“I’ve got the most working-class Cabinet in the history of this country sitting round my Cabinet table,” said our beleaguered prime minister, “and I’m really proud of that”.
That statement is rich in connotation, which, I’m afraid, may escape my American readers. Even Britons may struggle to define ‘working class’ precisely, but Americans must be totally at a loss.
I understand their predicament. Having myself lived in the US for 15 years, I never once heard anyone describe himself as working class. I’m not saying such people don’t exist, only that I never met them.
When I moved to London, the demographics of my friends and colleagues didn’t change appreciably. And yet from day one I began to meet people, some of them on incomes ranging from six to eight digits, saying they were working class.
Now, I grew up in a country where Marxism was recognised as the only true teaching in history. Hence I had to take half a dozen different university courses in various aspects of Marxism, all the time suppressing either the giggles or nausea.
I’m not sure I retained much of that useless knowledge, but I do remember how Marx defined working class, otherwise known as the proletariat. His definition was mostly economic, based on one’s relationship to ‘the means of production’. Essentially, he meant manual workers in manufactories, factories, mines and some such.
It seems to me that our governing Marxists have kept their guiding light’s nomenclature, while depriving it of any tangible substance. They define working class as a certain badge of honour, the prole version of hereditary peerage.
A man whose ancestor was ennobled, say, in the 17th century will consider himself upper class or, if he is in the direct line of male descent, a peer. The same logic is applied to working class: someone who grew up in a working class family, even at several removes, is working class for life, and so will be his progeny.
While feasting on upward economic mobility, our Marxists illogically deny the possibility of upward social mobility. Hence, what Starmer meant was that many members of his cabinet grew up in families that were, or had been in previous generations, working class.
However, if we insist on using the term in Marx’s own rigorous sense, Starmer’s statement is a lie. Hard as I looked into his cabinet colleagues’ backgrounds, I couldn’t find a single one who ever did a full-time working class job.
Starmer himself never did. Neither did Rachel Reeves. Neither did David Lammy. Neither did Angela Rayner – although she qualifies tangentially and, if you will, culturally. Angie grew up on a council estate and left school at 16 after producing an illegitimate child conceived behind a bike shed or in some other insalubrious surroundings.
After that she became a social worker and a greasy-pole climber in union and then Labour politics. Does that make her working class? I don’t think so, but Rayner’s background is similar to her cabinet colleagues’, minus bike-shed babies.
By being an open homosexual, Wes Streeting boasts an important political qualification, but not the one in question. His grandpa and grandma did some time at Her Majesty’s pleasure for armed robbery, which is undoubtedly a lower-class pastime. But as far as I know, Wes himself never knocked off a corner shop – and neither did he ever do a blue-collar job.
Compare this cabinet to the first Labour one in history, Ramsey MacDonald’s in 1924.
MacDonald himself was a farm labourer at 15. Arthur Henderson was a foundry worker. John Robert Clynes, a mill worker. Margaret Bondfield, shop assistant. Thomas Shaw and Fred Jowett, textile workers. William Adamson and Stephen Walsh, miners. And so forth.
Care to withdraw your statement, Sir Keir? No, of course not. It’s too pedantic for words to insist on precise definitions. Any Labour politician or voter is ipso facto working class, especially if he identifies as such. What’s there not to understand?
But I’m glad to see that Starmer found something to be proud of in his cabinet. For he and his jolly men are rapidly running the country into the ground – so rapidly and thoroughly, in fact, that one is tempted to think that perhaps a different family background is more conducive to successful governance.
Sir Keir’s boastful and false statement was more than just a reaffirmation of his Marxist credentials. It was surrender to the loony Left wing of his party, the Trotskies to his Bukharin.
“I will never walk away from the mandate I was given to change the country,” vowed the PM to the loonies baying for his blood. He seems to misunderstand not only the term ‘working class’, but also ‘mandate’.
Britain has 48,208,507 registered voters. One would think that a vote of at least over 50 per cent would constitute a mandate, but that would only go to show how deeply one misunderstands politics. In fact, 9,708,816 people voted Labour in 2024.
The peculiarity of our election system delivered Labour a landslide 174-seat majority. But it takes a profoundly dishonest man (aka a Labour politician) to claim a mandate on the basis of only 20 per cent of registered voters casting their ballot for his party.
“I will never walk away from the people that I’m charged with fighting for,” continued Starmer, and he didn’t mean all British subjects, which is how his job used to be understood. He meant those especially dear to his Marxist heart: working people, defined as the non-working underclass.
The necessity to restate his commitment to ruining the country arose in the wake of the Mandelson scandal, which the loonies saw as a pretext to get rid of Starmer and replace him with a loony Marxist like Rayner.
Yet Starmer got a stay of execution (figuratively speaking, for the time being) by effectively saying, “Chaps, we don’t need the chaos of a leadership challenge right now. Keep me in, and I’ll do everything you want – and more.” We can take his word for it.
“It is utter nonsense to suggest that everybody gets a fair chance in life, utter nonsense,” complained Starmer.
But it isn’t. Everyone gets a fair chance. What he meant was that not everyone gets an equal chance. For example, girls who get pregnant behind a bike shed at 15 are at a disadvantage, although not such a big one that they can’t become MPs 20 years later.
The complete equality of Marxist fancy is achievable only in prison, and this is the ultimate ideal for which Marxist loins ache. Making everyone equally poor and equally enslaved was the philosophy of the country in which I grew up, but I hoped — in vain, as it turns out — I’d be spared that evil nonsense in the country in which I grew old.
Then Starmer added a lachrymose personal touch: “Even within my own family, my brother, who died last year, he had difficulties learning when he was growing up. He spent his adult life wandering from job to job in virtual poverty.”
Learning difficulties is the woke for what used to be called mental retardation. This is a tragedy, as is dying of lung cancer at 60. But I struggle to detect any relevance here, unless Starmer believes that government action can turn mentally retarded people into systems analysts and brain surgeons, while banning cancer by fiat.
Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband, and only in a mad country can that post exist, explained the terms of surrender he and his fellow loonies imposed on Starmer: “I tell you what angers Keir the most – it’s class. It’s the class divides… He exists to change that… I absolutely dispute the idea he’s not somebody driven by burning passion about the injustices our country faces and how we need to change them.”
Right. So Starmer got to keep his job by promising to eliminate class divides. Good luck with that: no government in history has ever succeeded in that task, including those that could bring to bear on it mass executions, concentration camps and murderous artificial famines.
But hey, nothing ventured and all that. I just shudder to think what this lot may try before irreversibly reducing Britain to a Third World status politically, economically and socially.
We can’t get rid of this Marxist cabal for another three years, not legally at any rate. As a conservative, I’m opposed to any illegal ways of changing government, although I sometimes think at a weak moment that I’d be willing to make an exception in this case.
P.S. Would Angie Rayner know that the title above is based on a literary source? If not, she’s perfectly qualified to be the next PM.