but quite the opposite: he is authentic, clear-eyed and apparently unashamed about who he is and what he believes. Ironically, while “bringing your whole self to work” is something we’re all supposed to be doing these days, the example of Rees-Mogg shows us the pitfalls when someone actually does it.

Not for him, hints of apologetic embarrassment about the reactionary principles he would prefer not to hold. He is calmly candid about them, without even a defiant compensatory swagger à la Truss or Jenrick. And nor do we get the self-conscious attempts of other politicians to make themselves seem “relatable” and “human”: Keir Starmer tentatively holding a pint for a photo shoot; Ed Davey “officially stepping into Christmas mode” by jumping about like a lunatic on TikTok.

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To this, you might reasonably object that the man is now in a reality TV series, isn’t he? But even that seems true to bone-deep form. Ashcroft also relates how, aged 14, young Jacob featured in an ITV children’s programme, talking about his stocks and shares and “wearing a double-breasted camel coloured coat with a ‘Vote Maggie’ badge on it”. Or as fellow Etonian, the actor Dominic West put it:“[Jacob] has never changed… he’s a showbiz tart.”

What Rees-Mogg’s example convincingly tells us is that, at base, the high-minded demand to be authentic — to show “the real you”, to act in accordance with your “true self”, and so on — is only a covert inducement to display a particular kind of approved persona, carefully calibrated to socially acceptable mores, and then manifested with a convincing impression of sincerity and self-deprecation. The supposed value of making your inner core match your outer behaviour tends to be completely abandoned as soon as it is suspected that the core in question might be rotten. In Rees-Mogg’s case — whatever the rights and wrongs of his politics — it seems to me that the case for the prosecution of his character has yet to be proved.

Equally, for decades academics have been telling us that the distinction between “normal” and “weird” is a politically pernicious one, and in fact disrupting or “queering” social norms is good, actually. Yet they seem to get feet of clay when faced with someone prone to wearing top hats, using words like “floccinaucinihilipilification” in ordinary speech, and declaring that for religious reasons he is against abortion, even in the case of incest or rape. For what could be queerer than that these days?

Viewed in this light, perhaps what people really hate about Jacob Rees-Mogg is what people hate about eccentrics generally: that he won’t give in to pressure to conform even a little bit, as the cowardly rest of us do. All the brickbats flying his way make absolutely no difference. Angry socialist giants in Somerset might as well put away their marker pens.

A decade on, some of MIC’s most esteemed alumni — Binky Felstead, Lucy Watson and Rosie Fortescue — have reunited for Beyond Chelsea, a where-are-they-now series which The Guardian uncharacteristically declared “needs some backstabbing”. Unlike the intoxicating original, this spin-off, defanged by welfare concerns, is “bland”.

For many teenage girls in the 2010s, reality TV was everything. We cut our Gen Z teeth on a particularly nasty era of “scripted reality”. Producers feeding lines, stirring up behind-the-scenes beef and having cast members replay breakups in front of the cameras became the standard — a format that proved to be gold dust for production companies at ITV (TOWIE, Ibiza Weekender), E4 (Made in Chelsea) and MTV (Geordie Shore, The Hills, Ex on the Beach). Since then, streaming has blown the scripted-reality format out of the water. But it’s worth remembering how the shows we watched forged our ideas about celebrity and class.

Everyone’s favourite Made in Chelsea “character”, a true agent of chaos, was Spencer Matthews. In a pre-MeToo world he was just about acceptable — a medium-ugly Jack the Lad who meted out schadenfreude to every woman who was too nice and too pretty to go unscathed. The most memorable of which has to be his spectacular 2013 break-up with Louise Thompson, staged on Putney Bridge. Years later, Matthews revealed that the two had broken up off-camera the night before — only to be told to recreate the moment by producers. “It’s hard to respect you when you allow me to cheat on you,” he immortally told the sobbing 22-year-old. Having lately rebranded as a recovering alcoholic and fitness influencer, Matthews said of the scene, “I feel embarrassed about it.” So he should, but from what I recall of the time, he was only burnished by his misbehaviour.

What distinguished MiC from other scripted-reality shows of its day was a vibe of aspirational refinement. Unlike the fake-tanned, fake-breasted northerners chunning in local the Popworld on Geordie Shore, its bright young things attended shooting parties on rented estates, hosted flapper-themed “soirées” and, in fits of pique, swilled not pints but Bolly. At least, that was what we saw. The reality, I suspect, must have been quite different — one hears whispers about the dysfunctional lives of the programmes’ young cast members, their days-long benders and, through the thick fog of privilege and addiction, being riled up by producers to lash out at one another like snakes milked for venom.

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The facade of untouchable poshness, unique among reality programmes of this era, sweetened the satisfaction of tiffs and spats: this show was at once a moving Pinterest board (at my school, predictably, many girls dreamt of slinking down the King’s Road in a freshly waxed Barbour with K-Middleton chestnut curls) and deliciously sadistic. Every episode stages a fall from grace for a girl who is too envied to last, answering the blend of awe and disdain which such upper-crust women tend to inspire. Nobody wants to see Downton’s Mary Crawley end up with boring old Matthew in sickening harmony — we want to see him paralysed below the waist during the First World War then bumped off in a car crash after welcoming the couple’s first child, leaving her wracked by grief and hardship.

The truth is, we like our posh women to be victims. The privilege and vulnerability they embody places them at a tantalising sweet spot for contempt; comeuppance for prized “brats” like Lucy Watson always came with a whispered threat: nobody is too posh to be called a bitch. Even the nice ones are prodded into teary scenes wherever possible — pain purifies, and neutralises viewers’ envy. Their grandness also made them fair game for misogyny, an impulse which was otherwise beginning to be restrained on mainstream TV by the mid-2010s.

Besides, in the broader villain dynamics of scripted reality, men and women have prescribed roles. It’s far easier to swallow roguery in a chummy group of Harrovians than in their catty girlfriends; the format ensures that scenes of dark goings-on in members’ clubs evaporate in the sepia sunlight of a friendly Clapham Common rugby throwabout. The girls, by contrast, are never afforded this cleansing camaraderie — they are doomed to sit, pouting, in coffee shops, mooning over cheaters and slinging bitchy remarks about bags. The upshot of this dynamic is that the men of Made in Chelsea were able to tear their way through 10-plus series with little reputational damage, bar the odd well-deserved slap. Many, Sam Thompson and Jamie Laing included, are heading for national-treasure status at breakneck speed.

The women, conversely, had much shorter shelf-lives; many of them, Louise Thompson included, clearly underwent massive emotional trauma which has echoed in later life. Others, such as “fat fucking turkey” Francesca Hull, are haunted by their time on the show. The unforgettable line was hurled by arch-villainess Victoria Baker-Harber during a festive dinner party in 2013. After an exchange of fire from various girls as slack-jawed boyfriends looked on — “this cheese smells as bad as Lucy’s breath”; “I don’t ever see you eat, ever — you’re an anorexic” — Baker-Harber tells an emollient Hull, in a clip which she has said followed her around forever: “Stop opening your fucking fat mouth you fucking fat turkey!”

Hull has since revealed that, in a room “full of cameramen, producers, sound men”, she had tried to leave, but “there was a producer under the table holding my legs down, and she was saying, ‘No, fight back’”. At other times, the crew “spoke to us on the phone for hours every week. They’d come on nights out with us. They put us in situations that created drama”, Hull told Grazia.

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When scripted reality was first a thing, I sense that we all knew this — it was all slightly rougher, with drama inexpertly cut in. Now, though, as boundaries between celebrities and “real people” collapse on social media, producers’ wiles have caught up: it’s harder and harder to detect narrative artifice, and so, for young viewers in particular, to challenge the garish visions of sex and class in which these programmes trade.

We are no longer in a world in which bullied girls are held under tables by goading executives. Light-entertainment TV has had a heavy reckoning — from the Jeremy Kyle Show to This Morning. The trajectories of former Made in Chelsea cast members are depressingly predictable: many of the show’s biggest hellraisers are now wellness influencers — nobody hawks essential oils like a former cocaine addict — or, judging by OG gentle oddball Francis Boulle’s Twitter, alt-Right crypto traders. Present iterations such as Married at First Sight and Love is Blind attempt to whip up the same villainy, the winking caricatures, the ritualistic savagery of that era. But the unctuous brutality of 2010s TV production has been sapped away by years of Love Island suicides and interventions by Women’s Aid.

That time has left a strange legacy for my generation. Such shows service an emotional need to process thorny class elements of British culture. In Made in Chelsea’s case, it was a way of understanding breezy privilege, poking fun at it and indulging in our most Victorian fantasies about what goes on behind the shutters of Cadogan Square, in a country recently rocked by the 2008 financial crash, and which had just elected its first Tory government in 13 years. Now, after a comparable changing of the political guard, pop culture is having another dalliance with the upper classes: Saltburn, The Gentlemen and a new adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals are, depending on how you look at it, last-days-of-Rome takes on the end stages of Conservative collapse or much-desired correctives to the bleakness of Starmerism.

Nowadays, producers are much more careful — mindful, they would say — about dealing in baroque and, sometimes, offensive visions of class that abounded in 2010s reality TV. The exception for lampooning remains, for good reason, posh people. And it just so happens that they are also, for the time being, a lasting fixation, perfect aspirational hate-watch material. The brutality of the sets which produced these stereotypes may be gone — but can we ever banish our infatuation with the Sloane?

Posh kids have been chattin breeze on the mean streets of Fulham for years now, long before Tottenham girl Adele was derided for sporting Bantu knots and a Jamaican flag bikini for Carnival in 2020 (“hello pon de other side,” Twitter roared), or even before Bedales alumna and celeb offspring Lily Allen crooned “rudeboi you look like a smokah” in 2018.

Jamaican “roadman” slang, alongside borrowings from Arabic, Hindi and Somali, has been settling into 21st-century yoofspeak — known to academics as Multicultural London English (MLE) — for two decades now, causing various moral panics about cultural appropriation and/or the desecration of the English language along the way. Spreading far beyond the M5, teens in Derby, Devon and Darlington have traded in regional phrases for Skepta lyrics.

As long ago as 2008, Paul Weller — once known for taking on the establishment with David Cameron’s fave song Eton Rifles — admitted he would be sending his children to a private school lest they end up “coming home speaking like Ali G”. “I’m just not having it,” the Jam jongleur grumbled. His band came to prominence supporting The Clash on the earth-shaking White Riot tour, inspired by the chaotic events of Notting Hill Carnival in 1976. From cutting his teeth on punk to entering cantankerous middle-class fatherhood, Weller had embodied the complete life cycle of cool, the radical struggles of Windrush London trickling into the tediously ironic lexicon of Noughties teenagers.

White kids picking up the slang of ethnic minorities is nothing new; our language is always evolving, a testament to our island nation’s migrant history. But what has changed, in the past two decades, is the specific role of a working-class urban lexicon in burnishing the reps of the very poshest kids in town. Code-switching has become a careful London art, where bad gyals on the bus arrive home to sound cut-glass pleases and thank yous to the au pair.

Of course, the spread of MLE among the middle classes is not simply a nefarious culture grab. It is a natural consequence of diversity in both physical communities and in pop culture, with grime music bursting out of the 2000s London scene at the same time as Top Boy became the toast of Channel 4. The immediate vibe of both — being tough, ruthless, canny — is absolute teenager-bait; but you only need to actually watch Top Boy to think twice about brazenly copying its lingo in the common room. Not just a gangsta romp, it’s a serious study on young black masculinity, on government policy pushing migrant families off cliffs. But no: it seems many teens, who had only ever stepped foot on one kind of estate, watched this and decided the best takeaway would be to add a “ting” or two to their idiolect as a shortcut to gritty authenticity, however forced.

What choice, you might say, do these poor kids have? Being posh is no longer cool. Long gone are the days of Jack Wills supremacy, when lounging about in country piles wearing cable-knit jumpers was all the rage. Saltburn, in which troubled toff Venetia frolicked about on a tennis court with a bottle of Bolly, sparked a brief revival that saw TikTok trustafarians dance their way through listed buildings. To be honest, I’d almost, almost, take a Cotswold shooting party over the “duttiest” Camberwell rave, for at least one is upfront about the number of guests in Debrett’s.

But can we blame this second cohort, skanking to devious beats in a piss-scented lock-up, for putting on a costume? Culture has lurched so far away from Sloane Rangers — and, just as well-heeled graduates find themselves renting further and further afield from their prep schools, fashion has followed them into Brixton, Tooting and Tottenham. Who can blame them for wanting to fit in?

