Our leaders have betrayed the noble worker. Oh really?

In his essay on the ‘Peculiarities of the English’, E.P. Thompson gave his theoretical definition of class:

When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways. But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.

Selina Todd has a snappier and more prosaic definition of the working class (‘The People’) as ‘a class of workers who depended on earning a living and were in that way distinguished from the rich who lived on the labour of others’.

Whether it’s more of a thing or a happening, Todd sets out to record its history from 80 years after Thompson’s seminal work, The Making of the English Working Class, ends.