 Is this a latte? Yeah. A fucking latte. So that's what you wanted. I wanted a frothy coffee and a mug. So today I want to talk about class. Thanks, Gary. What makes someone work in class and what doesn't? Whether we like it or not, our understanding of class is as much cultural as it is economic. This hat actually belongs to my stepdad. Lots of the language we use around class is more about how much cultural capital someone has access to rather than how much wealth they have. Take a word like metropolitan. When you hear that in the media, you know that it's code for middle class. And yet when you hear a phrase like inner city, which in straightforward terms is meant to mean the same thing, it's got an entirely different sort of cultural baggage attached to it. It's a euphemism for lower income households from urban areas. For the most part, when we hear about class struggles in the media, we're not actually talking about the people who make stuff versus the people who own stuff. Class struggle is often a vehicle for other kinds of antagonisms, like progressive values versus more socially conservative ones or London versus the rest of England, pick up London, or the traditional working class versus migrant workers. Against this backdrop of cultural baggage, our understanding of who is the proletarian Vox Populi, the every man or woman connected to the people is completely divorced from things that actually tell us about someone's class status like median income or property. So often when commentators talk about class position and political alignment, they're actually talking about their own biases. Take these two blistering hot takes, for example. The claim of both of these tweets that Northern and or working class voters are significantly more keen on Donald Trump simply isn't substantiated by polling. But what it does reveal is that the authors both have an idea that working class equals reactionary politics plus regional accent. Because of the way this formula has been encoded in the British political psyche, we've ended up with an absurd situation in which privately educated multimillionaires can cosplay as anti-elitist men of the people. God, Niche, get it, Daniel. But this pantomime starts to fall apart when you actually take a look at voting behavior. We're constantly told that Nigel Farage's support comes from people who've been screwed over by neoliberalism, left behind by globalization and impoverished by austerity. However, data compiled by politics.co.uk tells a different story. So yes, while the Brexit party did clean up at the recent European elections, they actually underperformed in levy seats which were in the Northwest and the Midlands. And they overperformed in levy and leafy boroughs in the South and the Southeast. What this suggests is that Nigel Farage's strongest electoral base isn't left behind towns or the formerly industrialized North and Midlands. It's the commute about, it's the home counties, it's high synth bucket and people that bore your ear off at golf clubs. I mean, I'm not in a golf club, I'm just imagining what it would be like. The reductive equation of regional accent plus reactionary politics equals working class relies on crude cultural stereotypes in order to substitute the values of the millionaires for the values of the middle class and the values of the middle class for the values of the working class. And it doesn't take a genius to work out who benefits the most then. Now obviously I'm not saying that culture isn't important. I think that culture is the means through which we experience the political and economic forces that shape our lives. What I'm saying is that class composition has changed a great deal in the last 40 years. We've seen the demise of heavy industry in this country. We've seen the creation of a white collar proletariat and we've also seen huge demographic changes because of things like immigration and growing population of people of color. Differences is I don't think that that's a bad thing. What is a bad thing is that we no longer have politicized cultural institutions which are capable of mobilizing people who live off wages along the lines of their economic interests while still maintaining that diversity. Champagne socialism in it. Hey. Oh, if you liked this video, why not share it? And if you really liked this video, go to support.nevaramedia.com because it costs a lot of money to look this cheap.