Boris Johnson’s Brexit has been a dismal failure, heralding only falling investment and stagnant growth. If you want an admission of this truth, look no further than Saturday’s revelation of a secretive, two-day cross-party summit of remainers and leavers that took place last week in a grand Oxfordshire retreat to address this national fiasco.
But let’s not forget who the victims are here: as in all crises, it is the working class who suffer the most from our politicians’ malice – the same people Tory Brexiteers deceitfully claimed to champion, but know nothing about.
Indeed, in his younger years, our current prime minister was honest about the gilded circles he inhabited. “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper class,” said a youthful Rishi Sunak in a BBC documentary recorded in 2001. “I have friends who are working class … Well, not working class.” He spluttered it out, as though the very notion was absurd. In an unequal society profoundly segregated by class, privileged people see the lives of most of the population as exotic and alien: stereotypes emerge, after all, because supposed fellow citizens inhabit different worlds.
This brings us to the recent appointment of Tory MP Lee Anderson as the party’s vice-chair. Anderson has made his name by making crude and provocative public interventions, such as saying he would boycott watching the England football team because of the anti-racist gesture taken by its players, or supporting the return of the death penalty.
In recent years, media outlets and politicians have treated the likes of Anderson as emblematic of working-class voters: a category they often see as, to be blunt, a white man in his 50s or 60s with a Midlands accent and reactionary opinions. Rishi Sunak, who enjoys a family fortune twice that of the king, presumably believes that Anderson represents a direct hotline to working-class England. But the new Tory vice-chair also serves another function: to portray opponents of rightwing dogma as out-of-touch metropolitan elitists.
Rightwingers masquerading as tribunes of the people are nothing new, but as it’s revealed that Tory ministers are splashing public cash on luxury hotels, chauffeurs and travel, it looks increasingly beyond parody.
There has been in recent times a deliberate attempt to muddy public understanding of what social class means. For instance, it’s notable that commentators often seem to consider Anderson as some kind of authentic voice of “ordinary” people, but not, say, the RMT’s Mick Lynch, another white man of a similar age. Why? Because Lynch has a subversive conception of class, whereby those without wealth or power can pursue their interests through collective action. Anderson’s status, on the other hand, is the product of a redefinition of class – on cultural rather than economic lines. For the new right, to be working class doesn’t mean having nothing but your labour to sell, but being opposed to rootless, urban progressives who favour immigration, multiculturalism and “wokery”.
The result is that younger generations have been effectively excluded from the category of working class. This is even though they have a very good claim to it. After all, many are in low-paid and insecure jobs, they own precious little capital – home ownership has collapsed among younger adults – and have been at the sharp end of austerity.
At the same time, they are more socially progressive than any previous generation – from immigration to LGBTQ rights – and are far more likely than their grandparents to have grown up with migrants, people of colour, or gay or transgender children. It is notable that most of those judged to be working class by pollsters and then aged under 35 voted for remain in 2016. Yet they are rarely portrayed in Britain as members of the working class. Why?
A rightwing media ecosystem has much to do with it: many newspapers barely conceal their contempt for younger people, denouncing them as entitled snowflakes. There are enough unrepresentative, rightwing millennial provocateurs to sustain this image, too. According to the government’s own statistics, the national media is the second most socially exclusive profession after medicine, barring entry to most ordinary younger Britons and stripping media coverage of their lived experience.
As for the world of politics: well, the Tories have simply spent years calculating they don’t need the votes of the young, relying on older voters to make up for their deficit among the under-40s. Labour, meanwhile, treats the young as expendable voting fodder who are disproportionately concentrated in urban seats where the party racks up huge majorities anyway. One of the reasons Labour’s support in so-called red wall seats has been depleted is many younger voters have left small towns for urban constituencies, taking their Labour votes with them. As such, younger voters are not regarded as marginal voters who need to be courted, and are ignored by both main parties.
But while it has been possible until now to marginalise this younger working class, a reckoning may be coming. Recent research found that millennials have defied the political trajectory of previous generations by refusing to shift right as they age. This means the Tories may find they are running out of demographic road. And while they are set to play a pivotal role in delivering what looks like a Labour victory at the next general election, Keir Starmer may find these voters are far from docile when he is in office.
They have, after all, suffered most from the Tories’ ruinous rule, and if the multiple injustices they face – stagnating living standards, a lack of secure, well-paid work and an ever more suffocating housing crisis – are not addressed, they may well force the next government to listen.
Britain’s new working class has been silenced, but perhaps not for much longer.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist