Class, as if it ever went away, is back. Everywhere you look in British politics at the moment, class war is raging.
The House of Commons’s newest MP, Hannah Spencer of the Green Party, is a plumber who campaigned to represent “working-class communities” like hers. During the Gorton and Denton campaign, she was accused by the right of not being stereotypically blue collar enough: “She’ll never have a rolled-up copy of the Sun in her arse pocket… [or be] caught taking a five-minute break to find out the football scores,” wrote one commentator.
A former Labour candidate decided she had a “very middle-class” living room (standard terrace-sized front room, Ikea-d out with grey corner sofa and sage-green throw, venetian blinds, jute rug). This followed hilarity on social media at Zack Polanski’s party-political broadcast ahead of the by-election, in which he sat chatting about “Corrie” in a strange simulacrum of an Eighties nan’s living room, all chintzy brown floral carpet, Bakelite radio, heavy curtains and china teacups on saucers.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, the SNP is branding the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar “nepo baby-in-chief” – in reference to his father’s career as an MP. It accuses him of benefiting from the “colossal Sarwar family empire” by funding his political ambitions with “the bank of mum and dad”.
And Nigel Farage was visibly rattled at a recent press conference when asked by a Financial Times journalist about Reform UK’s commitment to state education, given he and his entire top team – Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman, Zia Yusuf and Richard Tice – were privately educated. Farage lashed out at the paper, and refused to let anyone answer the question.
What makes you “working class” – that prized identity – is set rigid in the minds of British politicians across the political spectrum: state educated, without family wealth or cultural capital, working a trade, watching the soaps, and mind-my-patterned carpet, thank you very much.
When the Oxford University anthropologist Kate Fox set out to study the English more than two decades ago, her conclusion was stark. “Class in England has nothing to do with money, and very little to do with occupation,” she wrote in her bestselling 2004 book, Watching the English. “A person with an upper-class accent, using upper-class terminology, will be recognised as upper class even if he or she is earning poverty-line wages, doing grubby menial work and living in a run-down council flat,” she observed. “Equally, a person with working-class pronunciation, who calls his sofa a ‘settee’, and his midday meal ‘dinner’, will be identified as working class even if he is a multi-millionaire living in a grand country house.”
The strange codes separating the upper class from the merely upwardly mobile, first popularised in Nancy Mitford’s 1955 essay “The English Aristocracy”, were thus updated to reflect the Britain of the new millennium – and they were just the same as the old one. Since Mitford’s work outlining U (upper class) and non-U (aspiring middle class) language usage – “napkin” vs “serviette”, for example – it’s been clear that the British definition of class has forever defied simple economic status.
Until today. While political parties cling to old assumptions and semiotics of what makes someone working class – their schooling, their parents, their accent, their interior design choices, their job – the British public is less and less likely to see class as a cultural thing with specific lifestyle and aesthetic markers, and to connect it more with material success.
This is because younger generations associate class chiefly with economic status. A stark example of this is a finding from a polling project the New Statesman ran with the pollster Redfield & Wilton Strategies a few years ago which has always stuck in my memory: the footballer Marcus Rashford was seen as upper class by 56 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds, compared with 10.3 per cent of those aged 55 to 64. Similarly, electricians were viewed as working class by just 42 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds, but by 68 per cent of those over 65. Millennials and Gen Z are more likely than their elders to link class to income and to overlook the background baggage that so preoccupies older generations. As Chris Rojek, professor of sociology at City University, put it to me: younger generations are seeing class “in the present tense”. They “appear to identify membership of the upper class with power and social impact” rather than “accent, schooling, parental occupation or ancestry”.
This shift is politically significant. Politicians trail behind public attitudes even as they compete to be the authentic voice of the “working class”. They have failed to heed the lesson of the 2018 book The New Working Class by the ex-Keir Starmer aide Claire Ainsley, which warned that none of the parties have “caught up with modern social class dynamics”. Ainsley found the present-day working class more likely to be multi-ethnic service-sector workers in retail, hospitality and care, rather than flat-capped ex-miners in rugby league towns.
“England is the most class-ridden country under the sun,” George Orwell wrote in his 1941 essay “England Your England”. “It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.” But while our class obsession clearly persists, it appears younger voters are moving the country on from the snobbery of their older, sillier counterparts.
[Further reading: Was the Chancellor’s Spring Statement dead on arrival?]
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This article appears in the 04 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Trump's global terror
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