1
the early 21st century , and media commentators struggled to explain it . As a historian of working-class life , I had long suspected that the public memory of the working class was at odds with the popular memory of working-class people . In 2008 I set out to investigate this , and in 2014 published my book The People : the rise and fall of the working class . The ‘ fall ’ of the subtitle does not imply that the working class has disappeared – rather , that mainstream politics and the media conveniently forgot about them .
The public memory of the working class is devoid of politics and divorced from work . I realised that this derived from social surveys of Britain conducted in the 1950s and 1960s , when affluence encouraged the theory that everyone was becoming middle class . Among the most illuminating studies were Richard Hoggart ’ s semi-autobiographical The Uses of Literacy and Michael Young and Peter Wilmott ’ s Family and Kinship in East London , both published in 1957 . These books became bestsellers . They highlighted that working class people ’ s lives were worthy of serious consideration . But they were not comprehensive : they focused on neighbourhoods , not workplaces , and on family life rather than trade unionism . They fed some powerful myths : that ‘ traditional ’ working-class men worked in heavy industry while women were full-time housewives ; that working-class people lived in the same place for generations ; that ‘ their ’ interests lay in domestic stability , not in political change .
Post-Thatcher , we are in an era of deindustrialisation , attacks on trade unionism , legal restrictions on popular protest and growing inequality . In this context , these myths feed an argument that the working class no longer exists . After all , we ’ re now in a world where women go out to work , heavy industry has declined , and migration is a fact of life . Alternatively , these myths bolster politicians ’ claims that working-class voters can only be won over by promises to curb migration and restore socially conservative values . Most overview
57