Class warfare is nothing new when it comes to the left. It’s a massive part of how liberals sow division among people who would otherwise get along. We see it in how Democrats always portray Republicans as only looking out for the interests of the rich, as though wealthy people are always the enemy.
In the UK, the Labour Party has had power since July. Labour is a far-left party that has its roots in protecting the interests of labor unions and socialists. But today’s Labour Party is playing a different sort of class warfare game. It’s a unique riff on the elites vs. proles narrative that characterizes much of today’s politics.
“Keir Starmer’s critics might have you believe that the Labour government is fighting a class war,” writes Gareth Roberts at The Spectator. “They point to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s crackdown on private schools and Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s attack on farmers. These initiatives certainly don’t appear to be just about money: whacking VAT on school fees and hitting dead farmers with inheritance tax won’t raise much cash in the scheme of things. But they will inflict totally unnecessary amounts of pain. Their targets are, supposedly, people with cash to splash, on behalf of the needy.”
Roberts instead characterizes Labour’s policies as a “civil war” rather than a class war, and it’s taking place “between factions of the middle class.” He explains that “It’s the progressive public sector vs the conservative private sector, with everything and everybody else used either as materiel or as collateral.”
A note of clarification: What the British call the “middle class” is analogous to what we would refer to as the “upper middle class” in the U.S. Our “lower middle class” is the Brits’ “working class.”
In some ways, this class war is new money vs. old money. It’s the snobs vs. the aspirational. It’s the high class vs. the tacky. In other words, it’s teenage drama in the political realm.
“Despite what we’re constantly told, there is no hatred so deeply ingrained in this country as the hate felt by the public-sector middle class for the private-sector middle class,” Roberts writes. “The progressives really, really loathe productive, aspirational people who have put a bit of money away. They view them as anti-social.”
“Wouldn’t that money be better spent by government, they think, redistributed where it could do some good, for asylum hotels or foreign farmers maybe?” he adds.
Related: Voters' Remorse? 2 Million Brits Sign Petition Calling for a New Election
In Roberts’ eyes, the government-elite class sees these people as “upstart trash: pushy, ungenerous, suspicious, climbing and grasping. Not lovely kind welcoming folk like us.”
Roberts points out that this hatred of the aspirational middle class shows up in the villains of British pop culture. He writes that the kerfuffle over the Jaguar rebranding highlights this middle-class divide. The elites applaud the silly Jaguar ad, while the hated aspirationals scoff at it.
What’s more dangerous is that this loathing of the non-elite shows up in policy.
“This hatred makes the purpose of Labour’s policies nakedly clear,” Roberts explains. “They are there to indulge the spite and envy of the public-sector middle class, who regard family farmers and people who send their kids to fee-paying schools as the lowest of the low.”
He concludes that the “progressive middle class,” which spans both major parties in the UK but is especially dominant in Labour, has done much to damage the UK. It’s why millions of Britons have signed a petition calling for a new election. The American version of this phenomenon is what has led to the MAGA movement and this month’s monumental election. Thankfully, we’ve dodged some of those bullets so far, and hopefully, we can fend off more of them.
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