Confessions of a class tourist

Pundits writing for a young audience are always telling readers to ‘stop pretending to be working-class!’ and stop ‘fetishising the working class’. They seem more angered by the imitation of class than the iniquities of class itself. Singer Lily Allen and the rap star Yungblud have both been denounced on Twitter for – to paraphrase E.P. Thompson – the faking of the English working class.

Personally, I don’t understand the fuss. For most of my youth I pretended to be working -class – and so did most of my middle–class mates (sorry, friends). And we were not alone. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the voices of youth all sounded working–class, especially the middle-class ones like Jagger, Bowie and, yes, that faux working-class hero himself, John Lennon. Today, with our fixation on cultural appropriation, they’d all be denounced on Twitter for class tourism. 

My journey into working-class tourism began when my American parents moved to London in the 1960s and I ended up attending a local north London comprehensive school called Holloway.