XPost: uk.media, alt.politics.uk 
  
 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- 
 Hash: SHA1 
  
 UK: A nation of shoppers needs to talk about class 
  
 Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit 
  
 sent by Riaz K Tayob (activ-l) 
  
 The Guardian - Apr 19, 2006 
  
 This nation of shoppers needs to talk about class 
  
 The emerging hourglass economy is creating a swelling lump of poor 
 workers and a shrinking, insecure middle class 
  
 by Neal Lawson 
  
 As the high tide of New Labour recedes, the rock of class is again 
 revealed as a determining feature of Britain's political landscape. 
  
   From Marx to Major, politics was defined by the desire to create a 
 classless society. It was a challenge taken up by Tony Blair, who 
 wanted "to take class out of British politics". Your class, though, 
 is still your fate - only we've lost the language and culture to deal 
 with it. New Labour cannot talk about the working class, and so 
 denies the possibility of renewal. Why and how should the left respond? 
  
 The left saw class as both problem and solution: the root cause of 
 social inequality and, through a growing labour movement, the engine 
 of a classless society. But this historical inevitability was undone 
 by postwar affluence and a burgeoning "middle class". The forward 
 march of labour was halted. 
  
 New Labour's ideological escape hatch from old class politics was the 
 emphasis on the nation's labour force in a global economy. Echoing 
 the language of Marx, Tony Blair said "people are born with talent 
 and everywhere it is in chains". It was the job of the state to 
 liberate them so they could fully participate in the new economy. New 
 Labour referred not just to a new party but to individualised 
 labourers, no longer to a class of labour. 
  
 But the escape hatch was a trap door. While New Labour found itself 
 politically free from old labour, it was economically tied to a new 
 master class. Once Blairism inverted the role of social democracy, by 
 forcing people to fit the market, it accepted a politics driven by 
 the demands of a global elite seen as crucial to international 
 competitiveness. 
  
 This is the transnational class of consultants and bankers who, it is 
 feared, work only where they are paid most and taxed least. They are 
 the new untouchables. Because of them, we cannot not talk about 
 spiralling executive pay, rewards for failure, or wealth beyond 
 imagination that allows some to spray champagne around West End bars 
 for the conspicuous fun of it. 
  
 While this silence in class is maintained, social mobility declines 
 and the gap between rich and poor remains at the levels bequeathed by 
 Thatcherism, as the Fabian Society has recently reported. Instead of 
 "living on thin air" the reality is an emerging hourglass economy 
 with a Victorian jobs market of gangmasters and domestic servants. 
 Infant mortality rates are double for the lowest social group; the 
 poorest men die seven years before the richest; and 69% of the land 
 is still owned by just 0.6% of the population. 
  
 Denying that class matters creates a vacuum in which the far right 
 festers. New Labour has said goodbye to the white working class, 
 whose votes they have taken for granted, because of its focus on the 
 swingers of middle England. Margaret Hodge may bemoan the rise of the 
 BNP in her backyard but it is the government's refusal to address 
 issues of affordable housing, flexible labour markets and the effect 
 on them of immigration that leaves the way open for the racist right. 
  
 Within these growing divisions, consumerism is both the new social 
 glue and the basis for even greater polarisation. We are all 
 consumers now, buying if not identical designer wear then at least 
 cheap high-street copies. But the new excluded are the failed 
 consumers who cannot afford to be part of "normal" shopping society. 
 In many ways they are worse off than the poor of the past. They 
 suffer alone with nowhere to hide from their exclusion and no one to 
 blame but themselves. They don't want to fight the rich, just be like 
 them. 
  
 No wonder Francis Maude, the Tory chair, was recently moved to say 
 that "one of the great achievements of New Labour is to have taken 
 class out of politics". It is this "achievement" that has made 
 Britain safe for the new global elite. But New Labour promised a 
 meritocracy of fluid social movement. This demanded policies to end 
 private education, to tax land, inheritance, wealth and higher 
 incomes, and end the monarchy and the Lords. Of course none of this 
 is countenanced. 
  
 The more social democratic elements of New Labour in the Treasury 
 have thankfully been papering over the cracks of class divisions 
 through redistribution by stealth. But they can't go on running to 
 keep inequality still, without discussing class. Class cannot be 
 removed from politics if it is still part and parcel of people's lives. 
  
 So tensions abound. Stephen Byers, the Blairite outrider, says in one 
 breath "we are now witnessing a silent and secret revolution where, 
 to a greater extent than ever before, those born into disadvantage 
 and poverty will be condemned to it for the rest of their lives" - 
 and in the next, denies the ability to act, by declaring Britain has 
 reached the ceiling of its tax burden. 
  
 The task of the left is to reduce differences in class and 
 inequality. New Labour sees only a nation of shoppers, dragooned on 
 to the treadmill of consumption and more work. A cold society of 
 economic self-rationalising individuals able only to change 
 themselves through what they purchase. Class to them is something you 
 can buy. 
  
 The alternative is to recognise class as part of the answer to how we 
 change our world together. Social trends may be heralding a return to 
 the solidarity of class politics. The emerging hourglass economy 
 creates not just a swelling lump of poorly-paid service workers, but 
 also a shrinking and insecure middle class, the effective 
 organisation of which demands the rebirth of a trade unionism that 
 knows when the interests of capital and labour do and do not mix. 
  
 But we never could rely on economic determinism. Ultimately the 
 challenge is political. Class is socially constructed. People have to 
 want class to matter. Recognising the role of class opens up new 
 possibilities for the left. The cash-rich but time-poor can only find 
 "the good life" through a redistribution of resources with their cash- 
 poor but time-rich alter egos. But forging this alliance requires 
 brave political leadership. 
  
 New Labour was conceived just at the moment the new right was 
 proclaiming "the end of history". The judgment of both looks 
 premature. As Marx and Engels wrote at the start of the 1848 
 Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is 
 the history of class struggle." In its own way that struggle must 
 continue today. 
  
 [Neal Lawson is chair of Compass and managing editor of Renewal 
 at http://www.renewal.org.uk ] 
  
                                 * 
  
 [continued in next message] 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)