Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968-2000

This book examines class identities and politics in the late twentieth century, a period where class identities changed hugely. Class identities became more about history, heritage, and culture, and less linked to politics. Class ‘went underground’ in these years: though class snobberies didn’t disappear, they became less socially acceptable. In order to understand these changes, one important cultural shift we need to study is the decline of deference, which changed how people saw the hierarchies and snobberies of class. The study also looks at politics under Thatcher and New Labour, and examines the claim that these political projects wrote ‘class’ out of politics. It suggests that this analysis is too simple. Thatcher did attempt to do just that, but New Labour’s rhetoric about a ‘new working class’ or even a ‘new middle class’ was not an attempt to eliminate class from political vocabularies, but instead resulted from their attempts to listen to the electorate and what people were saying about social change and class.