Nor is class and race tourism anything new. In 1957, Norman Mailer taxonomised the Hipster as a fanatical consumer of black culture in a 9,000-word essay. It makes for difficult reading now — not least for its pretty racist thesis that “the American existentialist” (a guaranteed bore) must live with “a sensuous relation to existence” by enjoying bodily pleasures in some sort of hedonistic “primitive” present. It was understandably hated by Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. But Mailer’s obvious fetish for what he saw as the liberating abandon within black culture, of its supposed proximity to death and reality, revealed in itself the way edginess tends to pluck choice things from other worlds, borrowing and refashioning until they become accessories for discerning whites, like trinkets from so many marvellous holidays.

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It is fascinating that, 70 years on, cool elites are similarly using black argot as a totem of hipness and modernity, framing everything non-white and non-posh as sensual and gritty. But we should be wary of buying into Mailer’s insufferable hipster mode by letting this slip without critique. A recent conversation with an old friend about his moving to Bow was shot through with euphemisms to this effect — that a bit of time in a different “community” (why does this term never apply to the stucco-fronted houses of Westbourne Park?) might be “cool”, “eye-opening” even.

One of the appeals of these fake accents, which is also at the heart of their problematic nature, is that they are perceived as “anti-establishment”. If the system is white, moneyed, strict — a.k.a our parents — then the coolest rebellion must be the opposite. Part of the allure of slang is that it is not understood, or is despised, by a perceived enemy: middle-class parents’ horror at their children picking up MLE only makes it more enticing. For fear of seeming prejudiced, such disdain is best expressed in careful euphemism. In 2010, Emma Thompson told Radio Times that, on a visit to her old school, she urged pupils not to use slang words such as “like” and “innit”. “I told them, ‘Just don’t do it. Because it makes you sound stupid and you’re not stupid.'”

But is it truly fair to equate the use of slang with intelligence? By doing so, Thompson encircles the most poisonous stereotypes about inner-city teenagers without naming them —  insinuating that hanging around on the wrong side of the linguistic tracks imparts some sort of wretchedness on the speaker. Besides, she need not have worried, for the old school in question was the Camden School for Girls. These clever girls, primed to float demurely into top jobs, know more than most how to code-switch. Indeed, the point about code-switching is that it comes easier to the elite, because the thousand secret signals of privilege cannot be learned from the telly, but from years and years of subtle and exclusive schooling. And whatever we pick up, we can just drop, with no risk of discrimination. For others, not so.

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Emma Thompson’s alarm at teenagers “sounding stupid” or jeopardising proper English is therefore a little disingenuous: posh kids will always have RP to hand when they need it. Did Thompson really think the Camden girls would forget how to speak nicely? In reality, if the past 20 years show anything, MLE’s posh adopters do so as a teenage fad — and it will never get in the way of a Fulham boy and his birthright, a job in finance or fine art.

Middle-class parents, then, do not fear linguistic extinction, but their own murky and problematic associations with not speaking “properly” — crime, stupidity, drug use. Really, Cressida… did we put you through Hill House to speak like a gangster? But what they do have right is contempt for the artificiality of the whole affair.

For more than anything, it speaks to the way fashion has come to cannibalise the aesthetics of diversity, feeding the illusion of London as a great bastion of social mobility while only lending cachet to uptowners. Our capital’s youth scene is now one that favours these MLE magpies, so many miniature curators, trying on accents like Marie Antoinette demurely playing peasant in the Petit Trianon. For a generation so tormented by a desire to be candid about privilege, this trend is a toe-curling exception.

Scouring maps of southern Europe like a Napoleonic general, the Brit Abroad plots his summer holidays. He seeks abandon, hot sun, cold beer and cheap 20-packs of Camel Blue. Territory selected, he readies his armoury: Dior Sauvage, Stone Island tee, Gucci belt. A stealth vape in the plane loos, a blast of Balearic heat when the doors slide back. The mission begins, the battlefield beckons: sunburnt bodies totter down tourist strips; big blobs of pork sizzle in the sun of a concrete Spanish resort; stumbling brigades of bloodshot-eyed boys spill plastic pints.

Such is the mythos of our favourite summer bogeyman. The past 20 years has seen the figure of the largely working-class, largely male, largely large holidaymaker conquer the middle-class imagination — a yardstick against which to define oneself.

Contrast this with the other spiritual half of British summertime, the yin to Mallorca’s yang: Wimbledon. Here, we breathlessly spot “who’s who” in the Royal Box; ladies in frilly dresses grimace through the rain; there are strawberries and cream, Pimms and “new balls please”. Hordes of neon-lit bodies in coastal Spain make way, each June, for the great and the good of “SW19” — and by the end of summer, all presuppositions about the great British class system are tidily confirmed, tucked away for the following year.

How does the Wimbledon “set” do a holiday? For many, it will involve a restless and self-conscious consumption of culture: betterment is one of the things that sets us apart from the drunken hedonists over there. In practice, this means peering around fusty-smelling churches, picking through broken tat at worthy-of-their-name flea markets and getting annoyed when waiters disregard your International Baccalaureate Italian, handing you English menus instead. Capisci, I speak from experience.

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Being a “good tourist”, with hefty disdain for your vacational inferiors, means jumping through a million performative hoops to constantly prove your politeness, patience and sophistication. A memorable holiday with four of my friends descended into farce as we tried to do just that through the most Sicilian of trials, including freewheeling a clapped-out hire car down a mountain and getting stuck in a lift, only to have a furious Palermitan engineer yell at us down the phone for interrupting his lunch break. (“I come back… a domani.”) The funniest thing about middle-class tourists is the die-hard instinct to insist that everything local — broken, infuriating and a bit rubbish — is simply part of the rhythm of life here. Hyacinth Bucket tutting is reserved solely for when things go wrong at the airport (“this is why I don’t fly easyJet!”).

Yes, British tourists do sometimes behave badly — and cities have taken action accordingly. Stag-do hotspots such as Amsterdam and Dubrovnik have introduced hefty fines for public drunkenness, limitations on party boats and pub crawls, and crackdowns on lewdness and nudity. In May, party towns in the Balearics banned the sale of alcohol in shops from 9.30pm to 8am.

Meanwhile, in Barcelona, a full-on tourists vs locals war has ensued, with 3,000 protesters using hazard tape to cordon off dining holidaymakers, spraying them with water pistols. The row is based on tourist rentals driving up housing costs — which seems to me like beef with multinational bedsit-peddler AirBnB, not Gary and Sue on their summer holidays. There is similar discontent among locals in our own beauty spots, from Whitby to Weymouth, facing exactly the same problem because of Londoners’ second homes. But only one has become a cultural obsession: the one steeped in delicious snobbery about how other people holiday.

Sneering at other people’s leisure time has become an aspirational sport. This may be because, on holiday, we are encouraged to relax into our true forms, to act on our desires. Every stage of planning a trip involves a thousand moments of self-fashioning: party city or shambling slice of life? Carbon-belching Ryanair or socially conscious train travel? Resort food or chancing the local cuisine? The fork in the road seems often to fall on hedonism versus sophistication. But for some commentators, certain tourist behaviour amounts to political aggression: one, from the i, unironically ascribed the national shame of our holidaymakers to Brexit, arguing that “we don’t want to contribute to the EU, we just want to trash it, thanks”. We love to look down on our compatriots for loutishness — as though a foreign setting gives us licence to vocalise our most toxic prejudices. This is not to say that I would throw myself headlong into an all-inclusive, living off Fanta lemon and cardboard chips for a week in a Shein bikini. But haughty narratives of social degeneration are not the answer.

Once, the working classes (yes, that’s who the disdain is aimed at) could not spend their summer holidays abroad. Your big yearly trip might have involved a caravan in drizzly Wales, or knobbly-knees contests at Butlins. But firms such as Thomas Cook changed the game, offering affordable package holidays. In 1961, 1.75 million Brits went abroad; three years later, four million of us flew off. The proportion of British tourists in some Spanish resorts reached a third by the end of the decade. At a time when olive oil was something you bought from a pharmacist, European travel suddenly became available to the masses.

Before then it was the preserve of the upper classes who, springing from the pages of an E.M. Forster novel, sauntered about on the Grand Tour, sighing at suitors, clicking at waiters and mixing with none but their own aristocratic circles. The most daring antics would still be contained to the same swaggering elites, typified by the original lad on holiday — Lord Byron — who romped about in Albanian dress, shagging his way through Venice, swimming the Hellespont and barging into the issue of Greek independence.

Would some prefer the old way? To send our brightest young things to frown at Roman ruins while the poor relations “embarrass themselves” behind the closed gates of a regional Centre Parcs? It seems that though travel can broaden the mind, it can also narrow it — feeding off the stratified snottiness of rainy England. If there is a Brexit comparison to make, it is of that same self-defeating snobbery — us, respectful, cultured, cosmopolitan; them, brutish, provincial, rude. Surely, surely it’s time to pack that all in.

Sunday was the epitome of this divide. At half nine in the morning, England fans piled into pubs, swarming around Clapton’s Crooked Billet like wasps around a rotting plum. In the early afternoon, the Princess of Wales walked on to Wimbledon’s Centre Court in a magenta dress to heartfelt applause. There were polite ripples of laughter when Annabel Croft called the victorious Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz “hot”. Both finalists gave sportsmanlike speeches. A few hours later, our Euros finalists lost 2-1 to Spain; at one point before the equaliser, the camera trained on two men in crusader costumes — a common sight at any England match. There they were, leaning anxiously over the railing, decked out in the splendour of Christian knights, a shell of national fantasy. This may be the image that best crystallises the irony of the Brit Abroad: a bygone valour, a hubris, that clashes with the damp reality of our global standing.

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The atmosphere around Sunday’s football had the brash sincerity of a lads’ holiday, Wimbledon the genteel and self-conscious restraint of middle-class trips to continental cathedrals. One is heavily male-coded, booze-centred, charged with a mythic optimism, the other a measured, picnic-y affair. That only one could be said to be “quintessentially English” — the latter — tells us all we need to know about who we hope to project ourselves as internationally. The sensibilities of the Grand Tour are more difficult to scrub than we think: the cringing irony around big football tournaments is, I suspect, grounded partly in disdain for the envoys sent to represent us.

On holiday, everything is political. It’s time we stopped pretending that going abroad is an act of escapism or authentic self-discovery: travel is as shot through with the anxieties of class as anything taking place on the British high street. Wimbledon and Benidorm are simply part of the circus of these social signifiers. None of us is immune: these trips are an opportunity to rehearse who we want to be, and the way we behave in our leisure time has come to represent our essential moral status. Yes, tourists shouldn’t behave like tyrants; but we should be a little more clear-headed about a fascination with a certain type of traveller. For this reason, I’m calling time on the spectre of the Brit Abroad — the most threadbare of national myths.

We rarely think about what it means to assign towns or neighbourhoods to the bottom of our moral geography; but those who live in them often feel ashamed, not because they have committed any wrong but because they know they are seen as lesser beings. They report feeling small and powerless, with their behaviour “painfully scrutinised and negatively evaluated”. Sadness, depression and a sense of isolation can often follow. The effect on the self can be devastating.

Curiously, this kind of humiliation becomes possible only when a society has, in its ideology, transcended ideas of natural difference, and convinced its citizens that they are due equal rights and dignity. For instance, when women and non-white people demanded equal rights and dignity, they rightly began to push back against the everyday slights and humiliations visited on them by dominant groups, who found shaming people on the basis of their gender or race increasingly frowned upon. 

In the great era of post-war social democracy, something similar began to happen in the case of social class. In the most wince-inducing scene of The Remains of the Day, set in the Thirties, the butler — Stevens, whose life goal is to serve his master with complete devotion and professionalism — is humiliated by the patrician friend of Lord Darlington who wants to demonstrate the lower class’s ignorance of global affairs and therefore the error of permitting them to have a vote. Yet, despite our own embarrassment and rising sense of outrage, the butler, played in the film by Anthony Hopkins, did not seem to feel the humiliation — because he accepted implicitly that he was of a lower social order and should not be expected to know these things.

Social shaming is by no means confined to the lower orders, whom today we refer to with terms such as disadvantaged communities and the precariat. In fact, shaming is a general phenomenon of stratified society, although its effect is much more apparent in some.

