There's this phrase beloved of the British media, "white working class". It is supposed to refer a specifically neglected group of the population whose views are routinely ignored and whose needs are consistently unmet. There's a tradition of journalists going to towns in northern England to interview "white working class" people to find out what such "real people" think about immigration, environmental protections, trans rights, calls for slavery reparations, and other hot-button issues, and the predictably horrific takes these people have are framed as the final word on these subjects, due to the supposed authenticity of the "white working class" people who hold them.
It is obviously a wildly untrue, totally racist and fascist project to frame a group of explicitly white people in a white-supremacist country as being particularly neglected by an establishment that supposedly favours their non-white counterparts. The idea that the children of Caribbean or Bangladeshi immigrants, for instance (people who moved to Britain precisely because of the vast difference in quality of life that was artificially created by the extractive British Empire ruining the countries from which they came), are somehow privileged over white British people is totally absurd.
On top of that is the fact that the "white working class" are pretty much always imagined as specifically English, perhaps because journalists are aware that a "white working class" person in Wales or Scotland might have views that don't quite fit the mould. And then there's Ireland: it is utterly trivial to find someone in County Antrim, for instance, who holds views more right-wing than anything you've ever heard in your life (an artefact of the settler-colonial mindset that persists centuries after that colonisation), but Northern Irish voices seem to be considered somehow foreign from the PoV of the British media. Plus the "white working class" are not allowed to be Polish, Romanian, or other nationalities of white British residents, because it seems you must be a citizen to have a space in the class system, a total joke in a country with such a sizeable immigrant worker population.
Then even within northern England, there are specific towns from which "white working class" people are not allowed to come. Some cities like Bradford or Sheffield are off-limits by virtue of not being white enough; others, like Manchester or Liverpool, are too metropolitan, too young, too vibrant; others, like York or Durham, have too many tourists and students. Once you cross off all the "inauthentic" places, you are left with a handful like Macclesfield, Doncaster, or Barrow, whose populations are sufficiently white and old to have the views you desire.
But on top of all that is the issue of "working class". You have to ask, if you stop people for an interview on the high street of a northern English town at 10am on a weekday, what kind of people do you expect to find? It's not going to be domestic cleaners, it's not going to be Amazon warehouse workers, it's not going to be supermarket checkout workers, it's going to be retired people, over-65s typically, who often live off their private pensions. Which is to say, the "white working class" are typically people who don't work at all.
For example, my wife's grandfather is 79, white, lives in a northern English town, and is likely to be the kind of person stopped by the journalists for an interview. He would call himself proudly "working class", and most people would probably agree. He owns a 5 bedroom detached house in rich part of town, has three cars, goes on 4 foreign holidays per year to places like Vietnam and Peru. He hasn't worked since he was 57, and his very high income comes from the fact that he saved 10% of his salary during his working life, invested it in stocks, and is now living off the dividends and growth in those stocks. Which is to say, he used to sell his labour to survive, but he now survives by owning portions of companies and living off the labour of others which produces profits and growth for those companies. He has moved from "worker" to "business owner", and through the miracle of the capitalism doesn't even have to administer the businesses he owns. He lives a life that, a few centuries ago, even a Duke would envy.
And yet, the idea that he is somehow "working class" is one that the large majority of British people would agree with. People would point to the fact that his parents didn't attend university, that he was not privately educated, that he reads "working class newspapers" like the Daily Mail, that he watches football, that he drinks beer rather than wine. And they would ignore that he is very rich, has domestic servants to do his gardening, cleaning, and ironing, and that he doesn't even work himself!
In Britain, your class (as generally understood) is composed of two things: your parents' class, and your aesthetic tastes. But also you can only move upwards. If you live in a Georgian house in North London, drink wine and read literary fiction, you are middle class no matter whether your parents were factory workers or landlords. If you live in your car and work 12 hour shifts at the Amazon warehouse to afford enough food to survive, but your parents were doctors who sent you to private school, you are still middle class, just a middle class failure.
Which is to say, class in Britain is totally disconnected from your relationship to capital. The "white working class" who are interviewed by journalists are pretty much always wealthier than average and living off their investments, i.e. the labour of others. It's pretty striking to realise that "working class" is totally unrelated to "working".
This is not to say that wealthy 79-year-olds should be working, only that we need to be honest about their class status. British society has been set up in a way that virtually guarantees that, as you age, your class interests gradually shift from "working class" to "business owner". A 25-year-old Amazon warehouse worker is personally invested in legislation about safer working conditions or limits on shift length; a 45-year-old Amazon warehouse manager has some interest in those things, but increasingly is also interested in their sizeable chunk of Amazon stock increasing in value; a 75-year-old retiree has no personal interest in working conditions and is entirely invested in their Amazon stock continuing to grow. Retired people with private incomes, no matter what jobs they did in their youth, have class interests that align with other wealthy people: to call them "working class" is absurd.
There is a parallel here (as always) to transfemininity. Specifically in the sense that the class that society will admit that you have is very different to the class that you actually embody. Trans women occupy a social role similar to the homeless Amazon warehouse worker whose parents were doctors. The supposed privileges of your youth are used to deny you the right to name your relationship to capital as "working class"/your relationship to sex-gender as "woman", even though the reality of your lived experience places you right at the bottom of the class/gender ladder, even far below those who are allowed to be "working class"/"women".
Both economic class and sex-gender class have two meanings: a nominal one that describes only how society expects or wants the world to work, and a material one that describes how it actually works. The misalignment between the two allows for privileged people (like my wife's grandfather) to be widely understood as underprivileged, or for severely underprivileged people (like trans women) to be unable to access what little support there is for the underprivileged on the basis of their alleged privilege. Both in the case of journalists spouting "white working class" nonsense, or social attitudes to trans women, I can't help but feel that this misalignment is precisely the point.
