The two houses pictured above are a three-minute walk between each other—then again, I’m a fast walker so it would probably take you twelve minutes or so. The houses are quite near the University of Warwick; and you could probably jump in a car to the campus and listen to a seminar entitled “Brexit [inter]sections: class, labour mobility, and post-Fordism in late capitalism”; nominally, this would be all about the class divide in post-Brexit Britain—perhaps it would even feature quaint Marxist jargon about “the bourgeoisie” and “the petit-bourgeoisie” (even the left no longer says “the proletariat”, though perhaps there would be reference to POCs and “marginalised identities”).
The university seminar would, naturally, tell you nothing about the real class war in Britain. The real class war is between the Victorian townhouse with the Ukrainian flag tagged on the window and the mid-2010s new-build with the England flag—technically, in this context, pronounced “En-GER-lund” (Come on!). I know quite a lot about the people who live in these houses; no, I’ve never met them but they are archetypes—the Victorian house contains an education consultant who consumes avocado on toast (sourdough) and is still very, very angry about Brexit (that Farage); and the new-build contains an electrician or plumber, not yet with his own business but perhaps on the way to that, who is devoted to football and disposable BBQs from Tesco.
If you follow the BBC—the university sector or media more generally—you would live under the impression that there is a class war; and the class war features on the “oppressor side” Mr. Monopoly men in top hats, fox-hunting “posh twats” (even though fox-hunting is banned), Eton-educated “toffs at the top”, and “racist football hooligans”. The former oppress “real people”: the real people being blacks, migrants, the LGBT community, women, recreational users of cannabis and DMT (there is no other kind), and women who wear the hijab—left absent from the mixture of “real people” is the notional ideal BBC viewer, who is actually implicitly white and middle class (in a Victorian townhouse) and who prides himself (mainly herself, really) on his non-prejudicial attitude to the world (for the masochistic and serious cult devotee, Channel 4 provides content that causes straight white believers to actively whip themselves for their crimes).
This is the class war as constructed from the fantasy world of academics and media types—a world where Thatcher and the miners still constitute an important contemporary issue, or something that needs to be burned into historical memory, anyway. Just as with Greg Dyke, the BBC director who remarked almost two decades ago that the BBC was “hideously white”, these people are often envious wretches.
I once met a storied feminist-socialist academic who had dedicated her life to the movement for “social justice”; it quickly emerged that the real issue that motivated her was not love for the trannies or the migrants but the fact that her father, a successful dentist, never sent her to private school—and then she only went to a mid-ranked university. The horror. This was the real issue that motivated her love for “the oppressed”, her endless articles that stoked a fictional class war—cause: daddy didn’t spend more money on me.
The official class war discourse taught at universities and on the BBC is a fantasy for the middle-class and upper-middle-class occupational categories. It bears no connection to the real class war—the real war for status. If you really want to know what it’s like to be a despised and disprivileged minority, walk into the University of Warwick seminar with an En-GER-lund flag; people will be horrified—or, more likely, get on the intercom and say, “Security! Security! We have an ISSUE here.” Possibly it will be recorded as a “hate-crime incident”. Do the same with the LGBT flag and you will receive benign indifference, perhaps the lecturer will request that you wave it a little less forcefully over his face.
Crack out the En-GER-lund flag and you will soon know what it is to be “low class”. You see, real high-status people are intelligent; and intelligent people like novelty, intelligent people like distant things (distance and novelty go together)—different cultures, different peoples, Waitrose-range Indian food (authentic—scrumptious). You do want to signal you’re intelligent, don’t you? Then you better be cosmopolitan.
What the Ukraine flag at the window really says, “Look, I’m a powerful person: so I can afford to care for the victim—for LGBT, for BLM, for the Ukrainians.” The position is feminine: the Ukrainians take the feminine position in the war and they do so quite self-consciously in order to receive more Western aid—hence it is high status to support them (they are practically being raped by ultra-masculine Putin; the beast, the beast daddy).
To fly the England flag is unsophisticated and parochial: yet, note well, the man who flies the England flag is lower class in pure monetary and occupational terms than the he/him (of course they have pronouns in their profile) with the Ukrainian flag. I estimate the Victorian townhouse to be worth about £430,000-£460,000, whereas the new-build is about £200,000-£240,000 (this is how middle class I am, reader: I stand outside estate agent windows and look at the house prices—I know, with my educational level I should be crying about Ukrainian orphans instead; excuse my class faux pas).
