A Four Class Society

Back in 1997, John Prescott (the greedy fat pig who now claims to have bulimia) told us that ‘we are all middle-class now’. Spoken genuinely or an attempt to curry favour with Tony Blair – who knows or frankly cares, because either way reality tells an entirely different story.

New Labour’s ‘classless’ social concept was and always will be a façade and a lie. In whatever society you choose to consider humanity has and always will organise itself into classes. It is in our tribal nature to do so. No amount of social engineering can or will ever do away with this reality.

British society, like all others, still maintains degrees of class; it’s just that they have been noticeably transformed in more recent times. Largely gone are the days of the working, middle and upper classes. Relative economic affluence and prosperity for all has done away with the need for those terms, as did the destruction of the British manufacturing sector in the 1980s and the current rise of tertiary service industries.

Where once class was based upon economic well-being and means by which the man on the street earned his living, now class and our society revolve around the struggle for power, prestige and the ability to influence others. Thus people in Britain can now be categorised into roughly four different classes: the Elite, the Underclass, the Welfare class and Everyone Else.

The Elite, being the smallest group consists of the super-rich, celebrities, media and the political elite. Though they often maintain the greatest financial resources the true key to their position is their grip on the levers of power and influence over the rest of society. Metropolitan, liberal and elitist in their outlook, they are an insular, selfish and often intolerant group by nature whose lives are almost entirely separate to the rest of us.

At the complete opposite end of the scale lies the Underclass which encompasses sections of the immigrant population in Britain, the very poorest and those existing at the margins of society that most people would rather just ignore and hope might therefore just disappear. Their level of power and influence is negligible and they inhabit areas including the inner cities that are blighted by crime and insufferable conditions. At a stretch I would also include in this class those that are unemployed through disability or no fault of their own.

Next up is the Welfare class which consists of those persons who are unemployed and willingly chose to simply sponge off the state benefit system. In general they tend to occupy an area of society where once the lower or working class used to reside – though this is perhaps unfair on the old working class since they did in fact work for their living. Locked in a vicious cycle of deprivation and welfare on Britain’s council and sink estates, with no incentive or reason to lift themselves out of such an existence, their style of living perpetuates and their numbers grow as more people discover the ease with which welfare may be obtained.

And then stuck in the middle is everyone else. Currently the largest class in British society consists of all those in employment, who pay taxes and as a consequence fund (either directly or indirectly) the lifestyles of the Elite and the Welfare classes. Everyone else as a class carries the increasing burden of society as the other classes continue to increase in size, and an ever dwindling proportion of the population are left to pay the way.

Our society, built as it is upon an increasing number of people living at the expense of the rest, coupled with a rapidly aging population means that a tipping point may well be reached in the near future. What is therefore needed is an immediate reform of both the welfare system and the cutting back of state and Government in general.

However, this will not happen under Labour who have used the state as a means to forcefully try and create equality and to maintain their stranglehold grip on power by using state services to employ voters in marginal constituencies. This situation reminds me of two quotes, the first being from George Bernard Shaw who wrote:

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

And the second has been attributed to Alexander Fraser Tyler in a book ‘Elements of General History’ where he remarked that:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The cutting back of the state in this country can only happen on the condition that a conservative government accepts that the state is not there as a means to promote equality and that to rebalance the distribution of power and democracy in society, Britain needs to retake complete control of its national sovereignty by leaving the European Union. Until that happens, elections in this country will be a largely meaningless exercise and the state bureaucracy which traps so many will only grow.

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