The end of class based politics?

The irony is about aspiration. The employee with just a few GCSEs to their name probably has lower aspirations than the person with a degree does. They accept their (academic) limitations and know that they are probably only suitable material for a basic simple job for the rest of their working life, whereas the employee with a degree thinks that they can potentially find a graduate job or a job that is better paid than working in Greggs in the future. Labour traditionally enjoyed the support from people with low aspirations whereas people with higher aspirations tended to gravitate towards the Conservatives.

Firstly I doubt this worker with a few GCSEs is voting for the Tories. They are probably more likey not to vote than do that. Or vote for a party like UKIP. It's the older poeple that have voted conservative. They tend to actually have some stake in the capitalist system, and have more attachment to notions of British nationalism which has totally replaced other forms of spiritual nurishment, eg the now dead labour movement they used to be a part of.

You are highlighting exactly what is happening. There is a breakdown of the thatcherite and New Labour promise. What you have here is working class poeple unable to progress and "escape" into the middle class, and poeple from the middle class falling back down into the status of working class. I'm an example of the latter. Even though my parents both have degrees and I have qualifications in higher education, and have a "middle class job", my situtation is in fact very proletarian. I do not have enough money to get on the housing ladder. If I move out of my parents house I would have to pay near to half my income on rent. And my job is heavily proletarianised. I have rigid set hours that I must be sat at my desk for and have little autonomy at work. There is a growing 21st century working class that is highly educated and has to sell their immaterial labour to make a living. It's totally epected that the Labour party is more appealing to these poeple than the conservtaive party who's class base ensures they must do everything they can to make my classes life harder.

I disagree, class politics is still here, it just looks different from the past and a new form of class antagonisms are emerging that look different from 20th century ones based around industrial workers. The divide between anyone of working age and retired is extreme and their has been nothing like it before. What looks like young vs old is actually a class cohort effect. This is summed up well by this sociologist

"The working class our "blue collar Tories" and their Blue Labour analogues get into a lather about is the working class of the past. The contemporary working class, the socialised worker is disproportionately young, more likely to be disengaged from official politics, but also largely spontaneously anti-Tory thanks to how the Tories are barriers to getting on and have vested interests in keeping this state of affairs so their voter coalition can hold together.

Why the old and the retired then. Why are they prepared to return governments who actively make life tougher for their children and grand children. Well, obviously, they don't see it like that. At its most conscious it's going to be articulated as tough love but ultimately, as a group of voters and a segment within the wider class structure there are certain structural characteristics conditioning their choices. The first is property. After a life time of work under a more benign economic and political settlement than now, they are more likely to own a home and have a decent pension. A decent number hold small quantities of shares. As modest as this property ownership is, you want to keep hold of it. And so suggestions Labour are going to tax the rich is code for 'they want to nationalise my bungalow'. Property, therefore, is something to be jealously guarded."

Very intriguing. Never considered the generational gap quite like this, but it certainly does make sense. It's almost as if we're dealing with two generations who both perceive, for different reasons, themselves to be genuinely "working class" while also emphasising the characteristics of the other that they perceive as not "working class".

Does the general election result indicate that the traditional Labour Conservative political divide based on social class is coming to an end?

Where do you think the dividing lines are now in politics? Is it age? Is it location? Is it education? Is it social values rather than economic matters? Is it knowledge of a foreign language?!

In Scotland the SNP appears to be very successful at transcending social class to the point where they are effectively a classless political party.

The Brexit Party and formerly UKIP are deemed to be to the right of the Conservatives but they more strongly attract people in the C2DE socioeconomic groups or those without higher education than those in the ABC1 socioeconomic groups or those with higher education, or what you could call left behind folk in the provincial towns of England.

In contrast, the Green Party is a party of the political left that tends to attract comfortably well off (but not wealthy) people with degrees who live trendy lifestyles and read the Guardian and listen to Radio 4, but they are ineffective at attracting manual and menial workers, the poor and downtrodden, or even what you could call common folk.

Very intriguing. Never considered the generational gap quite like this, but it certainly does make sense. It's almost as if we're dealing with two generations who both perceive, for different reasons, themselves to be genuinely "working class" while also emphasising the characteristics of the other that they perceive as not "working class".

This the blog post I got that quote from.

http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2019/12/boris-johnson-and-21st-century-class.html

The author is an academic that researches the conservative party.

The one's without degrees working in warehouses have no idea what a union is.

They are however very switched on when it comes to being woke and despise social conservatism.

Makes it even harder for the conservatives to win votes from these poeple. Best they can do is to suppress that vote. The problem Labour have is not enough of these poeple vote, especially in red wall type seats where the ageing relics of the industrial era (who often own property now) do vote.

The point about social values being tied to identify and new politics is a good one. How one voted in the EU referendum was actually more correlated with social values than anything else (liberal/social conservative).

That said it's hard to say how important this is. 2017 and 2019 aside most people don't vote for social policy, they vote largely on economic values. This may return to being the case once Brexit passes.