The guilt of rich liberals: How should we tackle the wounds of class?

The Lowdown: Ep 5

I’ve done a long read (below) on Polly Toynbee’s new study of class and guilt: An Uneasy Inheritance. As well as reading the piece, you can listen to my Lowdown interview with Polly on the Apple player. The Lowdown is also available on Google and Spotify The feed for all other providers is here. Alternatively, Buzzsprout has links to every podcast player you can think of!

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I’ve written at length because Toynbee covers two underexplored ideas.

First, she emphasises the primacy of class in determining our lives. Most Conservatives deny it. They pretend that we succeed by merit alone, and dismiss middle-class critics of the status quo as champagne socialists and poseurs. On the left, a focus on diversity has also downplayed the importance of economics. As I say in the piece, no one should dispute that it is a change to the established system to replace upper-middle-class, privately educated men with upper-middle-class, privately educated women, and upper-middle-class, privately educated white people with upper-middle-class, privately educated people of colour. But it is a change that leaves an unequal society intact, and may even strengthen it by covering its inequalities with a shimmering, progressive sheen.

Second, Toynbee takes the charge of middle-class left hypocrisy seriously. How should we live? What should we do? Her ancestors gave away fortunes, set up communes, and indoctrinated their children in the ways of righteousness — often with disastrous results. As graduates move to supporting centre-left parties everywhere in the West, the questions Polly raises are in need of answers.

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A Wide-eyed incredulity at working-class support for conservatism has gripped the political left for as long as there has been a political left.  From Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, via Antonio Gramsci and Lenin, to today’s denouncers of Fox News and the Tory press, the far left, and often the centre left as well, has believed that conservatives have a near supernatural power to brainwash the masses into voting against their real interests.

Liberals have paid less attention to an equally perplexing question: why do wealthy people vote against their real interests and refuse to endorse conservatism?  In materialist terms their politics make no sense. How can they simultaneously benefit from and denounce a system that gives them and their children such abundant privileges?

The right, of course, cannot stay off the subject. Across cultures it knows how to mock the Champagne socialists, the limousine liberals, the salonkommunists, the liberal elite, and La Gauche caviar.

And, let us be fair, the gap between the upper-middle class left’s words and deeds is often wide enough for an army of satirists to march through.

The mockery is occasionally gentle but usually​ ​delivered with real venom​ which reveals a deep loathing​. Polly Toynbee has heard it all.  Most wealthy people will not accept that their most significant achievement was to be born to the right parents, she writes. They are “certain that merit has propelled them to the top and just as certain their children will merit their inheritances”.  They turn on class traitors who recognise the injustice of the society that created them.In feudalism, inequality was justified by the principles of aristocracy; in capitalism, by the myth of meritocracy.

At one level Toynbee’s  An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals is the culmination of a journalistic career that focused on the injuries of class.

She does not just collect statistics, but goes undercover to share the experiences of the working poor and report on how hard it is to live on wages and benefits that, for all the talk of scroungers having it easy, have fallen in real terms since the 1980s.

In a scene a novelist could lift, Toynbee describes what happened when she took a job as a porter in a London hospital.

I knew a number of the consultants here quite well. I had interviewed them often during my time as BBC social affairs editor. I knew one who had treated both my daughter and myself. But porters with their wheelchairs and walkie-talkies are invisible, not people but mere functions. Even if I smiled at them no one I knew ever recognized me, because I had become a nonperson. That was something I experienced over and over in these jobs. Once you cross the threshold from middle class work to manual drudge, you pass through a green baize door of the mind into a nether world of unimportant, uninteresting non-personhood.

The dominant faction among progressives is as in need of Toynbee’s lectures as the rich right.  There is a “dangerous tendency” on today’s left, she writes, to replace class with other identities – ethnicity in all its variations, gender, transgender, sexual orientation or religion.  “But class still stands out as the overarching determinant of most lives, an identity everyone is born with, and too few escape.”

No one should dispute that it is a change to the established system to replace upper-middle-class, privately educated men with upper-middle-class, privately educated women, and upper-middle-class, privately educated white people with upper-middle-class, privately educated people of colour. But it is a change that leaves an unequal society intact, and may even strengthen it by covering its inequalities with a shimmering, progressive sheen.

Toynbee is scathing about the lies the comfortable tell themselves. Along with her husband and collaborator, David Walker, she convened a focus group of extravagantly rewarded City lawyers. They did not realise how rich they were, thinking themselves closer to the middle-class than the plutocracy (they were all, in fact, in the top 0.1 per cent of earners and some in the top 0.01 per cent). When their good fortune was explained to them they put their success down to hard work, as if a single mother juggling two or three jobs ​was idle​.

They are not alone in that. Class, when it is discussed in the UK, too often consists of prolier-than-thou poses.  “An astonishing 47 per cent of all those in professional and managerial jobs actually call themselves working class,” Toynbee reports. “Even a full quarter of those who have middle​-​class parents still claim working class authenticity by reaching back to grandparents and even to great-grandparents.”

Desperate to prove that they are strivers who have succeeded on merit alone, too many among them damn the needy as lazy and undeserving, as their predecessors have done since the institution of the Elizabethan poor laws.

If Toynbee had left it there, she would have produced a good book; a necessary book even, as thinking about class is out of fashion on Left and Right.

An Uneasy Inheritance is an exceptional book because Toynbee goes on to discusses the contradictions of her own class of bourgeois radicals with an honesty few writers have matched since George Orwell.