The Guardian view on class politics: it has faded as culture wars have risen | Editorial
As economic inequality deepens, political leaders continue to side-step structural issues while extremists aim to claim the votes of the left behindEarly in the 2010s, class politics was everywhere. Bankers were bailed out, and the price Europeans apparently had to pay was austerity. Protests erupted from Greece to Wall Street. Thomas Piketty’s book on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, took the world by storm, and Britain seemed poised for a shift – first with Ed Miliband’s critique of “predatory capital”, then when Labour members chose to back Jeremy Corbyn’s attack on a rigged economy.A decade later, it might seem that time’s arrow has finally hit its mark. Britain has a Labour government with a whopping majority and, after years in which British prime ministers hopped off the conveyor belt from Eton or Winchester, the country is now led by the son of a toolmaker. Even the leader of the Tories, Kemi Badenoch, claims she “became working class” as a teen, while doing a few shifts at McDonald’s. Continue reading...
As economic inequality deepens, political leaders continue to side-step structural issues while extremists aim to claim the votes of the left behind
Early in the 2010s, class politics was everywhere. Bankers were bailed out, and the price Europeans apparently had to pay was austerity. Protests erupted from Greece to Wall Street. Thomas Piketty’s book on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, took the world by storm, and Britain seemed poised for a shift – first with Ed Miliband’s critique of “predatory capital”, then when Labour members chose to back Jeremy Corbyn’s attack on a rigged economy.
A decade later, it might seem that time’s arrow has finally hit its mark. Britain has a Labour government with a whopping majority and, after years in which British prime ministers hopped off the conveyor belt from Eton or Winchester, the country is now led by the son of a toolmaker. Even the leader of the Tories, Kemi Badenoch, claims she “became working class” as a teen, while doing a few shifts at McDonald’s. Continue reading...