Jilly Cooper’s very English fantasies
Her novels are so absurd they are rarely analysed. Can they tell us anything about Britain and class?
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Who are Britain’s new aristocrats?
An elite by inheritance still holds sway but it has been joined by an elite of grafters.
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Keir Starmer, toolmakers and the death of the working-class hero
Why his story of individual aspiration has failed to resonate.
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Rishi Sunak and Sky TV have unleashed a class war
The debate over the Prime Minister’s background is a reflection of bourgeois neuroses.
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How Thomas Piketty found politics
Ten years after publication, Capital in the Twenty-First Century remains a landmark study of inequality. Did it change anything?
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Can Labour’s skills policy break the “class ceiling”?
Keir Starmer has pledged to boost social mobility, but the success of previous interventions is mixed.
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How to fight a class war
The tractor convoy has replaced the picket line as the symbol of working-class revolt.
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Why Britain loathes the middle classes
Saltburn isn’t the first British film to scorn the petite bourgeoisie.
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What are private schools really selling?
They no longer have a stranglehold on Oxbridge and would lose tax breaks under Labour. Can elite education survive?
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It’s Rachel Reeves’s party now
The shadow chancellor mixed fiscal discipline with class war. Both went down equally well in a changed Labour Party.
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We’re all working class now
More Brits feel “working class” than 40 years ago, according to a major study seen exclusively by the New Statesman.
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Deano is Britain’s most misunderstood man
The left refuses to grapple with the realities of petty bourgeois life.
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Freddie deBoer: elite identity politics is destroying the left
The Marxist essayist and author on the real reason Black Lives Matter and other protest movements failed.
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Only snobbery can stop Elon Musk
Class prejudice is the last weapon we have against tech titans.
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Why the rich just keep getting richer
Also this week: an oak that will outlive us all and the problem with dogs.
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Democrats are losing the country music culture war
America’s white working class anthems tell stories the left want to forget.
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How the left forgot the petty bourgeoisie
The sociologist Dan Evans on the “shopkeeper” class that progressives fail to understand.
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America is nothing more than a self-help society
On both the left and the right, political radicalism has given way to cultish self-improvement.
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QUIZ: Which social class are you?
Take the New Statesman quiz to find out whether you’re working class, middle class or upper class in the eyes…
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How not to drown
Growing up as a fish out of water.
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