A survey of Australians we commissioned for our new book, The Privileged Few, found that half of young adults admit to having felt ashamed about where they grew up, the school they attended, or their parents’ employment. Shame is a strong emotion to admit too, even in an anonymised survey. We found that parents in households with children are much more likely to admit to feelings of shame than those in households without children, perhaps because adolescents feel shame more intensely than adults and memories of emotional wounds fade as one grows older. In our follow-up focus groups, some made poignant comments about how, as children, they thought they were normal until someone denigrated their suburb or their school or even their father’s low-status job.

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The side effect of this shaming is worryingly that people lower down the hierarchy say they conceal where they live or where they went to school, either by lying or becoming evasive when asked. One of our informants spoke of how “people would cringe when I mentioned the… suburb I came from, so sometimes I’d pick another suburb, so they don’t cringe”. Another said that when he mentioned his state school to a partner at the accounting firm where he works, “he visibly recoiled… He looked at me differently.”

In 2012, Owen Jones published Chavs, a powerful polemic against the demonisation of the working class, or at least the element of it characterised by the media and some politicians as “feckless, criminalised and ignorant”. But the extremes of condescension, scorn and even disgust directed at “chavs” should be understood within a broader distribution of “microaggressions” up and down the social scale and manifesting in feelings of embarrassment, humiliation, resentment, guilt, envy, arrogance and contempt. Unlike debates over the microaggressions of race and gender that have dominated the public domain in recent years, the microaggressions of class are often ignored. Yet they seethe beneath the surface, erupting at times when the privileges enjoyed by elites become too brazen, too egregious — justas they did during the pandemic. 

As the Covid virus spread in the early months of 2020, and London began to shut down, wealthy families fled the city for their sanctuaries in the country. Others took to their yachts or flew to Caribbean islands. Estate agents fielded inquiries from the super-rich for “mansions with bunkers”. Newspaper stories reporting the flight of the rich attracted a torrent of bitter and cynical comments from the public. 

We argue in our book that relations among those up and down the social scale are fraught with emotional effort and inner turmoil. Informants for our study (in “egalitarian” Australia) admitted that they pay more attention and respect to people they believe are wealthy or influential. Some look up to them even though they don’t want to and it goes against the grain of their moral code. One conceded that if someone pointed out a billionaire at a party then “I think you may afford them a bit more respect”. These comments were made bashfully, as if looking up to the rich and powerful went against some inner principle or entailed a small sacrifice of dignity.

At the other end of the spectrum, some from a higher position in the hierarchy may want to be respectful and congenial in their relations with those below, but risk being seen as condescending, disrespectful or unduly familiar. While one spoke of levelling-up by changing the way she speaks and carries herself in the presence of a higher status person, another, who had attended an elite school, commented that the adjustment can work the other way so that “you might come down a notch or two”. But he has also discovered that the gulf between the elites and the rest sometimes takes the form of disdain from below: “You get on really well with somebody and then they ask you that dreaded question ‘Where do you live? What school do you go to?’ And the instant you say it, their face drops.”

We are not suggesting an equivalence between disdain from above and disdain from below. The face drop does not have the social power of the cringe. As Kathryn Abrams observed, “a war of disgusts is one that those less socially privileged are unlikely to win”.

These injuries of social class are often felt most painfully in the schoolyard, among children yet to learn the rules of social inhibition or, indeed, respect for difference. In schools, interactions among students and between students and teachers are beset by the everyday slights and humiliations associated with social and economic difference. Yet the language of class, once a powerful tool serving the interests of equality and dignity, has fallen out of fashion. The words to parry the microaggressions of class are absent.

If you speak to 11-year-olds, they can call out sexism and racism, even ageism, but when it comes to discrimination or vilification on the basis of class or social status they are dumbstruck. Those students who intend to remain in the state system after primary school are often shamed by those whose parents are sending them to elite private schools. Public schools are “shit”, said one. How does an 11-year-old respond? With an explanation of the social benefits of the public education system? Or with an epithet such as “snob”, which has little rhetorical power in the neoliberal area of “choice” and getting ahead by whatever means possible. The absence of a language of class politics — as opposed to a vibrant language of gender and racial politics — means that shaming on the basis of social status or the school one goes to is taken in as personal wound rather than as an expression of social division.

Students at elite private schools in Britain as elsewhere are taught to assume the superiority of their position. As one graduate observed: “I joined Westminster School [in London] for sixth form. On my first day we were given a talk by the headmaster, who told us: “You are the crème de la crème of this country. Sitting around you are future leaders. Don’t you forget it.”

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These schools aim to imbue the offspring of the elite with certain higher moral and spiritual qualities, a process known as consecration, sanctifying these students as beyond the ordinary and moulding them into objects of power and influence; in short, elite. They are taught the dispositions of ease, confidence and entitlement appropriate to a world of privilege. 

The uncomfortable conclusion we draw is that elite privilege is best viewed as a set of everyday practices that sorts and reproduces social strata. Studying the alchemy of how privilege is done, whereby elites seek and are granted exclusive benefits, suggests that the privileges bestowed on elites are not a by-product of wealth but an organising principle used to enforce social difference. In the end, it is our collective compliance that makes elite privilege so deeply entrenched and “natural”, even though it is responsible for so many harms: economic harms, civic harms, and psychic harms, not least the everyday system of shaming and humiliation that is characteristic of a society of privilege. 

Still, it’s a dangerous game for the elites because shaming can congeal into resentment, a political anger that can break through in unpredictable ways. A political class that not only lacks an understanding of the problems of class demonisation but actively seeks to participate in it is doomed to face the reckoning of a vengeful electorate.

As we mark Habitat’s sixtieth birthday, all of this feels strangely current. Sexual liberation, women’s empowerment and the fashionable status of European culture are still with us. The duvet’s victory is complete: few of us sleep under blankets or eiderdowns. But most familiar is how the Habitat catalogue wove these products and themes into a picture of a desirable life. It turned the home into a stage, a setting for compelling and attractive characters. This is a species of fantasy we now call lifestyle marketing, and we are saturated with it. Today’s brands offer us prefabricated identities, linking together ideals, interests and aesthetic preferences to suggest the kind of person we could be. It was Habitat that taught Britain to think and dream in this way.

The first shop opened on London’s Fulham Road in 1964, a good moment to be reinventing the look and feel of domestic life. New materials and production methods were redefining furniture — that moulded plastic chair with metal legs we sat on at school, for instance, was first designed in 1963. After decades of depression, rationing and austerity, the British were enjoying the fruits of the post-war economic boom, discovering new and enlarged consumer appetites. The boundaries separating art from popular culture were becoming blurred, and Britain’s longstanding suspicion of modern design as lacking in warmth and comfort was giving way. Habitat combined all of these trends to create something new. It took objects with an elevated sense of style and brought them down to the level of consumerism, with aggressive marketing, a steady flow of new products and prices that freshly graduated professionals could afford.

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But Habitat was not just selling brightly coloured bistro chairs and enamel coffee pots, paper lampshades and Afghan rugs. It was selling an attitude, a personality, a complete set of quirks and prejudices. Like the precocious young Baby Boomers he catered for, Conran scorned the old-fashioned, the small-minded and suburban. And he offered a seductive alternative: a life of tasteful hedonism, inspired by a more cultured world across the channel. Granted, you would never fully realise that vision, but you could at least buy a small piece of it.

No one has better understood that strand of middle Britain which thinks of itself as possessing a creative streak and an open mind. The Habitat recipe, in one form or another, still caters to it. Modern but classic, stylish but unpretentious, with a dash of the foreign: this basic approach underpins the popularity of brands from Zara Home to Muji. It has proved equally successful in Conran’s other major line of business, restaurants: see Côte, Gail’s Bakery or Carluccio’s (co-founded by Conran’s sister Priscilla). To one degree or another, these brands all try to balance a modicum of refinement with the reassurance that customers won’t feel humiliated when they examine the price tag.

Yet there was always something contradictory about this promise of good taste for the masses. In Britain, influential movements in design have been inspired by a disdain for vulgar, mass-produced goods since the Industrial Revolution. Conran liked to cite the great craftsman and designer William Morris — “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful” — but Morris famously detested factory-made products. From the Thirties, proponents of modern design despaired at the twee aesthetics and parochial norms of petit-bourgeois life in the suburbs. The fashionable culture of the Swinging Sixties, Conran’s own milieu, likewise defined itself against the conventional majority. This was the era of John Lennon and the Rolling Stones after all.

In his outlook and his commercial ambitions, Conran tried to ignore such tensions: good design should be available to everyone. But they have inevitably come back to the surface. With the rise of Asian manufacturing, passable copies of classy or arty products are now as widespread as any other; think mass-produced ceramics that imitate artisanal imperfection. Similarly, successful Habitat-like brands have acquired corporate managers who force them to expand. Even an apparently exclusive institution such as Soho House, the private members’ club for wealthy creatives, is now a globe-spanning lifestyle brand with locations in dozens of cities and its own line in cosmetics, furniture and workspaces. These trends have made Conran’s vision of life appear increasingly hollow, because even in the absence of snobbery, it relied on a sense of originality, individuality and artistic inspiration. Such qualities are difficult to find when a product suddenly graces every living room and Pinterest board.

These same contradictions doomed Habitat itself. In the late-Eighties, Conran’s appetite got the better of him, and a botched effort to incorporate two other firms led to his ejection from the company. After 2000 the brand rarely made a profit, as it was passed along by a series of retail giants, including Ikea, Argos and Sainsbury’s. Like so much that was fresh and subversive in the Sixties, Habitat was absorbed by the mainstream, its lively identity reduced to a market segment and subject to the demands of accounting. Its famous shops were trimmed down to a handful of showrooms, and last year those closed as well. Today it is little more than the husk of a brand — a slightly upmarket, design-conscious Ikea — condemned to the purgatory of online retail, where every competitor has its endless thumbnail images of seemingly identical products.

A more serious problem is that, while we now have an overabundance of style, the “life” side of the equation has become increasingly sparse. The Boomers buying continental quilts were a generation on the up. They could plausibly imagine themselves moving towards the spacious and leisurely domestic life that Conran dangled before them. Most of those young professionals who entered work after 2008, by contrast, know they will never stack their French crockery in a French holiday home; they would be happy with a modestly sized apartment. So aspiration does not really capture the appeal of lifestyle consumerism for these embittered millennials. It is more a question of consolation, or escapism, or a desperate attempt to distinguish themselves from the mass market where they know they belong.

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Then again, it increasingly feels like the whole notion of lifestyle was a recipe for dissatisfaction to begin with. Habitat emerged at a moment when traditional roles and social expectations were melting away; in their place, it proposed the idea of life as a work of art, an exercise in self-fashioning, with commodities and experiences guiding consumers towards a particular model of themselves. Today, with all the niches and subcultures spawned by network technology, there is no shortage of such identities on offer. If you like outdoor activities, you may find a brand community that combines this with certain political views and a style of fashion. If you like high-end cars, you might dream of occupying a branded condo in Miami or Dubai.

But these lives assembled from images remain just that: a collection of images, a fiction that can never fully be inhabited. It seems the best we can do is represent them in the same way they were presented to us, as a series of vignettes on Instagram, where the world takes on a idealised quality that is eerily reminiscent of those Habitat catalogues from decades ago. One gets the impression that we are not trying to persuade others of their reality so much as ourselves.

Obviously, after I wrote about her for the Guardian, the locals in our trendy Crouch End park soon got wind of it. They would stop us to ask if Maisie was the “Princess Diana dog” and we would joke about her being harassed by the paparazzi. One humourless reader didn’t really get the joke. He wrote to the newspaper: “Bindel has gone too far this time. That dog looks nothing like Princess Diana!”

But like Diana, Maisie was heartbreakingly beautiful, a Spaniel-Collie cross with a long coat and soulful eyes. Her legs were slightly too short for her body, which made her all the more lovable. But before she came to us, someone had abandoned her. According to her profile on a rescue charity’s website, it said she would be put to sleep the following day unless she was claimed. We did. And we were besotted.

Her reputation — and her bark — soon preceded her. Our local park has a tennis court attached, and Maisie would gallop in and grab a ball, mid-serve. The Crouch End tennis gang were rarely amused. She even made a name for herself in media circles: if ever my partner Harriet or I were doing interviews, Maisie would inevitably bark her head off. Producers would have to decide whether to rerecord the segment or broadcast her voice on Radio 4 or Sky News.

