Review by Owen Jones (Guardian) of the new Selina Todd book The People

Above:  Eton Mess - a favourite pudding.

Writing a review of a review is as absurd as the Whit Stillman character who says he prefers reading literary criticism to reading novels.

However there are some comments in this review by Owen Jones (Guardian) of the new Selina Todd book The People that one cannot let pass:  http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/05/we-re-not-all-middle-class-now-owen-jones-class-cameron-s-britain

"...the rise of Thatcherism led to 'the fall of the working class as an economic and political force' " - actually it led to the consummation of the working class as an economic and political force.  Margaret Thatcher's landslides would have been impossible without the votes of the working classes.  Not since Victorian times had work as a moral imperative and ideology become such a motivating force of government policy.

The post war competition to build houses was in many ways motivated by the desire to repair the destruction of the war, rather than any socialist drive to house the workers.  House building was a national prestige project.  It should be evaluated in the same way as the useless accumulation of the atom bomb and the abortive Blue Streak / Black Arrow space programme.

"...a fifth of manual workers’ children made it to grammar school" - and thus went on to enter the establishment.  Now, instead of 20% of working class children entering the establishment NONE of them do.  The socialists created a desert of educational equality and called it social progress (to paraphrase Tacitus).

"...writers on the left, including myself, need to examine the appeal of conservatism..."  Here Owen Jones betrays his middle class credentials.  No-one who has struggled to build from nothing a secure home and future for their families can doubt the appeal of Conservatism to the working class.  Those who have nothing have nothing to lose and so can regard revolution with equanimity.  Those with an Oxbridge education and easily transferable intellectual skills can afford to say sweep the board clean and let's start again.  Those who have nearly killed themselves to buy a tiny house and buy a reasonably acceptable second-hand car and get their children into moderately competent state school will fight with the ferocity of lions to preserve the status quo.

Owen Jones has obviously never worked in a factory.  If he had he would know that the workers and the bosses get on fine, it is the bullying middle-ranking supervisors and middle managers and jumped up shop stewards that are hated.  As in the factory so in society as a whole - the workers and the toffs quite like each other, and both groups despise the busybody moralising middle classes with their po-faced political correctness and superior airs of liberalism.

That is why although I am the son of a welder and a cleaner, and I was born in a house later pulled down as a slum, and I left school at 16 with almost no qualifications (although I later corrected that through my own efforts) I am a Conservative.  I much prefer the Old Etonians - you know where you are with them.  And although I quite like the rise of radical UKIP I see it as a complement to Conservatism, not a replacement.

"...food banks, legal loan sharks and zero-hours contracts..."  These are all New Labour creations Mr Jones.  I am sure Labour meant well (most of the time) during their eleven years in office but their incompetence created the three monsters you describe.  It took eleven years of Labour to create this situation and it will probably take eleven years of Conservatism to eradicate them.