The 'Economy that Works for Everyone'

PLATITUDES

I will govern for the whole United Kingdom and we will look to build an economy that works for everyone, not just the privileged few.

Theresa May, after becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom, July 2016

We want to see a break with the failed economic orthodoxy that has gripped policymakers for a generation, and set out a very clear vision for a Labour government that will create an economy that works for all not just the few.

Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, May 2016

Class is a communist concept ... it groups people together and sets them against each other.

Margaret Thatcher, 19921

Very few people claim they want an economy that only works for some.

Given this, we might wonder why senior politicians keep talking about how they want an economy that works for everyone. If everyone agrees on this, why keep bringing it up as if it were controversial?

The idea of the economy that 'works for everyone' is a platitude. It is something that is sufficiently vague that nobody could really disagree, and which nobody ever gets around to defining. British politics runs on these kinds of statements. Certain things are so roundly accepted as good that their actual meaning is rarely questioned: important platitudes of the last decade have included 'balancing the budget' and 'social mobility'. More recently, these have been usurped by 'taking back control' and, as things have become more and more chaotic, 'certainty' and 'stability' (these last ones looking more grimly ironic by the day). These are all empty phrases on to which listeners can impute anything they like. Conversely, there are other phrases with equally little definition that are used to signify Bad Things: 'red tape', 'Westminster elites', 'magic money tree' and so on.

The platitude of the economy that works for everyone is a particularly important one, because of the sense of fuzzy warmth it provides. It conveys the idea that British society could and should be one big harmonious unit, where the prosperity of one means the prosperity of all, so long as a few issues can be ironed out. As with a healthy human body after the removal of an inflamed appendix, once a specific problem has been dealt with, the remaining entity is basically one in which all the different bits act in harmony. This is a good, uplifting message.

But such an economy has evidently not arrived and seems unlikely to do so in the imminent future. So the business of politics becomes the business of identifying new problems that can explain the delay, and this is where the message becomes less inspirational. There is no shortage of groups or entities that act as the social equivalent of the inflamed appendix, and politicians have competed to find the most relevant ones. On this basis, in the years following the financial crisis of 2008, the political right clearly did much better: migrants, the European Union, the unemployed and benefits claimants evidently captured voters' imagination more than left-wing concerns like inequality, 'the bankers' and 'irresponsible capitalists'. There has been a shifting astrology of blame which has, at times, become surreal and dreamlike, even extending at one point to people who don't have alarm clocks or who leave their blinds closed. Sure signs of unacceptable sloth.

The idea of class poses a problem for these kinds of platitudes, because it suggests that there are more deep-rooted and intractable divisions in society that cannot be resolved without significant upheaval – hence Margaret Thatcher's rejection of the very concept, in the quote above, as one imported from communist ideology. It alludes to tensions that are imprinted on the heart of society and define the way it works, when actually it is much easier to parcel out smaller, more manageable evils, whether they are real or not. So it seemed, until quite recently, that class had become very unwelcome in mainstream political discussion.

The Labour Party had a big hand in this. In its New Labour period, it had a quaintly uplifting message: yes, class used to matter and it used to be terrible, back in the pre-war era when people worked in hellish factory conditions. But now we've had Labour governments, along with the National Health Service (NHS), the welfare state, workers' rights, and so on, and as a result class is not a problem anymore. It still exists, but if we can make sure we have 'equality of opportunity' (as if this is possible when people start life under such different conditions) then class divisions don't have to be divisive.

Since then the Labour Party's abandonment of class has come back to haunt it. The political right in Britain became far keener to talk about class than before. Politicians such as Theresa May and Nigel Farage sought to build a close association between the idea of the 'working class' and a particular set of opinions, most notably related to immigration. They cultivated a widespread conventional wisdom that 'ordinary people' were sick of immigration and the EU, while 'liberal elites' loved immigration and hated native British people. This message, while dependent on some fairly self-serving stereotypes, proved quite resonant, and did the Labour Party very severe damage, particularly in the general election defeat of 2015 and in the Brexit referendum, which led to huge internal tensions and agonising. In 2017, as May began to look increasingly weak and Labour appeared to be gaining ground under Corbyn, the issue of class once again became hazy in British politics. For instance, we were told that age is now a far more important division than class, and had largely usurped the latter as a means of explaining people's voting choices.

This erratic and unfocused discussion of class, sometimes dismissive, usually vague, always self-serving, comes about mainly because the concept is nowadays generally understood as a kind of cultural identification. It is associated with certain accents or certain kinds of job, or the kinds of music or TV programmes people like; who their friends are, the values they emphasise and the kinds of newspapers they read. Consequently, some of the people who talk about class most often are self-conscious liberal broadsheet journalists, fretting over whether or not they are allowed to pass judgement on people who read The Sun. There is a vast body of academic research on how to categorise people into different classes according to these social and cultural differences. I will summarise some of this later.

While recognising the insights that some of this literature can provide, I want to get away from this kind of thing. In the Marxist reading, class is about something different. It is not, at root, about culture, but about the position people occupy within the structure of an economy, including the economic function they fulfil and the...