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Maisie brought us joy in private as well as in public. With us, she was sweet, cuddly and affectionate, though she barked at everyone else. And she was insecure. If Harriet and I were sitting together on the sofa, she would try to separate us with her paws. She had never got over whatever had happened to her in her former life. We supported her with her trauma, and she helped us when we needed comfort after a bad day. Harriet, a lawyer, and I both do work that takes us to very dark places, dealing with the detail of the worst excesses of men’s violence. It’s not uncommon for us to be talking about murder, prostitution and child sexual abuse before 8am. But having a creature who would greet us joyfully, blissfully unaware of the terrible things humans are capable of, was always incredibly therapeutic.

And we repaid that joy with love and attention and vast vast vets bills. I’ve never felt more middle-class than when I had to tell an editor that I couldn’t knock out a piece in the next hour because I had to take the dog to hydrotherapy. She had fortnightly appointments ever since she developed arthritis. She also had monthly vaccinations to keep the condition at bay, and check-ups for her kidney disease and pancreatitis. People without pets will howl at the expense, but I had always felt lucky we could afford this sort of care.

Never more so than when we decided we had to euthanise her. She could no longer bound on to the tennis courts to irritate the Wimbledon wannabes; she could no longer negotiate the four steps into the kitchen or out into the garden without help. She had gone off her food. Her kidney failure had progressed and the vet suggested a new course of treatment. “No,” I said. “It’s time for her to go”. My partner and I knew we would rather let her go a day too soon than a day too late. She was 16-and-a-half and it was just before Christmas.

I know people will call me a hypocrite for promoting the value of having a pet, particularly during a cost-of-living crisis. When people are using food banks to feed their children, isn’t it bad taste to be talking about pet food banks? I hear the criticism. And I have made similar arguments myself — railing against donkey sanctuaries getting more funding than domestic violence charities. And, yes, I do think we should prioritise humans. I spend a significant amount of my unpaid time and energy campaigning to keep women and children safe from male violence. But I also donate a fair bit every month to animal charities. I want women to live without male violence; I don’t want donkeys to suffer; I want people to be able to feed their pets. These things aren’t mutually exclusive.

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A couple of years ago, I wrote about about people who had to give up their pets because they couldn’t afford basic vet treatment or decent food. I wept with owners who recounted the pain of rehoming their beloved companions, feeling angry that there was little help for them. Things have only got worse since then. Figures released last week by the Dog’s Trust reveal that a record number of people are being forced to give up their pets: the charity received more than 45,000 requests from owners about giving up their animals in 2023.

If I could have kept Maisie alive, fit and healthy forever I would have. But when the time came, the vet came to the house so that Maisie could die in her own bed, with us close by. She was given a sedative, fell into a deep sleep, and then a final injection stopped her heart. She was wrapped up in her favourite blanket and carried out in a wicker basket, while we sat inconsolable, looking at her bowls, her toys, her collar.

I cry about her every day and I have barely slept since she died. Christmas was especially hard: even the cat looked bereft. I would go out for walks on my own, feeling completely weird without a dog by my side. It was so odd to not hear her incessant barking when the doorbell rang. The house has lost its soul. While researching that piece two years ago, I also spoke to experts in bereavement counselling for pet owners. Some might think going to a therapist to get through the loss of a pet is a ridiculous self-indulgence when there’s so much human suffering in the world. But I know now that such loss can bring with it terrible grief, particularly when they have been so therapeutic, as Maisie was for me

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Maybe it was the quietness of the holiday season, but I ended up looking at dogs on rescue centre websites — thinking that, in the future, we would probably get another. Yes, I felt guilt, but I figured there was no harm in looking. And then, of course, the inevitable happened. She was a cross between a springer spaniel and a French bulldog, nothing like Maisie. It was only a couple of days before I surreptitiously emailed the owner, asking for more details. It was a familiar story: family dog gets pregnant, six puppies are born, they all need rehoming.

We brought Ruby home on Sunday, a month after Maisie died. She is four-months-old, and full of energy. I can’t wait for her to start barking, demanding a walk first thing in the morning. I still feel Maisie’s loss like a hole in my heart. But I didn’t want to wait just for the sake of it. I’m a fairly anxious person, an insomniac, and the nature of my work leaves me with invasive thoughts. Being able to spend time with a furry bundle of happiness reduces my anxiety and makes me forget, albeit temporarily, the painful stories stored in my head. Maisie helped me keep doing the work that I do. Now, Ruby will take up the baton — and the tennis ball.

The first happened, but the second didn’t even come close. To describe Terminal One that Thursday night as a shitshow is unfair to shitshows, which are at least darkly entertaining. This was bureaucratic hell: lines of exhausted travellers snaking out into dreary linoleum hallways festooned with disconcertingly cheery posters welcoming us to NYC. It took close to an hour to even reach the main hall, and then we endured another hour of slow shuffling up to the 10 or so border security agents.

Ever since I began my project to walk around the world, it has always been jarring to come home to the US, often from much poorer countries — in this case Bulgaria — to find that our infrastructure is infinitely worse. Of course, flying internationally is still a luxury, and complaining about it is a bit elitist. I really wish the US, and JFK in particular, would make an effort to meet global standards of air travel — but it was what happened after I left the airport that convinced me that America, and especially NYC, is broken.

After crashing at a friend’s house not far from JFK, I got up to take a 4:39am subway train to the Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan, so I could catch the first bus home. The train, to be fair, was on time. But it was filthy. The carriages were mostly empty, except for three or four homeless guys in each who were either sleeping or passed-out. The dozen or so of us who got on at the first stop chose our seats carefully, positioning ourselves close to each other, for safety, and as far as possible from the sprawled-out guys and their piles of trash and puddles of urine.

The train slowly filled at each subsequent stop, until it was standing room only. I was seemingly the only person on the train who didn’t have to be there. Ride a NYC subway from the outer boroughs at 4am and you’ll find that it’s jammed with overnight construction workers, office cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel employees — all coming from late shifts, or going to early shifts, carrying tool bags, hard hats, work clothes. The “help” coming in and out of the city. United in fatigue and quiet frustration with the squalor, with the unconscious men taking up multiple seats.

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I thought about Sofia, where the subways and buses — and other public spaces and resources — are so much cleaner, safer, and smoother. Where workers simply wanting to get to their jobs don’t have to deal with navigating the mentally ill, addicted and desperate every day. For context, the GDP of Manhattan alone is about nine times that of the entire nation of Bulgaria. But NYC’s problems only seem to be getting worse, especially for those who have the least. I don’t have to take the subway; I have the cash for an Uber. But I try to see, and to understand a little, the world as most people see and understand the world.

And what I see is that, in the US, larger cities are basically two-tiered. A wealthy downtown professional class relies on inexpensive labourers who can’t afford to live near their workplace or drive a car; who are forced into long commutes on public transport systems in terminal decline.

Eventually, that morning, a guy covered in old vomit and carrying a cane, his trousers only just above his knees, got onto the subway train, and went up and down each carriage, hitting every sleeping or passed-out guy on the legs, yelling at them to move on, to give the rest of us some space. Everyone else pretended it wasn’t happening, hoping it wouldn’t go south, focusing instead on the floor or their phones.

And nothing “bad” did happen, beyond a few raised voices and some pantomime air punches. We all got where we needed to go.

But having garbage-strewn subways that effectively serve as mobile homeless shelters is no way to run a public transit system. It isn’t fair on the riders who don’t have the money to avoid the subway. It also isn’t fair to the homeless, who are being encouraged — or at least not discouraged — to hang out on crowded trains, maximising the chances that bad stuff will happen. The Daniel Penny-Jordan Neely case was a horrifying example. The death, on Sunday, of a man who tried to break up a fight on a Manhattan-bound subway train may be another. NYC’s authorities, even if they tried, couldn’t design a better system to provoke a nasty backlash against addiction, mental illness and homelessness.

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But this isn’t just an East Coast problem. Last May, city officials in Los Angeles proudly announced a new kind of bus stop to address rider complaints by providing “shade and lighting”. They called in La Sombrita — and were promptly and roundly mocked by Twitter users, who pointed out that it’s a sad provider of both light and shade. I mean, just look at it. At best it provides shade for one person, maybe. As for the light, I’m not sure how it is any different from your standard streetlamp?

And then there was the expense. It was claimed that each La Sombrita came to $10,000, although the research that went into designing it is said to have cost well over $300,000. That process included junkets to foreign cities, to see what works, including Quito in Ecuador, a city I’ve spent a fair amount of time in. I can tell you, Quito doesn’t have these sad things.

I’m not saying LA shouldn’t be doing something about bus stops. While the city has a surprisingly extensive system, with clean and comfortable buses, the stops themselves can be pretty terrible: a pole by the side of a road under an underpass that reeks of urine, or a simple bench in the glaring sun. But that they came up with La Sombrita as the solution — and announced it so proudly — is depressing, and another revealing example of America’s much bigger problem: its inability to build nice things.

One of the forces that influenced LA authorities, though they won’t admit it, is homelessness. They built La Sombrita, rather than a proper bus shelter, for the same reason NYC is taking benches out of Port Authority: they don’t want people to sleep there. It’s something you see more and more in American cities: a locking down of public spaces in an attempt to deal with the growth of the homeless population. A removal of resources for the majority, because of concerns over “misuse” by less than 1% of residents.

I’m not saying those concerns aren’t well-founded. Benches become unusable if someone is sleeping or pissing on them. But removing them is a cowardly way to cope with a problem that authorities are otherwise not wanting, or able, to address.

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To get big-brained about it, something like La Sombrita could only happen in a high-regulation/low-trust society like the US. If regulations massively limit both bottom-up and top-down solutions, and if those solutions are expected to protect against all sorts of bad behaviour, you end up building the least to mitigate the worst — building things the majority doesn’t want, or doesn’t find useful.

The high-regulation part of the US is usually couched in the language of safety, but it’s really about not allowing organic growth, which is messy — even though, people being people, it tends to result in things the majority really wants. Ecuador, by contrast, is a low-regulation (although low-trust) society: here, you get ad hoc, bottom-up solutions. If there is a bus stop in the middle of nowhere, without natural shade around it, riders rig an umbrella to a pole, or throw some old seats under a tree. In the US, such solutions would be dismantled within days.

But also, in places like Quito, bus stops attract street vendors, who come with umbrellas, making people feel safer by their very presence. LA has some of that, but it’s against the letter of the law, and vendors are constantly hassled with fines, or threats of shutdowns. My favourite taco place was closed down twice during my short stint in LA, for bureaucratic reasons. All this is to say that in Quito getting the bus is a much more pleasant experience than in LA — even though the latter city is roughly 10 times richer than Ecuador, and the latter has its own serious troubles.

Regulations themselves aren’t the problem, though. Germany, like much of northern Europe, is a high-regulation society, but it’s also high-trust, compared to the US. Here, nice and fully functional things are built without fear of misuse. For Americans, who have both a high-regulation and low-trust society, this is all rather depressing; it’s the combination that means we can’t have nice things.

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I like to live here, but the reality is we are rapidly falling behind the rest of the world in liveability, especially when you adjust for our wealth. Our cities are being frozen in time by an absurd, centralised regulatory mindset, which sees human flourishing as dirty and unsafe, and seems determined to wring out the last drops of any soul from our urban spaces. A mindset that manifests as one useless La Sombrita at a time.

It’s not that I’m worried about Americans moving overseas. That’s a luxury most don’t have — or want. I’m worried that authorities don’t feel compelled to provide citizens with towns and cities that work, and feel safe, and offer slivers of shade and corners that don’t smell of piss. But I’m also worried about the cultural forces that have got us here: that they allow the tolerably well-off to ignore the plight of those who are forced to depend on public services. The regulatory mindset is a problem that can be easily changed; the more pernicious part is that we are now firmly a low-trust society, and social trust impacts everything — every facet of life — and it can’t simply be legislated back. Like a ratchet wheel, once social trust comes undone, it spins quickly out of control, and getting it wound back is a long, arduous, and complex process.

I wish we could stop it from spinning too much further out of control, but I’m not particularly hopeful. The first step would be to realise that something is wrong, and right now a lot of people in the US seem determined to deny we have a problem. Why complain, when you can just order an Uber to avoid the subway?

