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.

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Crewe And Nantwich

With just ten days until polling day, campaigning for the by-election in Crewe and Nantwich is now in full swing with the Conservative party clearly sensing that victory is possible.

An ICM poll of 1,004 people by telephone in Crewe and Nantwich for the Daily Mail put the Conservatives on 43% while Labour on 39% and the Liberal Democrats on 16%. However, once again I am not convinced that this poll will reflect the final result we shall see on the night.

As is the case with most parliamentary by-elections, a diverse range of candidates have chosen to stand including UKIP, the Green party, and the Monster Raving Loony Party. The ICM poll does not appear to take into account ‘other parties’ running. Therefore, even on a reduced turnout I doubt we will see any candidate exceed 40% of the vote.

What’s more, it perhaps goes without saying that the Liberal Democrats will poll better than they would tend to in a general election because at a by-election they are able to pile their national resources and activists into one seat. At the last General Election the Lib Dems took 18.6% of the vote. I expect that they will not only increase their vote but also their overall share by picking up a good few anti-Tory and disgruntled Labour voters.

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Vagaries Of Perception

I don’t believe for one moment that at the next General Election the Conservatives would take 49% of the vote while Labour only 23%.

It just is not going to happen. People can say whatever they want when answering opinion polls but when it actually counts many would still vote Labour having previously said otherwise.

The problem is that the Conservatives are still unpopular; perhaps less unpopular than Labour are currently, but nonetheless still unpopular. The opinion polls and statistics highlighted in the newspapers rarely tell the full story – that of declining turnouts and a fall in the number of people saying they are certain or likely to vote.

While the Conservatives may supposedly be set to take a higher percentage of the vote than Labour, the actual number of votes set to be cast at the next election will probably decline meaning that each party will receive fewer votes in total. Turnout may only increase slightly if the result appears to be particularly close, similar to the increased turnout in the recent Mayoral elections.

There is of course also the fact that opinion polls are based upon uniform swings and General Elections do not produce exact uniform swings from constituency to constituency. For example, the Conservatives poll very well in the South East but very poorly in Scotland. Overall polling figures often do not reflect such regional differences.

The upcoming Crewe and Nantwich by-election will almost undoubtedly represent another wake-up call for the party hierarchy and the small number of Cameron-fanatical members who seem to increasingly frequent ConservativeHome.

If the Conservatives fail to win the seat, then not only will it have been over twenty years since the party won a parliamentary by-election from any opposition, but stark proof that the much discussed opinion polls of bubble politics are almost worthless.

Global Cooling

In his weekly column in the Telegraph on Sunday it seems that once again Christopher Booker is the only journalist within the mainstream media to be highlighting the increasing degree of evidence against Global Warming theory.

As he points out, when the snow cover on Snowdonia fell between 2003 and 2007 the mass media crowed that this was of course evidence of global warming caused by human activity. But now that Snowdonia has experienced abnormally deep snowfall this year, guess what, it has rarely if ever been mentioned by the same ‘concerned’ media.

NumberWatch, in a humorous ‘rebuke’ of Christopher Booker’s latest article points out that:

The snows of Snowden are a case in point. They were news while they were shrinking, but when that goes into reverse, the rules of modern polite society require the quiet turning of a blind eye.

Equally interesting is the way in which the eco-lobby and the green left have begun to noticeably shift their rhetoric and focus from ‘Global Warming’ to ‘Climate Change’ when it turns out that the facts don’t suit their warming theory. Amusing if it were not so serious is the recent suggestion by some more ‘scientists’ that the recent large increase in Antarctica ice is down to (yes, you guessed it) global warming. Once again it is apparently man that is causing the Arctic to warm while Antarctica to cool.

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