BY STEWART SLATER
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” wrote Wittgenstein, thereby changing the world. For the “Linguistic Turn” he spawned in philosophy changed the task of the practitioners of his discipline from inventing new entities and processes to explain the world (Plato’s Forms, Hegel’s Dialectic etc.) to ruthlessly weeding out all propositions which failed their test of meaning. That those who took to their new job with most alacrity were English-speaking, and the ideas they rejected were European was nothing more than a happy accident.
But what starts in the Academy rarely stays in the Academy and, as a society, we have become increasingly obsessed with textual analysis, precisely parsing every utterance for implication and error. When Bill Clinton said, “It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is”, he was merely ahead of his time.
Britain and her politicians are not immune to this.
Much energy is currently being spent on the minute analysis of the government’s manifesto phrase, “Labour will not increase taxes on working people, which is why we will not increase National Insurance.” Does this mean that they will not increase the National Insurance paid by “working people” – the deduction one might see on one’s payslip – or does it mean National Insurance in both forms, employees and employers? If, as is suggested by copious evidence, increasing costs on employers reduces pay rises for employees down the line, does doing so count as an implicit tax on the workforce, money which would otherwise have found its way into their pockets instead being given to the Treasury?
At the risk of being charitable to a government which gives every appearance of inhabiting the sour spot where incompetence and unpleasantness meet, it is not, to my mind, open and shut. It would be more natural to read “National Insurance” as meaning both types but one could continue the sense of the preceding clause and take it as referring to employees only. Economists might see future pay rises being handed to the Treasury, but most people think of tax as coming from their actual earnings, not their hypothetical future pay.
Even such unaccustomed generosity, however, (“try everything once except incest and folk dancing”) does not entirely get the government off the hook on which its opponents are gleefully watching it wriggle. For the distinction between “working people” and employers is not hard and fast. Owners of small business are both.
And this takes us to a strange place. Tarquin, who translated his Eton and Oxford education into a job paying hundreds of thousands at a City law firm, will pay no more to the Exchequer, but Mrs Mopp who employs her friend Ida in the cleaning firm she operates from the bedroom of her council flat will. We might expect a party which calls itself “Labour” to defend the interests of the working class and see “working people” as a synonym denoting the same group but without the Marxist baggage but it turns out that, to the government, one can be a “working person” and not working class and working class but not a “working person”.
The Prime Minister must be aware of this wrinkle. While he is, according to rumour, the son of a tool-maker (this may come as a surprise to some of you), it has been suggested (and never denied) that his father actually owned the tool-making company. If true, the man who releases election videos about how he “grew up working class” would not be, on his own government’s terms, the son of a working man.
It is well known that the Starmers pere et fils had a difficult relationship. Perhaps there is some unresolved Freudian Daddy issue being worked through here via the nation’s finances. Perhaps, as in Soviet Russia’s genocide of the kulaks, he sees being poor but owning assets is some sort of mortal offence. (For the avoidance of error, I am not suggesting that Starmer is Stalin – yes, he has bouffant hair and a fondness for bureaucratic procedure but he has not been seen with a moustache…). Perhaps there is some strange U-curve in operation whereby being poor is good, having made enough money in the right way to be able to donate to the Labour Party is good, but everything else in between is bad.
More likely, the government is merely demonstrating our national confusion over class. For, despite what it may think, Britain is not unique in having a class system – Rome divided its citizens into three groups. Nor is it unique in having a complex class system – Rory Stewart the former cabinet minister reduced, in a fall reminiscent of that defrocked vicar who became a lion tamer, from high office to peddling political entertainment to the patrons of Waitrose, may describe himself as “lower upper middle class” but a turn of the millennium Japanese would have found himself sorted into one of nine castes. Where we stand out is in the informality of the system, and the uncertainty this creates.
Rome organised its system by wealth. Most people were plebs but, owning enough property made one a member of the equites. Having held certain political offices would further bump one up to the Senate. Japan, like India, used birth. You were born into your parents’ caste and that was where you stayed. Whichever route these societies chose, class was objective and externally assigned – a Roman Senator, even one who had been consul, would be kicked back down the ladder if he lost his money.
These systems had their disadvantages (Japan ended its caste system in 1869 but even today, descendants of the burakumin, the lowest order, suffer prejudice and reduced opportunities) but they offered clarity. An individual knew what he was, everyone else knew what he was, and there was no mismatch between the two.
With no external moderator, and no hard and fast rules, in Britain class identity is far shiftier. Does it depend on birth or is it a matter of wealth? Take the Prime Minister. He thinks he “grew up working class” but if his father owned the company, was he not the son of a petit bourgeois? What is he now? He has two university degrees and is a barrister so surely, he is middle class. But he is a multi-millionaire and has a knighthood, does that not elevate him at least to the upper middle? If Caesar bestrode the narrow world like a colossus, the Prime Minister pulls off the same trick with the class system.
Lest it appear that this article is purely dedicated to kicking Keir Starmer, he is not alone in this. To the extent we have a formal class system, it is the ABC categorisation invented by sociologists. But 41% of ABC1s (the middle class) consider themselves to be working class, and 24% of C2DEs (the working class) consider themselves to be middle class. Class is, it appears, what we want it to be.
If we are unusual in the informality of our class system, we are also odd in the respect we give to those at the bottom of it (perhaps a factor in Britain’s relative stability over the years). In India a dalit is literally untouchable, but here, Jack Tar’s role in seeing off Napoleon was widely acknowledged, as was Tommy’s in the defeat of the Kaiser (he was famously the lion led by the upper-class donkeys). The country’s cultural icons, the Beatles, were working class as are the priests of its modern religion, professional football. The middle class, by contrast, are stuffy, closed minded and snobbish (think Margot in The Good Life) while the upper class are evil (any Hollywood movie since the fall of the Berlin Wall). In a system where one can be whatever one wants, why would one not want the street cred of being working class?
In this context, the term “working people” makes sense, particularly for a political party. It allows those who are not working class or who no longer lead typical working-class lives (most of the cabinet) to associate themselves with a group seen as “cool” and with those who have traditionally represented them. No longer do those who “get on” have to turn their backs on their ancestral tribunes. Nor do those who never were at the bottom of society need to reject Labour as beneath them. All are welcome.
Well not quite all. Not those who have chosen a different route up from the bottom to the university/third sector/backbench MP path favoured by our new masters. Those who aspire to the golf club, not the book club. They can be treated like the small number who live off an inheritance large enough to allow them to spend their days sybaritically eating grapes peeled by a freshly oiled ephebe. Because they’re not quite our sort. Even a classless society has its snobs.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.