The first Wetherspoon I went into was The Cherry Tree in Huddersfield, to hide from a morning rain shower. Even at 10.30am, it was buzzing. At first glance, it appeared to be filled with more outwardly broken people per square foot than almost anywhere I’ve been in the world: alcoholics (functioning and not), people with disabilities (mental or physical), and the very poor. If I were that way inclined, I could easily paint it as a scene to be gawked at, mocked, pitied, or all three. I could make a clown of the perfectly and precisely dressed bald gentleman who sat four tables down from me, alone, staring straight ahead, sipping his pints and periodically lifting up his tie to lick off the drops that fell on it. Yet as I sheltered in The Cherry Tree, what I saw in him, and beyond him, were hundreds of warm, human and moving scenes of otherwise lonely people not being alone.

The table directly next to mine catered to an evolving mix of mostly elderly people who seemed to all know each other. They would come, hug, sit, sip, gossip, get up, hug again, then move on. It ebbed and flowed like that through lunchtime, until by 2.00pm the table sat only a single couple, across from each other. They eventually invited me to join them. When they introduced themselves, they explained they were not a couple. Not like that, you see. Just friends, drawn a little closer now, because each had recently lost their spouse, and they were more alone than they’d ever been.

She had lost her Oliver eight months before, after 53 years of marriage. He was everything to her, and her to him. Oliver had been a builder, she had been a dinner lady, and after they raised a family, they retired to live their dream of travelling the world. Nashville, Italy, Spain, Vegas. Then he passed away. She tried to tell me more, but kept teetering on the edge of tears.

Her tablemate, a retired military man, had a similar story, although instead of tears there was a measured stoicism. A lost spouse of 22 years, and now confusion. Life wasn’t supposed to be lived without her.

So, they both came to The Cherry Tree daily, to forget and connect. We talked for two beers, and they tried, with all they had left, to keep the conversation positive — even though Huddersfield isn’t what it used to be, the world’s become crueller, and everything is going down the gutter. You have to make the best of the ups, and weather the downs, and focus on the grandkids.

It was an eerily similar conversation to one I’d once had with two widowers in McDonald’s outside of Houston, Texas: a conversation that had helped me to see the fast-food chain not as the soulless corporation to look down on, but as an essential part of local communities, especially “downscale ones”. A welcoming space in a world that’s becoming ever colder and more mechanical. Society needs these inexpensive, judgement-free zones, for people who are used to being judged; places where those of any race, class or age can get together simply to be together; where someone can escape loneliness and the elements, and sit all day in a quiet corner, reading the paper.

After The Cherry Tree, I would go into a Wetherspoon whenever I was near one, and I came to respect them even more than I respect McDonald’s. Partly because they are so pleasant: there is no blasting music or blinding lights. They have comfortable chairs with actual fabric. They are thoughtful, too, with separate spaces for every type of customer, from large families with rambunctious toddlers to sullen singles wanting to bond only with their pint. The employees are polite, which puts the customers on their best behaviour, even those who’ve been drinking for hours straight. I’ve now been to over 40 Wetherspoons, in all parts of the UK, and there are no clunkers.

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It is easy to take those things for granted, if you are well-off. But Wetherspoons are also beautiful. Other large chains aim to be dull in their consistency, but every Wetherspoon is unique. With rare exceptions — The Cherry Tree being one of them — each one is in a refurbished historical space, done up in neither a gaudy nor a sterile fashion, honouring the past while keeping it alive in the present. The preservation spirit alone ought to make cultured people gush about Wetherspoons, but, as I quickly learned, when I did gush about them, few gushed back. In fact, they tended to be downright scornful. I learned that I wasn’t supposed to love Wetherspoon, except perhaps ironically, because the chain is “problematic” with an owner “who’s a closed-minded arse”, who supported Brexit and “was wrong about Covid”.

The founder and owner of Wetherspoon, Tim Martin, is not loved by journalists, or others in the credentialed class. When I first picked up the chain’s in-house magazine, I found that the feeling was mutual. The issue in question had a blood red cover blaring, “Does Truth Matter?” with the subheading: “Many untrue statements were made about Wetherspoon during the pandemic. Wetherspoon News sets the record straight.”

The case he makes — about a snobby media class twisting his words to make him sound like an Evil Boss — might have merit, but it really doesn’t matter. The snobs can adjudicate over the finer details of the morality of going to a ’Spoons for breakfast when they’re hungover; meanwhile, the regulars’ loyalty has never wavered.

I find it particularly odd that people object to Wetherspoon because the owner supported Brexit. Because the other reason the chain gets judged is because it’s killing off smaller, family-owned pubs: undercutting them in price, due to its size and scale. I won’t deny that, after a week of going to such pubs, I was shocked at their prices. Was I really getting my favourite locally-made cask ale — the work of a craftsman, from an American perspective — for around £2? The same one for which I’d paid over double a few nights before? In short, Wetherspoon is doing exactly what the EU was doing.

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The death of American dignity

By Justin Webb

One of the main reasons for voting against Brexit was for more open markets: for the cross-border, neoliberal agenda that encourages global uniformity, and consequently larger corporations offering lower prices — like Wetherspoon. Those well-travelled, well-educated Londoners, with careers in big global corporations and enough money to pay the £7 for a pint in their uptight South Kensington local, sneer at the poor for drinking in a big corporate chain run by a bad man. But if they were consistent, they’d cheer it on, as one of the more pleasant and socially useful manifestations of corporatisation.

Because ultimately, what matters is this: that Wetherspoon is good for people. Politics has absolutely no bearing on whether that couple will keep meeting to share their sorrow over a drink, or whether that solitary man with the 1,000-yard stare will find shelter in a well-upholstered corner. It does not explain why I will continue to tour the Wetherspoons of England. All of us will keep going simply because we take ’Spoons at face value, and like them without irony. They are simply great establishments to have a pint in — which is how a pub is generally judged.

I now tune out when people start telling me the political reasons they don’t like a Wetherspoon. But I also skip over the editorial at the front of Wetherspoon News, before I read the rest of the magazine, which tells the stories of regular customers and long-time employees, such as shift leader Carol, who skipped 100 times a day for a month to raise money for cancer research, in honour of her late grandmother. 

Not surprisingly, my favourite profile to date is of a former medic, Steve Jones, who’s halfway to his retirement goal of visiting every Wetherspoon in the UK — using only trains and his feet. Wetherspoon is not its owner’s politics or even its owner. It is this: human stories, told simply.

There was the hunchbacked man with a pork dinner; the woman in a motorised wheelchair eating sticky toffee pudding; and the obese man stuffed into a far-too-small football kit, working on a nut roast and strawberry shake. Outside, in Market Square, the only thing going on was a showdown between two addicts, “John’s a lying cunt” and “Wendy’s a fucking a fat whore”. I started on team John but quickly pivoted to team Wendy, when John insisted he hadn’t punched the guy we all just saw him punch.

I had planned on staying in Dover for two nights, but by the time the police came to take John away, it was clear I’d been fooled by decades of tourist board propaganda. Here was a scrappy, poverty-riddled port town struggling to live up to its historical hype. An essential node in modern life where motorways intersect next to a huge port, allowing us to have the stuff we have.

I thought about giving up on Dover and going to sleep, but first I went to Wetherspoons. There, I met Sandra. Or as she wrote in my phone, Sandra Puta. Since I’ve spent time in Brazil and the Bronx, I recognised this as confirmation of what was already pretty clear — she was for sale, or rent at least.

Sandra had come into the Wetherspoons 20 minutes earlier and methodically worked her way through the tables of men, none of whom wanted the problems she was selling. It was a buyer’s market anyway, since there were plenty of younger, blonder options nearby. Some were accompanied by both their newborns and their mothers, so that the latter could act as impromptu babysitters if their daughters got work. Three generations at one table.

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Sandra was originally from Brazil, she told me, but had been making her way through the EU, using refugee status to get what she wanted. She’d arrived in Dover a few months ago, using what she called her “Pussy Passport” to gain a long-term visa, a flat to bring men back to, and the £170-per-week payment offered to victims of human trafficking. She alternated between talking to me and FaceTiming a man who could have been her dealer, her pimp, her boyfriend, or any combination of the above. 

She wasn’t shy about any of this — what she did, or the bullshit she told the bureaucrats. Her honesty was disarming. I’m used to deflection, but she was upfront about everything, including what she currently wanted, which was more money for crack. I made it clear I wasn’t going to help her with that. We talked for about two hours, before I left to get some sleep. The next day, I would begin my week-long walk to Portsmouth. When I woke at 5am, I had over 20 missed calls, because addicts be addicts, no matter how smart, genuine, and interesting they are.

When I planned my trek along England’s South-East coast, I had images of boardwalks crowded with arcades, high streets chock full of fish and chip shops, and town centres of ancient churches and quaint inns above pubs. I wasn’t prepared for how populated the beaches themselves would be. Despite being an island, England isn’t thought of by us Americans as having a beach culture, perhaps because in reality it’s so ingrained — the literal and figurative water everyone swims in. It’s a good attitude, which I prefer to the American one of “let’s invade the beach for a few hours with loads of paraphernalia”. The coast to the British is more about long-term therapy and less about immediate pleasure — it has to be, given the climate.

The result is the British, more than most, want to live close to the coast, even if they don’t ever swim in the water, even if it means giving up a larger house with space. The shoreline, even in the most remote parts, is dotted with trailer parks and clusters of RVs, tents, and vans — some right on the beach, others off in the hills with only a view of the ocean, but all gaining value by their proximity to the sea. Wherever in England there is the right to settle near the coast, people settle; sometimes they even settle where there isn’t the right.

Somewhere between New Romney and Rye, I met Mark, who lives with his furless cat in a van in a squatters’ camp. The pebbled land is owned by “some rich guy in Thailand who doesn’t give a fuck about us”. He claims it is one of the few remaining plots on the southern coast that hasn’t been taken away by “them fuckers in the government, or the rich”. It is a self-policing year-round community of about 100 people — most retired, on the dole, working odd day jobs, or all of the above. I’d seen other squatter communities along my walk, but none as well-organised.

Many of the beaches I walked along between Dover and Worthing were the sad pebble and concrete beaches that Americans picture when they feel sorry for the British. They are rocky, cold, misty, mercurial — but they are busy, which fits with the rather passive English attitude toward life: people making the best of what they have and accepting things as they are, rather than trying to change them. This is how it is; this is how it’s always been.

These beaches fit what I call the British “Extra Rolo Culture”. When I worked in London in the late Nineties, the buses all had huge ads proudly announcing that a roll of Rolos now came with an extra Rolo. Eight, not seven, baby Rolos per Rolo litter. For me and my banker friends, it came to represent the material sadness of English life, compared to the US. You might have a stagnant GDP, a crumbling empire, rock-filled beaches, soggy and tasteless food, rainy and dreary weather, but don’t despair: here’s an extra Rolo!

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In defence of class

By Justin Webb

At the time my personality was peak Wall Street and I viewed everything in economic terms, and by that measure England is something to be laughed at or pitied. That hasn’t changed in the last three decades; if anything it’s worse. The seaside towns I have walked through are a good example. I’m typing this in a pub where almost nothing works, after spending three nights in three different hotels where almost nothing worked. Where showers are either scalding hot or freezing cold. Where, when the weather turns a bit warmer than usual, people treat ice likes it’s some magical thing that can’t be accessed. Not without offending the Gods. Where everything is small, sad, half-broken and dreary.

Since then, I’ve changed. I get the extra Rolo thing now: it is about moving beyond the material, accepting what you have, which is perfectly fine, and focusing on other things. Sure, you can splurge every now and then, spoil yourself with an eighth Rolo, as a lark, but that’s not the primary point of happiness. From what I’ve seen and heard in my two long walks across England, the English working class is a lot happier, more comfortable in their own skin and content, than the American. They might suffer from many of the same problems, but they seem a lot less angry. 

While there’s a lot of reasons for this, I think the main one is, ironically, that the class system is more calcified. In the US there’s this fantasy that anyone can do anything. The elites peddle this all the time: with enough hard work you can be whatever you want to be. The corollary to that is it’s not ok to be working class. You should always be looking to move on, rather than building your own culture. Divorce your class and be better, you loser!

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Life on the Cornish breadline

By Tanya Gold

In the UK, the knowledge that you are stuck in your class is actually freeing. The attitude shifts from constantly trying to distance yourself from your community to contributing to it. Or at least being happy with it. Because fuck the elites and their scorn. I’m never gonna be them, so I’ll be what my dad was and my dad’s dad was. 