Hang on, I thought you were for the effin workin’ class? Answer: the official class war, the class war invented by intellectuals and journalists, has always been bullshit. Sure, at a certain point they propagandised a lot of agreeable lower-intelligence people into unions and the Labour Party—but previously those people were loyal Liberals, and before that they did what the squire and parson told them. All that has changed is that the parson is now in an office in BBC Manchester, and he is bored with plain old English tradesmen and shop assistants—he is more “concerned” about transgender issues today; hence the “class war” is about trans, migrants, POC and so on.
Personal example: I was in a Communist organisation as a teenager and ¾ of people in it were privately-educated—one senior party member, who had a senior position in a trade union, I learned years later was the son of a lord. He had me fooled, he had the accent down perfectly—I would have sworn he was born on a council estate and crushed under the heel of Mr. Monopoly.
It has always been this way: the “official class war” was invented by discontented intellectuals in the middle and upper-middle class occupational categories—or from outsider racial groups, such as Marx—to garnish their own status vis-à-vis successful businessmen and aristos; and they used pretended concern for the lower orders to do it. The intellectuals brainwashed the agreeable element in the lower orders into a class identity, but it is easily forgotten—so today some counter-signallers, conservative intellectuals, pretend concern about an entity called “the white working class” (ew).
The less agreeable social elements, with a staffie and Chelsea tattoo and an En-GER-lund flag, were never fooled—“What’s this white working-class bollocks? I’m England, mate. England.” His attitude is more healthy: there is no white working class—salt of the earth factory hands, or whatever you think it is—there is England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland; there is Britain. People who talk about “the white working class” are middle-class intellectuals who think they can play the victim game in a clever new way—usually they get owned by their slicker compatriots who have decided to champion the trannies or a more respectable cause, ultimately what they practice is genuine fascism (i.e. national socialism, national egalitarianism).
You could say that the real class war is the state versus the nation: the people with he/him pronouns in the bio, Ukrainian flags out the window, a regular donation to BLM, and so on are basically for the state—Havel’s proverbial greengrocers, except for them it is no formality; they really believe it—after all, it makes them high-status sophisticated people, not uneducated plebs who are afraid because a Somali clan moved in next door (not a problem in a Victorian townhouse, and to say it is a problem means you cannot afford to move to a Victorian townhouse…the occult class war is revealed).
The people who signal in this way are usually employed by or associated with the state: they are unrealistic and irresponsible, feminised—hence they support the feminine, whether men who want to be women or the Ukrainians; they live by appearances, just like Oscar Wilde. They dominate the priestly crafts and so impose their false class war on the nation—impose false non-issues on the nation in order to garnish their own status.
As priests, they establish the genuine rules that determine class in formal behaviour—the superficial, narcissistic class markers; and so they can easily “own” both the unsophisticated plumber with his England flag and also the royal family and the aristocrats who otherwise claim natural superiority over them. The middle class were always the religious class and they have never stopped being so: they know about status; they know that they can never be aristocrats, aristocracy is in the blood—yet they can be more pious than either the aristos or the less intelligent lower orders (some upgraded into the “respectable poor” if they scrub up well).
Class exists in occupational terms, monetary terms, and in aristocratic terms of blood—what does not exist is “the class war” as constructed since at least the English Civil War by middle-class intellectuals. The “class war” does concern money; the BLM flag-waver waves the flag to signal that he has no problem with blacks—he has no problem because he is rich enough to segregate himself from the ghetto, if you complain you ain’t rich. Yet he also knows that it is too crude to say—à la Donald Trump—look at my lovely cash, loadsa money. So he signals his superiority in a discreet moralised way, and he can trip up his near-rivals in the status game as he does so.
In reality, class is not an issue—however widely interpreted, whether taken in the old Marxist sense or in the contemporary sense that transgender people are treated as an oppressed class. There is no reason why a plumber, a computer programmer, a stockbroker, and a shop assistant need to be engaged in some putative conflict—the personal interests of two computer programmers do not necessarily overlap. The only commonality is the nation; the extended family—hence patriotism is the only real socialism, a situation whereby people are different but equal. And, incidentally, sticking a flag, any flag, out your window is narcissistic and tacky…