The Tory Leadership Election EpitomisesThe British Class Divide
The race to be Prime Minister has been laced with social snobbery and active hostility toward the poor, says Taj Ali
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Eton College. Oxford University. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Boris Johnson’s pathway to power is a familiar one.
Charging £48,500 per year, Eton College has produced 20 UK prime ministers. Such an institution epitomises how parentage and privilege determine who governs Britain.
Johnson announced his resignation last week without a hint of remorse or regret. He is the epitome of public school boy arrogance – used to coming out on top, due to the advantages provided by his background.
But no amount of wealth or privilege could save Boris Johnson from his eventual downfall. While his premiership is due to come to an end, his sense of entitlement has no end in sight. And the problem goes beyond Johnson – many of those gearing up to replace him represent continuity – both in terms of their detachment from working-class people and their embrace of policies which harm the poorest the most.
Both the cost of living crisis and the pandemic have brought into sharp focus how deeply divided we are as a country. At the height of the pandemic, people living in the most deprived areas of England and Wales were twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than people living in the least deprived areas. This pandemic hasn’t just exposed Britain’s deep-rooted class divide – it has exacerbated it.
Away from the Punch and Judy show in Westminster, there are millions of families across the country struggling with the cost of living crisis. Nearly 4 million children are growing up in poverty in the sixth richest country in the world. That’s 27% of children or eight in a classroom of 30. With inflation hitting its highest rate since the 1980s – combined with entrenched wage stagnation – a further 500,000 children are likely to be pushed into poverty this year.
Households suffering from the worst squeeze on living standards since the 1950s are bracing for further financial burdens. A new forecast from research firm Cornwall Insight predicts that UK energy bills could hit more than £3,300 a year this winter.
Who better to help the British public through a cost of living crisis than Nadhim Zahawi, the second richest MP in Parliament who claimed £5,822 in expenses to heat his riding stables and banked £1.3 million from an oil company while working as an MP? Or, perhaps, the richest MP in Parliament, former banker and billionaire Rishi Sunak, whose wealth exceeds £700 million?
The runners and riders seeking to become the next Conservative Party leader have spent the past few days trying to compete on who has the greatest willpower to slash corporation tax and make cuts to public services. They seek to indulge the demands and fantasies of an affluent middle-class membership that is in no way representative of the wider British public. But this isn’t just a Conservative leadership race; it’s a contest that will determine our next Prime Minister and, indeed, the direction of the country.
In many ways, the Conservative Party leadership election perfectly encapsulates the British class divide. So far removed from the lives of working-class people, they are utterly incapable of understanding the depth of the current economic crisis.
Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid – now out of the race but who will more than likely feature in a post-election Cabinet – have pledged to cut corporation tax from 19% to 15%. Zahawi has gone even further, pledging to cut staff levels in every single government department by 20%. Meanwhile, there appears to be very little appetite to tackle growing poverty and inequality. Indeed, some have taken to demonising the poor instead.
Take the comments of leadership hopeful Suella Braverman. On Monday, she claimed that “There are too many people in this country who are of working age, who are of good health, and who are choosing to rely on benefits”.
This misleading attempt to cast people on benefits as lazy typifies the disdain that many in the Conservative Party have for working-class communities. The reality is that 40% of people on Universal Credit are in work and 56% of people in poverty are in a working household. We know that seven in 10 children in poverty are in a household where at least one parent works and that relative poverty rates among working households increased from 13% in 1997 to 17.4% in 2021.
But why let facts get in the way of a reactionary bid to win power?
Calling for reductions in welfare spending at a time when so many are struggling with the cost of living is not just ignorant but deeply dangerous. Throwaway remarks like Braverman’s are indicative of a political culture that punches down and seeks to blame society’s problems not on those with power but on those without any at all.
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Social Alienation
In my hometown Luton, we see the impact of the cost of living crisis every single day. A jaw-dropping 46% of the children are growing up in poverty and we have the highest homelessness rate outside of London with one in 66 people in the town classified as homeless.
It is no surprise that we haven’t heard anything at all from Conservative Party leadership candidates about addressing child poverty or providing safe, affordable housing for all. Poor people are not the priority for the party of government.
What we have heard a great deal about during this leadership election is hard work, opportunity and aspiration. The myth of meritocracy has been alluded to multiple times by leadership candidates – Jeremy Hunt using an appearance on LBC to declare, as we have heard so many times before, that the Conservative Party is the “party of meritocracy”.
This is a convenient way for privileged people to frame their lives as an uphill struggle. We hear a lot about hard work – as if most people don’t work hard – and very little about inherited wealth, private education and family connections. Are those working in call centres or those emptying our rubbish simply lacking work ethic? Do they lack aspiration? Or perhaps they haven’t made enough of the abundant opportunities that have been provided by meritocratic Britain?
Sunak’s promotional video for his campaign is a case in point. He spoke proudly about being the son of immigrants (who probably wouldn’t be allowed to settle under the Government’s current immigration policy). He said that he wanted to give everyone opportunities and a chance to have a better future. Omitted from his video, of course, was his attendance at an elite boarding school, Winchester College, which currently costs £46,000 a year to attend. This omission matters, because beneath this fairy tale of hard work and opportunity is an uncomfortable truth; in modern Britain, it is parentage and privilege which largely determines progress. In Britain today, you are 60% more likely to be in a professional job if you are from a privileged background, rather than from a working-class background.
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Sunak was recently mocked for his appearance in a 2001 BBC documentary ‘Middle Classes – Their Rise and Sprawl’ (pictured above) during which he bragged about having close friends from Eton and none from the working class. The Chancellor clearly hasn’t reflected much on why this was the case.
What’s more, the meritocratic ideal preached by the Conservative contenders has stalled in recent years, with the Government’s watchdog warning in 2019 that social mobility has stagnated in recent years.
“Being born privileged means you are likely to remain privileged,” said then chair of Social Mobility Commission Dame Martina Milburn. “But being born disadvantaged means you may have to overcome a series of barriers to ensure you and your children are not stuck in the same trap.”
Yet the candidates would rather deploy high-minded rhetoric than actually fix this state of affairs. Sunak, for instance, could have used his position as Chancellor to improve access to opportunities. Instead, he has exacerbated inequalities further. Following his Spring Statement, the Resolution Foundation warned that 1.3 million people including 500,000 children could be pushed into absolute poverty next year.
Much has been made of the apparent ‘diversity’ of the candidates in this leadership race. True, there are more women and people from ethnic minority backgrounds standing for the leadership. But what about social class? Diversity that doesn’t account for class is pretty meaningless. For many children of immigrants in my home town of Luton, their experiences and the opportunities available to them couldn’t be more different to that of Sunak and Zahawi.
It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that those gearing up to lead this country are utterly detached from the dilemmas of ordinary people. We need more people in positions of power who aren’t divorced from the impact of their own policies. If we had more people rooted in communities and with lived experience of the issues they discuss, there would be a far greater urgency to tackle the cost of living crisis.