The result of this is the British seem like a wind-up toy that bumps over and over into a wall, but with a smile on its face. As a former banker, and an American driven to optimism, my first reaction is to find that annoying. But a decade removed from my banker days, I now see things in less material terms. I believe the biggest contributor to happiness is not having tons of stuff, but knowing your address in the universe of meaning. Knowing who you are, and why you’re here, and what will come once you’re gone. 

The English working class has that. It is eating mushy fish on pebbly beaches, then heading off to the local for a pint of bitter. That’s the difference between Dover and all the places in the US I’ve visited. They both have addicts — both have people like Sandra who are gaming the system — but in Dover, despite all the dysfunction, despite very little working, there is far more happiness than in the Bronx, or West Virginia. 

Chaplins, despite all the visible unhappiness, is a happy place. Everyone that came in knew everyone else, including lying John, and understood them. They knew where they were coming from and what they were going through. Because England, even the “worst” parts, still has a real community, built around a shared history and culture; even if it sometimes gets turned into tourism board silliness, it very much matters. The English know who they are, and are ok with it. That they also got an extra Rolo every now and then is the cherry on the top.

AI’s problems start at the top. Unlike the internet, which spawned a number of independent companies (including Google and Microsoft), AI seems to be controlled by existing tech giants, which are investing heavily in these new firms. ARM, for instance, the British-based chip designer whose IPO last week set Wall Street aflutter, is garnering huge investments from other Big Tech firms, including Nvidia, Intel, AMD and Apple. Elsewhere, Open AI’s largest investor is Microsoft, while DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014.

This pattern of collaboration between giants and upstarts suggests that the next tech revolution seems poised to empower the existing hierarchy. It also threatens the prospects of the classes below. Big Tech and venture capital executives such as Reid Hoffman promise that AI will serve the cause of “elevating humanity”, despite potentially wiping out hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide. Indeed, according to McKinsey, at least 12 million Americans will be forced to find new work by 2030. In other words, AI looks destined to warp our class structure in a similar way to feudalism, turning what has been a collection of Roman citizens into serfs.

But is this the entire story? Historically, humans have performed analytical tasks manually. They may have created tools, such as spreadsheets and surveys, to help them. But the tasks of optimising businesses have largely lain in the hands of human analysts who spend their days collecting data on the performance of businesses and markets. In the last phase of technological development, jobs for these “symbolic analysts” exploded: in the US, the number of workers in occupations requiring average to above-average education, training and experience increased from 49 million in 1980 to 83 million in 2015. Yet these tasks are now running into a buzzsaw with AI, whose underlying premise is that machines can learn to detect patterns and changes better than human beings.

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The greatest generational conflict

By Joel Kotkin

In his bestselling book AI Superpowers, Kai Fu Lee, a former Google and Microsoft boss who now runs one of the world’s most prolific AI venture funds, proposed a two-dimensional view of the future of work. His key thesis: that the social nature of a job and the discretionary nature of a job will be the key factors underlying AI’s impact. If, for instance, a job is highly formulaic and has few discretionary decisions, and people perform their tasks with little social interaction, AI is likely to displace it. So, while the CEO of an insurance company might be safe from being displaced by AI, one of his analysts is not.

And this is where the nuance is often lost. According to the US Labor Department, AI and automation could impact as many as many as 90 million American workers, with warehouse workers among the most prominent losers. What will really alter class relations, however, is the impact on more professional jobs. They have been the ascendent class for the last two generations, growing at an average annual rate of 2.2% since 2001 — well above the 0.4% annual rise for total employment. But whereas the computer revolution was a boon to those working as programmers and market researchers, AI does the job for them, often with more speed and accuracy. As Rony Abovitz, one of the pioneers of virtual reality and AI, has observed: “It’s the end of the white-collar knowledge work.”

In such a world, it is not hard to envisage a new kind of class conflict that extends beyond the traditional Marxist conflict between low-wage workers and better-educated owners. More than 82% of millennials fear AI will reduce their pay, and they are right to be worried. “We may be at the peak of the need for knowledge workers,” Atif Rafiq, a former chief digital officer at McDonald’s and Volvo, recently warned. “We just need fewer people to do the same thing.” As if to illustrate his point, tech firms such as Meta and Lyft have already announced major cutbacks in their white-collar workforce, while IBM has paused hiring to assess how many mid-level jobs can be replaced by AI.

What this means more broadly isn’t tricky to discern: a once-rising class that often embraced the oligarchy’s ideas now faces the same kind of marginalisation experienced by less-educated workers for generations. And it is not unreasonable to conclude this could eventually divide the current political alliance between progressively minded professionals and the AI-enhanced elite. Perhaps the most visible example of this is the writers and actors strike — drawn from a class traditionally aligned with the oligarchs — currently underway in America, where AI threatens to make the manufacturing of entertainment largely redundant.

Indeed, tech executives are already planning for the emergence of a vast, unproductive class made largely redundant by AI and robotics. After interviewing 147 digital company founders, the technology journalist Gregory Ferenstein has concluded that an “increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people”, while everyone else comes to rely on gig work and government aid. This is reflected in support for universal basic income by a number of leading tech oligarchs — Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick (former head of Uber), and AI guru Sam Altman (CEO of Open AI).

Of course, many might wonder what is wrong with this. Already, roughly half of all Americans support the idea of a guaranteed basic income of about $2,000 a month if robots put them out of work. UBI enjoys even stronger support in most European countries, particularly among younger people. Further east, the popular Japanese Marxist philosopher Kohei Sato sees re-distribution as a way to as achieve the green goals of “degrowth” and “net zero” without devastating the masses.

Yet if history is our guide, such intellectual circles are surely plagued by a certain naiveté. In every stage of capitalism, the ruling class has offered promises of welfare and support. And in every stage of capitalism, they have only done so with the intention of strengthening their own position.

What is different this time, though, is that there is one class of worker who remains capable of opposing this neo-feudal structure: those with hands-on yet skilled jobs, such as the engineers refusing to work at Intel’s new semiconductor facility in Ohio. After all, even the infrastructure for AI requires tactile skills, and, as a result, technically capable blue-collar workers still have leverage and can shut down the whole infrastructure. This same class of skilled artisans were at the vanguard of the rise of democratic capitalism. Two centuries later, they may be our best hope for resisting a very different revolution.

As teams do whatever it takes to win, swearing by the rather un-cricket mantra of by hook or by crook, is it any surprise that esprit de corps has wound up a collateral casualty? This is more significant than it appears at first blush. Historically, especially in the early decades of the previous century, the sentimentalisation of sportsmanship enabled cricket to declaim a unifying myth that was for the better part true. The “spirit of the game”, trite as this might sound, was the glue holding together the riff-raff and the ruling class, black and white — or so the Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James argued in Beyond a Boundary, indisputably the best book on cricket, published 60 years ago. On the field, he argued, all social divisions were transcended, even if only fleetingly. For players were bound together by the “code” of cricket.

What the game looks like in default of such a code is plain to see. Around the same time Bairstow was having his battles with the bails, there detonated the bombshell ICEC report, “Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket”. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Over three in four black and brown respondents spoke of having faced racial discrimination, substantiating the Yorkshire player Azeem Rafiq’s charge made before a parliamentary inquiry last year. Since then, heads have rolled — though not those of his harassers. Rafiq has left Britain on account of the abuse following his testimony. Incredibly, the man tasked with reforming Yorkshire’s club, Kamlesh Patel, has been hounded out his position as well. As in Yorkshire, so in Essex, where the black cricketer Maurice Chambers was repeatedly called a monkey and taunted with a banana. C.L.R. James, one suspects, must be rolling in his Trinidadian grave. For the game he describes in Beyond a Boundary is many worlds apart from the game it has become. Time was the “spirit of game” was more than a cynical expedient to clobber opponents. As James has it, it is something of a higher, even egalitarian calling.

James was drawn to cricket at an early age. It was, he describes, one half of a double inheritance. There was, on both sides of the family, the Puritan bequest, which translated into a generosity of spirit embodied by his aunt Judith: “whenever I went to see her, [she] fed me with that sumptuousness which the Trinidad Negroes have inherited from the old extravagant plantation owners”. The spirit of cricket was only an extension of this habit of mind. And it was a stroke of luck that his home gave on to a cricket pitch, his “window exactly behind the wicket”. Tunapuna, his hometown of 3,000 a stone’s throw from Port of Spain, was a cricket-crazy place. All in all, “a good case could be made for predestination”, he slyly writes.

But the sport was also an engine for rising above hoi-polloi. It’s no secret, of course, that cricket has always been a game of certain pretensions. We immediately understand, for instance, the significance of Paul Pennyfeather’s social handicaps in Decline and Fall when he declaims, “I don’t know a word of German, I’ve had no experience, I’ve got no testimonials, and I can’t play cricket.” For James, the game furnished a certain respectability — and “respectability was not an ideal; it was an armour”. The older Jameses craved it just as the young C.L.R. did. His father saw to it that the young C.L.R. acquired the cultural capital needed to secure a spot at Queen’s Royal College, Trinidad’s Eton. There, he studied Latin and Greek under Oxbridge types, who, more importantly, “taught a code, the English public-school code”. If all of this sounds Bridesheady, it’s because it is. He took a de haut en bas view of his fellow natives, whom he disdained because they were less au fait with Burke than he was. “Intellectually I lived abroad, chiefly in England.” Vanity Fair came as a revelation: “George Osborne was the hero.” One can see the appeal of snobbery. Later in life, he would credit “Thackeray, not Marx”, for his turn to the Left.

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A career path had been cut out for him: Oxford (read: prestige), lawyering (read: prosperity), political office (read: power). But the rebel had other plans. The lure of cricket wasn’t feasibly resisted. Though he would later be embarrassed by his choice, he plumped to play for Maple, the club for light-skinned West Indians. Shamrock and Queen’s Park Oval were “almost exclusively white… I would have been more easily elected to the MCC than to either.” Stingo was “plebeians: the butcher, the tailor, the candlestick maker, the casual labourer, with a sprinkling of unemployed. Totally black and no social status whatsoever.” Shannon belonged to the “black lower-middle class: the teacher, the law clerk, the worker in the printing office”. Maple, by contrast, was distinctly “brown-skinned and middle class”.

As he later explained, though not entirely in an attempt at self-exculpation, “the Negroid population of the West Indies is composed of a large percentage of actually black people and about 15 or 20 per cent who are a varying combination of white and black. From the days of slavery, they have always claimed superiority to the ordinary black… It is not too much to say that in a West Indian colony, the surest sign of a man having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself.” All of which is to say cricket in James’ time was no post-racial, anti-elitist Eden. Yet it was the “spirit of the game” that prevented the uglier instincts of a hidebound society from raising their head: “The foregoing makes it easy to misunderstand the atmosphere in which we played. We never quarrelled. When we played, Shannon, Maple, and Stingo members mixed easily on the same side.” Social tensions were sublimated into a sporting register, the cricketing drama of strokes and catches. “The sportsmanship was clean… Racialism did very little harm… If I had the power, I wouldn’t alter one selection.”

Racism and elitism very simply were, as the common phrase goes, “not cricket”. More than a game, it seems, cricket for James was a temperament: “as soon as we stepped on to the cricket field, we were a motley crew: the children of some white officials and white business men, middle-class blacks and mulattos, Chinese boys, Indian boys, poor black boys… We learned to play [as a] team, which meant subordinating your personal inclinations, and even interests, to the good of the whole. We kept a stiff upper lip.” It is no accident that such a worldview — ironically of patrician derivation — primed James for a life on the Left. A political awakening of sorts swiftly followed. The snobbishness retreated. His sympathies for the lower orders became more pronounced in industrial Lancashire, where he arrived in 1932 to help the cricketing giant Learie Constantine write his autobiography. Not long after, he became a cricket columnist for the Manchester Guardian, as it then was, on the strength of that connection. For five years, he shuttled between his Hampstead home and Lord’s, while also working on his pioneering survey of the Haitian Revolution. Black Jacobins appeared in 1938, the year he left for the New World.

There he stayed for 15 years, not seeing a single cricket match for all of that time. Instead, he immersed himself in the Pythonesque quarrels of the American Left, one micro-party accusing the other of selling out. The most formative episode of his American stay, though, was a basketball scandal in the early Fifties. What transpired was far from revelatory: in time-honoured fashion, college players fixed matches in cahoots with bookies. Yet, such an innocent James was, it came as a revelation to him. How could these young men betray their teams? His American friends understandably rolled their eyes. But the middle-aged James just couldn’t get over it. Rather touchingly in Beyond a Boundary, he records his “instinctive repulsion” on learning of “these crimes”.

