OPINION - In Starmer's Britain the class system isn’t dead, it has simply been re-imagined
Reading the dripping with snobbery and class-prejudice articles and social media attacks on Charlie Mullins, the Pimlico Plumbers boss who has declared he is taking all of his money out of the UK because of Labour’s attitude to the wealthy, I suddenly realised that there has been a seismic shift in British culture.
Snobbery, the national sport we Brits are most famous for, never went away, it has shape-shifted, metamorphosed and re-emerged in a different form. The British class system isn’t dead, it has been reimagined.
But it is no longer your physical characteristics that can be mocked for being naff, or your car or your kitchen or your accent; it is your beliefs. Thoughts and political opinions are the new class signifiers in Starmer’s Britain.
Think immigration is too high? You might as well be driving a white Range Rover with teeth sparkling from a trip to Turkey. Voted for Brexit? You may as well have concreted over your front garden in order to use it to park your car. Not enthusiastic about the gender diversity agenda? Unbelievably common.
Being on the wrong side of the culture wars is the new Non-U.
The American historian Christopher Lasch argued that modern global elites have more in common with each other than the poorer people from their own countries and this is true too of our new class overlords.
Despite romanticising the working class, which they use to burnish their reputation as People Who Care, it is a patronising and ignorant romanticism that then recoils violently when they manage to rise up a class but retain the “wrong” opinions. Sun-readers will never reach the sunlit uplands of recognition from this establishment.
Nothing keeps Sir Keir awake more than the unsavoury opinions of the working classes
And so it is that rape in Britain has pretty much been decriminalised, knife crime rampages throughout London without anyone in power seeming to flinch and every Saturday people with placards calling for death to the whole of Israel peacefully protest. But if a “gammon” writes something dreadful on Facebook they will find themselves summoned to the magistrates’ court by 9am the next morning, facing a hefty sentence. Nothing keeps Sir Keir awake more than the unsavoury opinions of the working classes.
The upper echelons are also under artillery fire from the new ruling class in the form of VAT on the al Qaeda training camps of the British upper class — our top public schools. Not many toffs, let alone the aspirants, can afford £20k a term. And, therefore, in a generation Bridget Phillipson will have killed off the entire rival tribe.
The controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq was recently quoted as saying, “These elites are harder to dismantle than the nobility. Nobility had nothing to explain their right to stay in power, apart from their birth. Contemporary elites claim intellectual and moral superiority.” Our new elite frames everything they do in terms of helping the poorest in our society (not white poor people — they’re ’orrible). But the rigidity of their intellectual framework doesn’t always allow for them to thrive.
And so we come back to Charlie Mullins, the type of person who under any other regime might command a bit of respect. The son of a factory worker and cleaner who grew up in Elephant and Castle (someone pass Lady Nugee her smelling salts), he left school at 15 with no qualifications and built a hugely successful company which meant over his lifetime he has paid more than £120 million in tax, enough to pay the salaries of 2,700 nurses.
But guess what? He uses his OBE on his Twitter handle (common), he has a hair style like Rod Stewart (common) and his teeth are too white (you guessed it). And apart from any of those things, his success is meaningless, he is entirely without status because he votes for Reform.
Don’t worry if this doesn’t make much sense to you; the rules of the British class system have always been intentionally esoteric. The main takeaway is everything and nothing has changed. All animals are equal but, as ever, some are more equal than others.
Anna van Praagh is the Evening Standard’s chief content officer