Britain's class system kills

This Green and Surprisingly Pleasant Land shows why the arrogance of the ruling class is lethal

Britain’s class system is supposed to be far less relevant than it once was yet it lingers to the extent that it is literally lethal.

Surely that’s an exaggeration, you may say but if you look at scandals continuing to this day and turn them on their head it becomes very clear that the class system lurks pretty close to their source and that victims of injustice are almost never members of the ruling class.

Can you, for example, imagine pupils of Eton College being treated as ‘human guinea pigs’ to determine the effect of blood transfusions during experiments? Yet this is precisely what happened to students at a school for the disabled.

Lamentably they were not alone, more than 30,000 people were infected by contaminated blood transfers. This all happened some five decades ago but only now is an inquiry coming to an end which may belatedly get to the bottom of what happened and offer compensation to the victims and their families. Most of these victims were ordinary people who were ignored time and again.

It’s the same story with the sub postmasters’ scandal, involving people of modest means who were harassed and jailed for crimes they did not commit but relentlessly persecuted because they came from the class of people who were deemed to be more likely to be dishonest and therefore prone to crime. Like the contaminated blood victims they had to campaign against the odds, unlike them their case was spectacularly highlighted by a television drama.

The victims of the infamous Grenfell fire disaster quickly secured some sympathy but little else. Yet the lives of these working class people in public housing would never have been endangered by  hazardous cladding on their tower block. It had not been removed because it was deemed to be too expensive to replace and probably because of indifference by a local council that had more important things on its mind.

Then there’s the  1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster where panic spread and 96 people died in a stampede inside a packed to overcapacity ground where passages were blocked preventing escape. The Sun newspaper, supposedly a great champion of the working class, gave its instant verdict on the tragedy lambasting the victims for being ‘savages’, presumably on the assumption that Liverpudlian working class football fans were inherently uncivilised.

Tragedy is thus compounded with insult. This is a common theme running all these scandals characterised by indifference to the victims, disbelief in their testimony, herculean efforts by the powerful would to avoid being held to account and a determination to avoid providing restitution to the victims.

All these disasters were man made. In fact made by people who have no idea how the other half  live.

Even when indifference to the lives of ordinary people does not prove to be fatal it causes immense suffering. A classic example is the era of austerity introduced by the Cameron government presided over by two immensely privileged public school boys, David Cameron and George Osborne.

Their focus was on balancing the books regardless of the intense pain inflicted on those at the bottom of the ladder who were plunged into a poverty trap with the trapdoor removed. The posh boys insisted that everyone had to tighten their belts to get the economy back on track; a palpable lie because there was no belt tightening for the rich. And the lie was compounded by the claim that once the books were balanced things would be much better for the poor. It did not take genius to predict that this was inherently unlikely and today’s long queues at food banks, crumbling schools and badly failing health service are testimony to the damage wrought during that shameful era.

The allegation is not that the rich and powerful are engaged in a deliberate war against the poor or even that they do not care. They probably care because in an elective system of government the wretched poor also get to vote. So those seeking high office are compelled to provide some semblance of concern. Usually this involves quick, very quick, trips up North, finding photo opportunities requiring the wearing of hi-vis jackets and hard hats (just like ordinary people, don’t you know) plus a visit to the pub to talk to ‘ordinary’ people with a pint of beer in hand. The alcohol abstaining Small Rich Fella at Number 10 has even been spotted in such a situation.

Today, when class privilege is not supposed to be what it was, 65 per cent of cabinet members went to private schools, 45 per cent attended the two Oxbridge universities. Most are not as rich as the Prime Minister but they come from social circles far removed from the lives of the average British person.

In other words they have no lived experience of what it is like to be at the bottom of the pile. This is why the absurd Suella Braverman can airily describe street sleeping as a ‘lifestyle choice’, why people suffering long term sickness have suddenly become the prime target for bashing the poor and why during Covid crisis the rulers felt free to party throughout lockdown because the rules they made were only for the little people.

The posh boys best friends in the newspapers are now busy filling their pages about alleged tax dodging by Angela Rayner, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. She has an excruciatingly working class accent, dragged herself out of poverty, was a teenage single mum, looks after a disabled child and has rightly also been castigated for attending an opera. Who the hell does she think she is?

Perhaps I should also mention that the origin of the allegations against her arise from a so called investigation by Lord Ashcroft , a millionaire tax dodger and scandal monger resident in Belize. His Lordship probably spends more on a couple of meals at the Ritz than the amount Ms Rayner is alleged to owe the taxman.