America proved too much. James, unsurprisingly, came hurtling back home to reacquaint himself with that treasured breed of his, the cricketing “genus Britannicus”. In later years, he did his bit to make the gentleman’s game a fairer one. In his brief spell back home in Trinidad as the editor of The Nation in 1958, for instance, he combined political activism and cricket to bring an end to the age white Test captaincy in West Indies. By all accounts, it was an unpleasant campaign — most definitely “not cricket”. The previous captain, Gerry Alexander, whom James insinuated was a racist for sending back the intemperate Roy Gilchrist from the team’s India tour, possibly had his reasons. Gilchrist had bowled one too many beamers and — apparently — even pulled a knife on Alexander. Still, installing the black Frank Worrell was an important milestone. Less rational was James’ uncritical adoration of the mediocre batsmen Wilton St Hill. With a batting average of 27.15, he was, rather perversely, likened to Bradman (the Don’s average: 95.14). It would have been a baffling encomium but for James’ appropriation of the comedian Jimmy Durante’s signature phrase: “that’s my boy”. As James put it with candour, “Wilton St Hill was our boy.”

“Our boys”, as it were, are in short supply these days. Most Brits no longer relate to the players on the field. In our time, the talent pathway runs through public schools. A curious inversion has transpired: in society at large, and indeed football among other ball games, meritocracy has become a watchword and racism has declined; in cricket, however, the opposite has been true. The day the ICEC report hit the front pages, a visual corroboration materialised in the England XI selected for the second Ashes Test. It was Lord’s in the year 2023, but it could have been the House of Lords circa 1923. All 11 players were white; nine were privately educated.

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The strange death of Jeremy Clarkson's England

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Of all the Test batsmen who have debuted for England since 2011, some 95% have been white, and 77% from private schools (a mere 7% in the country have attended these). This when one in five cricketers at the academy level are South Asian. Likewise, between 1995 and 2020, the number of black professional cricketers has fallen by 75%. Adil Rashid, from a Bradford two-up two-down, these days it is the exception that proves the rule. What we have witnessed, in nuce, is nothing less than the strange death of progressive cricket. What on earth has happened? For one thing, cricket has ceased to belong to our zeitgeist. Football has stolen a march on it, not least because run-of-the-mill cricket kits can set you back north of £500. At the turn of the millennium, moreover, penurious schools across England set about selling their playing fields. Furthermore, Test cricket has moved behind a televisual paywall since 2005.

It is worth remembering that a hundred years ago, it was cricket, and not football, that was the national game, binding the classes together. Emblematic was the popular Gentlemen vs Players fixture that ran from 1806 to 1963, paid working-class professionals in the employ of county clubs playing against unpaid amateurs of aristocratic and bourgeois stock. The two classes also played shoulder to shoulder in the same teams, though in a singularly and preeningly English way. The lower and higher orders took the field through separate gates at Lord’s, the latter having their initials precede their surnames on scorecards (and vice versa for the former). Freud would have described this as the narcissism of small differences. More substantively, though, cricket was a game for all. Received wisdom had it that when England needed a fast bowler, “all it had to do was whistle down a Nottinghamshire coal mine”. Just as D.H. Lawrence was saved from a career at the colliery by his facility with words, his near-neighbour Harold Larwood was whisked away from the pits thanks to his way with the ball. From Fred Trueman to Freddie Flintoff, it’s been a subaltern’s game. As late as the mid-Nineties, four in five Test cricketers were state school kids.

Now is a good time to remember this history. Clearly, we’re in the midst of a cricketing renaissance. “Bazball”, the new style of cricket — bolder, riskier, faster — inaugurated by the captain Ben Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum, has given the game a new tenor. Victories in white-ball cricket, too, have been infectious. Some of the stardust has rubbed off on the unabridged game. The opening fixture of the Ashes brought in a staggering 2.1 million viewers, Sky Sports reported, the highest ever for a Test match. Even the stumping affair showed a renewed interest in the game, the British and Australian prime ministers crossing bats over the matter. Australia will retain the Ashes, but there is now a momentum to English cricket. There’s no telling how the next Ashes will pan out. But first, England will need to cleanse the Augean stables and rediscover the Jamesian spirit of the game.

The Bible declares that those who do not work shall not eat, and our secular society clings onto that idea: the harder you work, the greater your reward ought to be. There is a glut of articles, for instance, expressing outrage at how many junior doctors are paid less than fast-food workers. If you’re being compared to a McDonald’s employee, you know it’s bad.

I worked in McDonald’s for a few years, and it’s true: the wages set the lowest bar. If junior doctors are earning so little, that is a scandal. But drawing attention to the paltry pay of working-class people just so you can make a point about the treatment of overwhelmingly middle-class public servants isn’t exactly progressive.

Fast-food work is derided because it’s an “unskilled” job that supposedly any fool can do. It was my first job, and the same was true for many of the people I worked with. Three quarters of McDonald’s employees are under the age of 25. The workforce at my store was young and diverse, many coming from immigrant backgrounds, very few of us university educated. The sort of people ignored by society.

Around 100 current and recent McDonald’s staff have recently testified, in a BBC report, to enduring a toxic culture of sexual harassment, bullying and racism. Female workers as young as 16 described experiences of groping and intimidation, from both customers and staff members. Managers were accused of turning a “blind eye”.

Though I can’t testify to personally witnessing any sexual harassment while I worked at McDonald’s, I did hear about it. When I first started, a male crew member who was notorious for hitting on female colleagues was suspended for making inappropriate sexual comments. He left soon afterwards. There was also a 16-year-old worker was hit on by a middle-aged, lecherous dad, while he was overseeing his own 11-year-old daughter’s birthday party.

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Why the Left eat junk

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To some extent, such objectification is true of any workplace. In History and Class Consciousness, the Marxist György Lukács developed the concept of “reification”, which describes how, in a capitalist society, human relations are treated as relations between things. Human themselves are treated as objects, while abstract ideas like “capital” or “the market” become active subjects that determine human activity. In other words, humans are controlled by capital, rather than vice-versa.

Being a fast-food worker is perhaps the most extreme example of this condition. It is a job that allows no room for autonomy. For a good portion of my day, I was a piece of equipment that the bosses had paid for, and they wanted to get their money’s worth. Orders were issued from on high, the managers enforced them, and I was supposed to obey them without question, on pain of sanctions such as getting fired or denied decent hours. We were all overworked, because the store was understaffed — unless it was a Friday or Saturday night. Management needed to keep labour costs as low as they could get away with, to maintain profitability. There were busy shifts when I would be dumped on fries, to cook them and box them by myself, hour after hour. On summer days, it was excruciating.

Because the job is so monotonous and automatic, I felt like I was more robot than person. Working in McDonald’s made me feel what Marx meant by his theory of “alienation”, as opposed to just understanding it as an abstract intellectual concept. Alienation, for Marx, was how workers became estranged from the product of their labour, never reaping the benefits of production. It’s something that is impossible to complain about, when you feel like you’re just another cog in a machine, disposable and easily replaceable. When your work is seen as near-worthless, it’s hard to protest that you are being underpaid for what you help produce shift after shift.

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By Ralph Leonard

Customers often reinforce this feeling. There is a general belief that people working in the food industry are servants and, therefore, lesser beings. Places such as McDonald’s cater to the masses; in their own work stations, its customers will often experience the same anxiety, alienation and precariousness. But McDonald’s is one of the few spaces where someone, downtrodden by their own boss, can feel like they have power — where they, as the customer, are king.

Those who exploit this transaction know that the power relations are lopsided in their favour. If they become aggressive and hurl abuse at a fast-food worker, for mostly minor infractions, the worker can’t defend themselves. They must maintain their composure, respond politely and just take the abuse on the chin. Otherwise, they may be damaging the company’s reputation for providing quality customer service, and even risking their job. I know of someone who was “written up” for getting angry at a customer who was swearing at him while complaining about cold fries. Usually if you have three write-ups, your contract will be terminated.

Meanwhile, the ubiquitous presence of CCTV cameras reminded us that we were always being watched. Indeed, McDonald’s must have recorded so many incidents of sexual harassment and bullying against workers. Yet footage is seldom used to bring about justice. One of the workers who testified in the BBC story said that, even though her sexual harassment was caught on camera, she had to carry on working with the perpetrator.

The harassment and bullying that goes on within McDonald’s isn’t simply a problem of gross lechers, then; it is a symptom of structural tendency in these workplaces to objectify human beings. It is a symptom, too, of the precarity of the job market for young people. Many of those I worked with had second jobs, often similarly low-waged, just to bolster their paltry income.

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Perhaps part of why fast-food work is devalued is because the food served is seen as a vulgar indulgence, unlike junior doctors. But in this respect, how is it different from other source of pleasure? People want to eat fast food, and someone has to serve them. Those servers work long, hard hours. Beyond deserving basic respect, they should be able to earn a living, afford decent housing and a social life, raise a family.

But McDonald’s won’t give them these things, unless pressed. “Capital,” as Marx rightly stated, “is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.” Fast-food restaurants have got away with treating their workers badly simply because they can; but they have been enabled by a tacit view, among the public, that these workers are somehow unworthy. It’s tempting to see the unionisation drives and strikes that have occurred in the past few years as the beginning of a fairer era. But it’s also hard to imagine a future in which fast-food workers aren’t the benchmark for bad wages, offered in exchange for their humanity.

The woman thrashing me pauses to throw a ladleful of eucalyptus-infused water onto a sauna stove. There is a hiss, and steam clouds the room. “Beware the puddles, for they are fiery intra-planetary cauldrons, used by the Sussex dragons to travel to Australia,” chants the English siren. Outside, a hip Canadian woman chops wood to sensuous French-Malian rock-kora fusion playing from a portable speaker. Others are busy at work, sweeping and carefully preparing the enchanted sauna ceremony.

My birch-twig attacker is Jamie, the ethereal saunameister of this spa-start-up-cum-pagan-temple. In a previous life, Jamie was a MacBook-using, flat white-sipping hipster photographer from east London, growing slowly disillusioned with the pressure and precarity of the city’s gentrification. Then, one day, while hungover at a music festival, she stumbled upon a sauna. “I came out of the sauna into nature and plunged into a cold lake and was reborn,” she says.

Months later, Jamie left London, moved to Sussex and set up her first sauna venture. After just five years, she’s flourishing: “I’ve created a really beautiful life for myself. I live on the beach, I work in a forest, I run my own business. I’m doing work that feels purposeful and impactful.”

In this, Jamie’s rebirth is far from unique. Quite the opposite: she is part of a vanguard rejecting the refined hedonism of the globalised Brooklyn-Shoreditch urban creative class. Suffocated by the downward mobility induced by our neo-feudal economy and its spiritually malnourished consensus, Jamie is part of an emergent socio-economic class — the Bohemian Peasantry, or Bopeas for short.

The Bopeas are a new paradigm in culture and consumption. They are the descendants of other post-war consumer groups: the Hippies, the Yuppies, and the Bobos of Soho House. However, unlike their predecessors, who grew from the boom of generational upward mobility and urbanisation in the 80 years after the Second World War, the Bopeas are responding to something else: a crisis of what Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction” — and a diminishing need for everyone to be an urban creative.

For the past year, I have been investigating and decoding the experience of the downward mobility of the elite-aspirant creative class across the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and China. As part of a collective of social scientists, I have been exploring optimistic alternative responses to widespread disenchantment. Contrary to the depressing “opting-out” tales of global NEETs, hikikomori and the Great Resignation, I studied people and communities finding new ways to live a fulfilling life within society.

Like the rest of their generation, the Bopeas were bred to chase a particular vision of the good life, but they now know they cannot replicate their parent’s lifestyles — waiting until their deaths to inherit. Thomas Piketty calls this the return to the “inheritance society” that has been the norm for most of history. Steve Bannon puts it more bluntly: they are “nothing but 19th-century Russian serfs. They’re better fed; they’re better clothed; they’re in better shape; they have more information than anybody in the world at any point in time, but they don’t own anything.”

