Kemi Badenoch & the Making of the English Working Class
Kemi Badenoch a contender in the current Tory leadership contest was born in Wimbledon although she spent much of her life to age 16 in Nigeria and the US. She would not take the point but her Nigerian origins- the country gained independence from Britain in 1960-makes her every bit as British as someone who had spent all their early years in Sarf London.
Her parents had a professional background but she claimed that working in McDonalds as a teen made her working class. I think not, anymore than my teenage evenings and weekends spent stacking shelves and working checkouts at Sainsburys made me a proletarian.
Ms Badenoch is Tory MP for Saffron Walden in Essex and so can be perhaps be excused for not having read E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1963). The definition of class that he offers is a generic one not just English but it is historically and politically rooted.
Thompson argues that class is not a category but ‘something that in fact happens…In human relationships.. we cannot have love without lovers nor deference without squires and labourers’.
Ms Badenoch’s current position as a Tory leadership contender brings her into a relationship with not just a party of wealth and capital but people who represent and personify it. She certainly has a relationship with the working class, as voters and the many where she represents the few. This does not make her working class
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