Wes Streeting & the middle class
Wes Streeting has criticised ‘middle class lefties’ who he thinks are standing in the way of his efforts to privatise bits of the NHS should he get to be Health Secretary in the next Government. He might well find that the mostly not middle class UNISON and RCN are rather more formidable opponents.
Streeting will only fit the definition of a ‘leftie’ if its one drawn up by Lee Anderson. However his £90K desk job marks him out as definitively middle class.
I’m not sure what Streeting studied at Cambridge, even after checking but it probably wasn’t history.
I did however check Raymond Williams Keywords. As might be expected its quite complicated. The modern usage dates from the earlier decades of the nineteenth century and developed in the decades after.
Before the 1832 Reform Act there are instances of references to the middling and lower orders. However the distinction began to arose between the lower or working classes and the upper classes. In between were the middle classes- quite small in numbers at this point.
By the 1880s there was a distinction between workers who did manual work and got paid a wage and the middle class- also workers- who however attracted a salary and did desk jobs ranging from clerks to managers and professionals.
Williams did not touch on more modern developments (reasonably given the book was published a while back now). However certainly from the late 1960s there developed a trend for middle class workers to become unionised. The political hold that the Tory Party held over them also cracked, perhaps in some cases because the salaries they were paid did not lend themselves to a supposed middle class lifestyle.
As E P Thompson noted class is not a static category but determined in practice in relations between people and struggles coming out of that.
Given that Labour is an electoral party seeking a broad base of support Streeting’s comments reflect a narrow factionalism which suggests a lack of genuine experience of life as it is actually lived on the shop floor and in the office
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