The classically liberal contention: Different strokes for different folks
We think this is most encouraging from the CLASS think tank:
The “white working class” is such a peculiar phrase, so widely deployed and so misleading. Of course there are white people who are working class, but the class as a whole is the most diverse of any group. This is a point made by a report from Class, the union-funded thinktank, on new attitudes to race and class in Britain. You cannot predefine the beliefs and values of a class, it says, and then filter for people whose whose views correspond to them. Instead, the researchers built their sample on a points system, taking into consideration class identity, housing tenure, education level, occupation, household income, and if and how one might pay a £500 emergency bill. Perhaps that sounds obvious, but it is also quite a novel approach.
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What hasn’t changed is that the working class is diverse. Indeed, this is a core definition; monoculturalism is a phenomenon mainly of upper-class groups. The values and attitudes associated with the “white working class” or its sibling phrase, so-called “red wall” voters – patriotism, xenophobia, racism, nativism, traditionalism, nostalgia – are simply not discernible themes in any prolonged discussion with working-class people.
This is encouraging because it’s an agreement that the base class analysis of Marxism - which feeds through into socialism - is simply wrong. There is no monolithic block of the “working class” who can be energised into taking that power which is rightfully theirs. This analysis coming not from weird folk like us, but from the very heart - calling it still beating is going too far such is the age of the philosophical mistakes - of that socialist movement. They’re saying it, not us - there is no the people, there’re just folks in all their diverse glory.
Which is, of course, the classically liberal contention. We are indeed all individuals, with our own interests, foibles, beliefs and desires. Therefore politics and the economy have to work on that basis, not on slabs of the faceless who are to be relied upon to act in uniformity.
It’s clearly too much to expect CLASS to recognise the import of their own finding but hope springs eternal. So, to cast this in the simpler form that they might understand. That great social observer, Rose Stone:
Different strokes for different folks
And so on and so on, and scooby-dooby-doo