Blair said he wanted to base his conference speech around the concept of ‘one nation’. He had mentioned this as a theme in his leadership campaign notes, but I had forgotten. I did not like the idea much, nor did anyone else – it seemed too abstract – but he would not let go of [...]
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Tags:Class·Equality·Labour·progressive politics·The 99%·UK
In December 1989 BMP had developed the concept of the ‘aspirational classes’. They argued that the key determinants of the next election would be ‘financial well-being: spending power, taxation, interest rates’. Qualitative research conducted at the time showed that despite the recession, Labour was seen as more likely to accentuate economic difficulties than the Conservatives. [...]
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Tags:Aspirational Voters·Campaigning·Class·Electoralism·Labour·progressive politics·UK
Salaries have not risen in line with inflation, the rupee has declined steadily against the dollar, and those of us who once had substantial family estates have seen them divided and subdivided by each – larger- subsequent generation. So my grandfather could not afford what his father could, and my father could not afford what [...]
It is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their actions. What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable.
Tags:Class
Seventy-five percent of the country is below the age of twenty-five. Sunil is representative of this group—a generation that expects something better than their parents had. If they don’t get it, they will be angry. And no family, no country, can withstand the anger of its young.
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This is the biggest difference between the world’s two largest democracies: In India, the poor vote.
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part of any speaker’s motive for using a certain vocabulary is always the desire to communicate stuff about himself. Like many forms of Vogue Usage, 65 PCE functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the speaker—scrupulous egalitarianism, concern for the dignity of all people, sophistication about the political implications of language—and so serves [...]
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The Imperial Hotel was patronized by the pastoralists, the civil servants, the bank manager and clerks—all the scrub aristocracy;
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