Yet rather than succumbing to the doom and gloom or burning themselves out by hustling, Bopeas are developing new ways to build a life. They cultivate meaning and status in ways that expand the ideals of success beyond conventional material accumulation and instantly decaying “cool”. Moreover, while this modern serfdom may not be able to accrue capital, Bopeas are spoiled for choice in a consumer universe built by brands. They can’t buy houses in the city, but they do have disposable income and a clear idea of “how to spend it”.

But what are Bopeas? The Bopeas are diverse in demographics and geography, but united by a shared mindset. Like the creative class that now dominate our culture, they draw inspiration from the bohemian ethos of artistry, non-conformity and self-expression. At the same time, however, they are wary of the narcissistic excesses of bohemianism, and enjoy a neo-medieval peasant worldview rooted in community values, rituals and natural rhythms.

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The Bopeas don’t wear a uniform. There is no universal white sneaker choice and craft-beer calling card. Instead, it’s all about the niche, the hyper-local and the mythic. While they might be wearing an expensive French worker’s jacket bought from a nose-to-tail restaurant, they are more easily spotted by their deeds and search for harmony. Unlike their success-obsessed Yuppie and Bobo ancestors, Bopeas want to flourish holistically. They want to feel deeply in tune with their bodies and the world. They are the wild swimmers,  the sauna obsessives, and the knitting, foraging and fermenting revivalists. They’re the ones rewilding our forests and guts. They are already shaping elite culture — they’re the reason the Financial Times wants you to buy £1,225 Givenchy cargo gardening trousers.

In essence, Bopeas opt for enchantment over refinement. In an algorithmic meat market of homogenous aesthetics and lifestyles, Bopeas differentiate themselves through their intentional cultivation of harmony. While Bopeaism incarnates in individuals — Paul Kingsnorth is perhaps the Bopea made flesh — it is also an aspirational mindset. During the Covid lockdowns, for instance, many of us transfigured into sourdough Bopeas.

The Bopeas I studied are essentially united by a desire to nurture genuine connection and finding meaning in life. They care about wider societal issues such as climate change and inequality, but they are rarely overtly political. Instead, they are driven by a small-scale politics of harmony channelling their values into making a positive, sustainable impact in their immediate world through their work, social and family lives. They don’t care for empty virtue-signalling.

Bopeas want to immerse themselves in nature and quirky culture. All of them are tired of trends, off-the-shelf lifestyles, and endless inane scrolling and swiping that leaves them feeling hollow. Instead, they seek wisdom that provides lasting guidance to shape life, even if it comes from ancient practices and traditions — or even (gasp) institutional religion. There is no central inspiration hub for Bopeas. They curate their own constellation of ideas and wisdom from a dynamic fusion of writers, podcasters and micro-influencers who align with their particular Bopea passions.

Most importantly, Bopeas don’t want to do it alone. Frustrated by the loneliness of modern branded “community”, Bopeas seek the comfort of tight-knit fellowships pursuing shared projects and a soulful life comforted by real community obligation and nature. In many ways, then, the Bopeas are a kind of post-internet Arts and Crafts movement. And yet, the dark satanic mills they rebuff are not the soulless Victorian workhouses, but the design agencies and tech start-ups that inhabit the WeWorks that have colonised the very same factories. Indeed, if the Victorian backlash was ideologically led by John Ruskin and manifested by William Morris, then their Bopea spiritual successors are King Charles III and Taylor Swift.

Like Ruskin, Charles III serves as the Apex Bopea philosopher king. With his tireless environmentalism, Perennialist theology, and mystic outlook, Charles has set the agenda for a bohemian neo-medieval revolution that places harmony and ancient wisdom at the centre. As Aris Roussinos writes, as “a Christian mystic, a layer of hedgerows and protector of the soil, there is a mythic quality of identification between our King and his land which we have not experienced for some time”.

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Meanwhile, like Morris, Taylor Swift has served as an avatar of the King’s Bopea ideology. In the midst of the lockdowns, Swift used her albums Folklore and Evermore to position herself as the ultimate Bopea vessel. With her knitted cardigans, enchanted forests and magic, Swift catapulted the niche Pinterest-TikTok cottagecore aesthetic community to a global platform. By celebrating the wonders of a simple, traditional lifestyle surrounded by a bucolic paradise and manual crafts, she made the enchanted Bopea worldview sexy.

Elsewhere, Bopeaism continues to be evangelised to the masses through notable Bopea Elders. Jeremy Clarkson’s Clarkson’s Farm is now the most-viewed original series on Amazon Prime in the UK. Nick Cave has transitioned from post-punk enfant terrible to earnest coronation-attending Christian. Tilda Swinton set up a tiny Steiner school in rural Scotland where phones are banned and children must learn to care for bees. Even Carrie Johnson, with her strawberry picking and knitted blankets, has become the nation’s Bopea tradwife. These are clear signals of a subtle re-enchantment of the world — a paradoxically countercultural conservatism.

Beyond the global stage, the internet is awash with Bopea missionaries. One does not have to search too far before getting lost in the world of doomstrolling, Irish water worshipers, entrepreneurs restoring small holdings, fungi activism, and Gladstone’s foraging and wild-swimming chef many-great-granddaughter. Bopeaism is simultaneously everywhere and totally invisible to those that are not looking. Some go full Bopea and are living off the grid. Others are more likely to gentrify semi-urban spaces like Hastings or Polperro — or perhaps Bruton if there’s family money. Financially, most Bopeas often maintain more conventional urban creative industry jobs — in marketing, design or tech — but work remotely from their more affordable homes. However, the most committed enter the Bopea culture production industries, selling Bopea artefacts and services to wealthier Bopea aspirants — like Jamie and her sauna business.

What next? Will Bopeas go the same way as the hippies? Bopeaism certainly seems more robust than its ancestors. It is, after all, more than just a set of aesthetics and practices that you can trade in and out of, but rather a mindset inspired by a hunger for timelessness. It serves as the North Star of a more harmonious post-internet worldview that rises above the digitally mediated pleasure that David Courtright terms “limbic capitalism”. But if it is to survive, it must be nurtured carefully and protected from the trend-market feedback loop, lest it be bled dry and discarded.

When Richard Florida published the The Rise of the Creative Class in 2002 and anointed the Yuppie-slaying “No Collar” hipsters and Bobos, policymakers and corporate brands descended like vampires. Within two decades, the creative class has been drained of all vitality. Investment bankers now wear white sneakers. Wetherspoons sells smashed avocado muffins. Everywhere looks like an Airbnb. In such a world, Bopeaism is surely something that must be nourished and sustained — not for a generation, but for eternity.

Boba has a reputation for being a drink that’s all sugar and no substance. Likewise, a boba liberal is an Asian who uncritically subscribes to the Democrat party line that “diversity is our strength!”, while making shallow tributes to Asian-American identity, such as celebrating representation in Hollywood. While it is commonly used by conservatives, “boba liberalism” was actually named by the other sworn enemy of liberals: Leftists. It was coined by a socialist Twitter activist, who wrote that “Boba Liberalism is thinking t-shirts, products, and merchandise are the main way of affirming one’s racial identity”.

The term is also used to describe Asians who are deemed to have been “whitewashed” — to have abandoned their “authentic” Asian identity to assimilate into the middle class. But how do you decide what counts as “authentic”, when the whole concept of Asian-American identity is built on a shaky foundation? African Americans are mostly descended from individuals who crossed the Atlantic centuries ago as slaves, and are therefore disconnected from their ancestors: they had no choice but to create a new culture from scratch, which gives it a coherence. Asian Americans, by contrast, have only existed in significant numbers for the past few decades. They have stronger ties, as well as living relatives, with other hugely varying nations. Bureaucracy may still lump together East and South Asians, but the two groups are two distinct races in everyday life. Ironically, in an era when racial minorities are encouraged to think about themselves as categories on a census form, boba liberalism is pushing a pan-Asian identity that does not actually exist.

The recent New York Times article “What Does It Mean to Be an Asian American Brewer?” is a classic example of how that identity is pushed. The author emphasises how few Asians there are in the industry, and points how those breweries which have succeeded began using Asian motifs, such as Chinese Zodiac symbols, only once they became popular. The only real difference between an Asian and a non-Asian brewery, apparently, is that an Asian brewery engages in self-Orientalism so that the mostly non-Asian customers can get feel like they are getting an “exotic” experience, even though the beer tastes just like any classic American beer.

Over time, politically conservative Asian Americans have also come to enthusiastically adopt the term “boba liberal” — mainly because it gave them a chance to “own the libs”. Like Asian Leftists, conservative Asians view boba liberals as not possessing an authentic Asian-American identity, but for the Right, disparaging boba liberalism is not a way to critique capitalism. It is a way of taking aim at a small but influential group of progressive Asian-American activists who are supposedly selling out other Asians, especially working-class Asians, in order to win brownie points from elite, generally white liberals.

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After all, Boba liberalism is, essentially, an Asian version of white liberalism — or wokeness. The core of this identity is self-flagellation, the sacred mission to “do the work” of atoning for being born white, the original sin. As Tom Holland has suggested, wokeness is a direct by-product of European Christian morality. And modern-day white liberalism has largely abandoned Christianity, but persistent is the desire to make up for the offences of one’s ancestors, and to see that the last shall be first and that the first shall be last.

As the most educated in society have adopted the tenets of this new religion, people who want access to elite spaces feel immense pressure to convert. Asian Americans from middle- to upper-class families are typically from majority-white neighbourhoods, and the urge to join the club is immense. (This demographic has the highest rates of getting into elite colleges.) Since white guilt is in vogue among their white liberal peers, they have created their own version.

Boba liberals cleave to the idea that that “anti-blackness” is endemic in Asian-American communities. In Liquor Store Dreams, for example, the Korean American filmmaker So Yun Um turns her parents’ experience of running a shop in a majority-black neighbourhood into a critique of this supposed anti-black racism. Her parents were working-class immigrants who toiled for decades to give her a better life, but she has risen above them socially, becoming a filmmaker — and is now castigating them to gain acceptance in her new class.

In an interview to promote the film, she tells the story of a Korean American friend who was accosted and robbed on the street by a black person. Her friend felt conflicted because he didn’t want to bring race into how he viewed the incident. The rest of the interview focuses on the myriad ways Korean Americans are said to perpetuate anti-blackness. When discussing attacks on Asians, for instance, she says: “If you’re in a predominantly black and brown neighbourhood, if an accident were happening, who else would be the assailant? It wouldn’t be a white person because a white person doesn’t live there.” Note her use of the word “accident”, rather than, say, “attack”. By doing so she is unintentionally perpetuating the obviously racist idea that a black person can’t help being an “assailant”; it denies black Americans agency. There is no similar call for black Americans to “unlearn anti-Asianness”, because in a boba liberal’s mind, how can they possibly take responsibility for their actions?

While boba liberals may experience anti-Asian racism themselves, they know there is little social capital to be gained from discussing it. The common assumption is that Asians are mostly well-off and do not need liberal saviours, unlike black Americans. The latter are often portrayed in popular culture as living tough lives in “the hood”. But working-class Asians tend to cluster in ethnic enclaves that receive very little media attention. The dominant Asian stereotype is of the “crazy rich Asian”. Boba liberals will intentionally distance themselves from these working-class Asians. Anyone who doesn’t toe the progressive party line on every issue is actually an ally of white supremacists.

Unsurprisingly, then, boba liberals often support affirmative action over merit-based admissions policies. In other words, they support a process based not on a clear set of consistently applied rules, but on more nebulous, unspoken criteria set by elite ideology. This benefits them, because they understand the “right” things to do and say to gain access to institutions such as Harvard. Working-class Asian Americans have little-to-no social capital and have the “wrong ideas”, however, and thus prefer merit-based admissions policies that don’t require intricate knowledge of elite codes.

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But being against affirmative action is considered “wrong” by affluent progressives; for them, the policy is an accessory they can tout to signal that they believe in the value of having a superficially multiracial ruling class. And just as affluent white liberals feel ashamed about white MAGA voters or Brexiteers, boba liberals are embarrassed by working-class Asians and their “incorrect” views.

As Rob Henderson has pointed out, Asian Americans are adopting “luxury beliefs, which are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower classes” — which he sees as “an indicator of assimilation” into upper-middle class America. A similar phenomenon is happening among Latinos: the college-educated now use the term “Latinx” as a class signifier, a term that is deeply unpopular with the vast majority of Latinos. It seems, then, that racial solidarity is not as powerful as class solidarity. America’s liberal elite have all converged on one value system that sets them apart, while pretending to be “diverse” through shallow imitations of identity.