It’s sometimes said that class no longer drives UK politics. But what if class consciousness hasn’t so much disappeared as taken on a new shape? In their interviews with people in three towns and cities across the UK, Sacha Hilhorst and Insa Lee Koch uncover attitudes to wealth and power that remain deeply classed.
Despite high levels of inequality, the UK has not seen a resurgence of class consciousness. This puzzling insight is at the heart of what Mike Savage has called the paradox of class: by conventional markers such as class voting, the connection between occupational class and politics has largely disappeared. Hence working class voters are now, if anything, more likely than professional middle class voters to opt for parties on the right (Conservatives, Reform UK). As Savage wrote when coining “the paradox of class”, intensifying social inequalities seem to have gone hand in hand with a decline in overt class-based politics and, with it, support for the Labour party.
But what if class consciousness hasn’t so much disappeared as taken on a new shape, one which is not immediately obvious to outside observers?
Between 2009 and 2023, we conducted ethnographic research with working-class communities across three towns and cities in the UK – Oxford, Corby and Mansfield. Our work centred around a large council estate (Oxford) and post-industrial field sites such as pubs, homes, community centres and gyms (Corby and Mansfield). Historically, these field sites were at the heart of working-class life. Today, after the loss of industrial work and many of its attendant institutions, the working class in these areas is more fractured, scattered across care work, retail and distribution, as well as informal work and different forms of non-employment. These communities have also become more ethnically and racially diverse, as migrants often perform the cheapest labour in a highly flexible economy.
The usual argument is that communities in places like these have withdrawn from politics, as class voting makes way for class non-voting. But while voter turnout has indeed been in decline, our fieldwork suggests that deeply classed attitudes to wealth and power continue to mark the daily lives and narratives of our interlocutors.
Corruption talk as an everyday narrative about privilege and power
As we set out in our recent paper for Sociological Review, this is best illustrated when we turn to the prevalence of narratives about political corruption. The people we spoke to perceived politicians to be calculating and mendacious, exploiting positions of privilege and power by “lining their pockets”, “being on the take” or “feathering their own nest”. Many shared a visceral sense that politicians did not care, which contrasted with the norms of our interlocutors, who derived a sense of moral selfhood from community work, reproductive labour or physical work.
The people we spoke to perceived politicians to be exploiting positions of privilege and power by “lining their pockets”, “being on the take” or “feathering their own nest”
As one woman in Oxford told us, reflecting on her recent experience protesting against Oxford’s “15-minute city” proposals: “The government don’t care about me, they don’t care about my children, they don’t care about our lives…. Life has got so much harder and there doesn’t seem much help and support for people.”
Our interlocutors’ stories about the wrongdoings of corrupt politicians were many and varied. Sometimes they revolved around well-documented cases, sometimes around snippets of gossip and rumour, and sometimes without a concrete reference point at all. Although the examples did not always fit formal definitions of corruption in terms of the use of public office for private gain, they were marked as corrupt for their use of entrusted power for self-serving ends. As one interviewee put it:
“You know when it came out about these second houses and holiday homes and things like that and they’re paying for new roofs or gardeners, it was like absolutely shocking… How can they expect to be respected when they’re abusing a system like that? And then, you know, the image of them asleep in the parliament chambers, where they’re meant to be like listening and working and we’re paying for them to be there, sort of thing. But, yeah, I think the whole system’s corrupt, if I’m honest.”
Quantitative findings across Europe bolster these points. Nearly 40% of working-class respondents express agreement with the statement that “corruption is widespread” compared to merely 25% for those who identify as middle-class, despite direct experiences of corruption being rare and, if anything, more common among middle-class respondents.
The lack of first-hand evidence did not necessarily dissuade the people we spoke to. As one interviewee explained, she knew the corruption was there, but she herself was not close enough to the halls of power to witness how exactly it worked. And so these survey questions about perceptions and experiences of corruption – intended to capture the prevalence of the soliciting of bribes and the like – inadvertently capture an important aspect of class politics today: the perception that the system is corrupt and that those in lofty positions regularly abuse the power entrusted to them.
A basis for solidarity across ethnic, gendered and generational lines?
The assumption we make in our paper, then, is that it is sometimes possible to speak of class consciousness even in cases where the people we speak to do not describe their views in straightforwardly classed terms.
This move follows a rich seam of social history. In The Making of the English Working Class, the social historian E.P. Thompson argued that class consciousness emerges out of experience. It can be said to be present, he argued, even in the absence of the terminology or organisational forms we might see as the hallmark of working-class political action. The Making discusses the years between 1780 and 1832, an era before the more overt mobilisation of class of the later 19th century, which was nevertheless marked, according to Thompson, by an emergent class consciousness, arising out of experiences of inequality and dispossession. Even then, “corruption” was a trope through which campaigners could expose deeper structural divisions – a remarkable similarity with today’s corruption talk in working-class communities.
We are now on the other side of the industrial era, with class consciousness widely assumed to have faded. Yet Thompson’s approach still offers insight. If we start from the call for an “actually existing politics”, forms of class consciousness which might normally go overlooked come into view: these are grounded in our interlocutors’ lived experiences of caring for their communities, families and neighbourhoods – and the corresponding failure of those in power to hold up to their end of the bargain.
Indeed, we argue that this basic opposition – between caring, ordinary people who work hard to get by and a self-serving political class unfamiliar with the difficulties of working-class life – lies at the heart of everyday understandings and narrations of politics for many working class people. Even when not expressed in explicitly class-based terms, corruption talk serves to indict inequalities in wealth and power, expressing a dispersed sense of class consciousness even under conditions of class fragmentation.
This basic opposition – between caring, ordinary people who work hard to get by and a self-serving political class – lies at the heart of everyday understandings of politics for many working class people
None of this is to argue that corruption talk is unproblematic or straightforwardly progressive. At a time when institutional channels for expressing class solidarity have been dismantled or seriously weakened, the class consciousness that we recorded across the three towns often remained diffuse, fleeting and implicit. What’s more, we need to be conscious that the party which has most explicitly sought to tap into these sentiments in Britain is Reform UK, which campaigned at the most recent general election under the slogan of “politics needs reform”. In an ever more openly hostile climate where politicians across the spectrum have come to “mainstream hate”, there is a real danger that the political energies which underlie corruption talk are funnelled into a far-right political project.
Even so, it is also possible for the oppositional politics and the forms of folk critique implied in stories about political corruption to be harnessed to indict inequality and disempowerment. As we write in our paper, “the political and analytical challenge ahead lies in recuperating the radical potential implied in corruption talk for a solidarity across ethnic, racial, gendered and generational lines.” Following E.P. Thompson, this will require that we do not pre-determine what the language and experience of class look like, but rather engage with people’s sense of self, place and politics on their own terms.
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All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s). They do not represent the position of LSE Inequalities, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credits: Banner photo of Blackbird Leys from Wikimedia Commons. Thumbnail image of The Market Inn, Mansfield, by Nathaniel White.
