The ragged class war may be over: the new politics of class is just beginning. The widening fracture between the wealthy elite and the rest is a enormous threat to our social fabricTwenty years ago the view that social class no longer mattered was widely shared across the political spectrum. Conservative prime minister John Major’s vision of a classless society was echoed a few years later by Tony Blair who insisted that “the class war is over”. Such views were endorsed by leading academics. Eric Hobsbawm was the first to detect the end of the “forward march of labour” back in 1978,and the subsequent decline of industry, working-class solidarity and trade-union membership only seemed to confirm his prescience. He was joined by an increasingly vociferous ((adj.) loud, boisterous) refrain of sociologists, and from Anthony Giddens to Zygmunt Bauman,who announced the arrival of a new globalised world of consumption and lifestyle choice.
Looking across the landscape of Britain nowadays these views peruse quaint (charmingly old fashioned) indeed. Motifs of class and inequality proliferate. The familiar pictures of Boris Johnson, George Osborne and David Cameron swaggering at Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club symbolise the languid power of a privileged elite. “Poverty porn” has become a staple across the broadcast media. The remarkable success of the Scottish Nationalist party followed by the unexpected election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader testify to the resurgence of a new kind of madden about how austerity is being used to justify extensive cuts in public spending and welfare. The issue of inequality is perhaps the defining question of our time.
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Source: theguardian.com