New Labour's Legacy: The Big Class Delusion

Britain used to be a simple place, with a simple class system, where everyone knew who they were. Then in 1997 Tony Blair and New Labour came along and messed the whole thing up.

Pre-Blair you were either a) Upper-class: Royal or titled aristocracy b) Middle-class: perhaps beneficiaries of inherited wealth and almost certainly educated at a top private school or c) Working-class: state educated and the people that become tradesman, milkman, postman, market traders or cab drivers etc. When I left school in 1989 only the really clever kids went to university, the rest of us did apprenticeships or went to work for banks at the bottom to learn the trade, then worked their way up.

Then up popped Tony Blair, who, even though he was a Thatcherite Tory in everything he said and did, managed to become leader of the Labour Party. The Party that was founded by Working-class Trade Unions. Then, probably embarrassed by his own middle-classness, he decided that working-class people shouldn't be plumbers or bricklayers anymore, he decided we should all go to university, get nice office jobs and call our children Poppy or Tulip.

Tony Blair said that everyone that leaves school should go to University. The ideology in itself is hard to argue against, the reality of it is nonsense.

Blair's idea meant that Technical colleges closed down and were replaced by second rate universities, teaching young adults second rate degrees. Which meant after 4 years of drinking, partying and going on demonstrations demanding equal rights for gay badgers, thousands of people left education unemployable. Further education also became so expensive that the Labour Government had to introduce tuition fees.

Another negative to Blair's flawed project was that we are now left in the UK with a shortage of some 150,000 plumbers, electricians & engineers. These jobs now have to be filled by migrants from the EU, which pushes wages down, casualising jobs that were once well paid. We have a whole generation of school leavers that don't see these trades with the same pride as the working class once did, but as something beneath them.

Labour continued the Tory policy of financial deregulation. This led to the banks recklessly lending money to people who had no hope of paying it back, tying them into mortgages and loans that means they'll have to work until they die to pay the debt off, creating what's known as 'the working poor'. Ordinary people were buying large houses with mortgages they got by just having to show up to sign the forms, believing that owning property raised you up the social scale. Sometimes they were lent money to buy two, three or four houses.

Normal people were somehow convinced that being in lots of debt made you a successful entrepreneur.

The brilliant Labour MP, Dennis Skinner, said in the House of Commons recently "it all comes down to thing we're told has gone away - class." Most people who still consider themselves Working-class will not be voting Labour anymore, they will vote for the polar opposite: UKIP.  New Labour didn't get rid of the old class divide, they just created a class delusion.