In defence of class war

UKIP and specifically its leader Nigel Farage are finally finding themselves under the glare of media scrutiny rather than simply the spotlight for once. The Times has been exposing (£) Farage’s alleged misuse of his expenses as an MEP and the party of out are not very happy about it.

In response, UKIP have published a list of Times journalists, their links to the Conservative Party and their educational backgrounds. Farage has also sworn never to deal with the Times again.

The list is bad politics. Let’s get that out of the way up front. Many of the journalists named had nothing to do with the piece that has so incensed Farage. It’s intimidatory and has more than a whiff of McCarthyism about it.

It has also long been the accepted case that the So-called “paper of record” has long been a supporter of the Conservatives and in their opinion their conscious and unconscious biases will be doing all they can to promote the Tory cause.

But the reaction from some – on both the left and the right – to the list was to focus on and ridicule the element of the list where it focused not on the many journalists political ties, but on their schooling. I lost track of the number of times on Twitter I came across the phrase “UKIP’s Class War”.

Now admittedly, it is a little hard to take a class-based attack seriously when spearheaded by an ex-stockbroker educated at Dulwich College. As the New Statesman have pointed out, his Party are similarly privileged.

UKIP’s hypocrisy is a story, but it is not the story. UKIP have a habit of being an odd vehicle for asking questions that politicians have avoided for too long. So I wonder if – just as immigration has become a topic that politicians and writers have been forced to make sense of in public (whether in celebration of our diversity or in understanding the pressures brought on the low paid for example) maybe now we can finally have an honest conversation about the incredible imbalance of our country and the way it is run.

Less than 7% of the UK population is privately educated. Yet more than one third of MPs are privately educated. Even in Labour – where our “One Nation” values see us better reflect the population as a whole, we have nearly double the national average. Better than the Lib Dems who have around 40% and the Tories on a massive 55% (Source BBC).

The same is true of those who are there to scrutinise them. A study in 2006 found that over half of all leading journalists went to private school. So we have a very narrow pool of privileged elites scrutinising each other from their very narrow privileged perspective (this is in now way limited to the Times or to the right-leaning media).

Policy is set by those who largely have never experienced or lived with poverty or even normal levels of financial concern. It is reported on by the same. gossip around the personalities of those involved is considered bigger news than the impact on those we will never know the names of. It is this lack of understanding that leads to policies like Labour’s 10p tax debacle or the disgraceful Bedroom Tax. The frame of our understanding is skewed by the inexperience of our interpretors.

Billionaire Warren Buffet once said:

“There’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning”

This is becoming as clear in the UK as it is untenable. So while we can dismiss the UKIP attacks on the Times as self-motivated and crude. While we can dismiss them as hypocrisy, we cannot dismiss the wider truth that they speak to.

The UK class system is more fragmented and complex than it has ever been. There are not simply three static classes. But what we are seeing is a very small group at the top hoarding the nation’s wealth and power. In UKIP, they have even taken over the principle protest vehicle people are using against such elitism. This is unsustainable for a healthy nation and unsustainable for one that values all its citizens.

It is time to stop dismissing questions about our elites as “class war” and to actually start to fight back for the majority.