Keir Starmer’s critics might have you believe that the Labour government is fighting a class war. They point to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s crackdown on private schools and Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s attack on farmers. These initiatives certainly don’t appear to be just about money: whacking VAT on school fees and hitting dead farmers with inheritance tax won’t raise much cash in the scheme of things. But they will inflict totally unnecessary amounts of pain. Their targets are, supposedly, people with cash to splash, on behalf of the needy.
But hang on: look at this government closely and it’s obvious that ministers aren’t horny-handed sons of toil. Well, Angela Rayner, the deputy PM, perhaps, but that’s about it. Despite Starmer’s attempts to portray himself as the salt of the earth – I’m not sure, but I think his father may have been involved in some role on the supply side of manual labour – and Labour’s nebulously defined mantra of ‘working people’, the party have the look of the extras hired to portray Injury Lawyers 4U in their advertisements. Plus, they’re cosying up to Blackrock, so this clearly isn’t about a simple dislike of the filthy rich.
In fact, Labour’s disastrous first few months in office don’t resemble a class war at all. It’s something much worse: a civil war, and not the one Elon Musk thinks is ‘inevitable’ in the UK. No, this one is between factions of the middle class. It’s the progressive public sector vs the conservative private sector, with everything and everybody else used either as materiel or as collateral.
Despite what we’re constantly told, there is no hatred so deeply ingrained in this country as the hate felt by the public-sector middle class for the private-sector middle class. The progressives really, really loathe productive, aspirational people who have put a bit of money away. They view them as anti-social. Wouldn’t that money be better spent by government, the think, redistributed where it could do some good, for asylum hotels or foreign farmers maybe?
You can see this hatred in popular culture; it’s no accident that villains like Mr Curry in Paddington, the Dursleys in Harry Potter, or Ian Beale in Eastenders all fall into a similar mould. For some Brits, there’s nothing worse than such upstart trash: pushy, ungenerous, suspicious, climbing and grasping. Not lovely kind welcoming folk like us.
This hatred makes the purpose of Labour’s policies nakedly clear. They are there to indulge the spite and envy of the public-sector middle class, who regard family farmers and people who send their kids to fee-paying schools as the lowest of the low.
When you’ve realised this, a whole lot of things suddenly become a lot clearer. For the culture war is a proxy battle of this civil war. It isn’t only Starmer who is up to these tricks, however; unfortunately the rot goes much deeper, as Jaguar’s disastrous rebrand showed.
The carmaker, in a doomed bid to shake off its fuddy-duddy image and reach a younger market, has binned its iconic logo. The result is puerile. The advert doesn’t really tell you anything about Jaguar. Indeed, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Jaguar has decided to stop selling cars altogether, if its advert is anything to go on.
But the trouble is that this is no accident. Jaguar’s advert is something of an elephant trap, set to goad and smoke out the ‘wrong’ kind of middle-class person, who inevitably reacts in horror, and cement the status of the liberal elite, who turn a blind eye. The consuming disdain is so strong that, in the case of Jaguar, it overrides little considerations such as the bottom line or making a return for shareholders. It’s more important to be nice, not to display ‘vile hatred’ in the words of Jaguar’s managing director.
It can be a good life being a prop in this battle, and who can blame the actors and other creatives involved for making hay. Good luck to ‘em. But I wonder if, sometimes, in their quiet hours, the genuinely talented among these troops stop and think, ‘These people are not my friends. I am being used’.
This is all quite funny on the surface level, but it has serious consequences. Because if you were planning to stoke division, exacerbate resentment, and ratchet up tensions in society, I can’t think of a better way of going about it. When the majority of the population are constantly made to think about identity, race and sexuality, constantly psyched into line and prodded by the self-aggrandising holy busybodies of the ‘nice’ progressive white middle class for their own status game, the appeal of what we call ‘populism’ increases.
The ads and fads, and even Labour’s spiteful policies, are just background details, mopping up operations. The progressive middle class (and that includes a large chunk of the Conservative Party) have already accomplished their mission. They have done incredible, possibly irremediably damage to Britain. They’ve rubbished the social contract, tanked the economy, bashed apart the continuity of a culture going back centuries, and turned a blind eye to mass displays of antisemitic hatred. But, for some Labour types, these consequences are worth it if it makes those on the other side of the class divide squirm.
