Privileged millennials seem to think they can tell us what it is to be working class.
Last year, Grace Blakeley, a privately educated leftist and journalist, declared on Twitter that class has nothing to do with your accent, where you live, where you grew up, what your parents do and where you went to school. ‘These things remain important in supporting certain individuals to change their class position’, she tweeted, ‘but they don’t come into the definition of class’.
I wasn’t surprised or even angry. I have been watching this narrative about class in Britain unfold over several years from the bourgeois left – those bright young things who have lived comfy, cushioned, middle-class lives, complete with private educations and Oxbridge degrees, and who now have very nice seats at the table with the chattering classes, the politicians, the academics in Russell Group research universities and the creative industries in elite spaces in London. No doubt, they read The Communist Manifesto at university and are now ‘literally communists’, taking up as much political space as their ever widening middle-class elbows can stretch to.
Think of an even more earnest Bob Rae and the NDP.
