Do you think that this country will have a working class PM?

[EddyF]

Do you think it’s possible and likely? someone who has gone to a bog-standard school; rented or grow up in council stock, or just someone who has lead a ordinary life like the majority in the U.K?

I don’t understand how people can only vote for the elite despite what the ordinary man and woman goes through in this country. The problems aren’t new with the NHS/benefit system/classism/immigration/no funding for society to actually run effectively. But they keep being voted in. Why? Twice this week people have told me they would rather vote Tories again as long as its not Labour. One with MH and can't get the proper help and the other one who is still working at senior age.

These issues haven’t just started and have been a sore point for a long time under the tories. Which begs the question, why do people vote for them? What vetted interest would the ordinary person have to vote the same party all of the time? It can’t just be about immigration ( what have the tories sorted out effectively regarding immagration?). I am not white but I have worked with white working class service users with very little in life but follow the rhetoric of the conservatives. Knowing damn well they will never reach the lifestyle of the party they're voting.

How did The Sun manage to get a large number of their readership to vote for tories? time and time again. First time might make sense as people desire change, but over and over again? Even if it is about immigration, don’t they have children and families who they can see struggle with these policies?

I get why businesses may vote the way they do, but the people in this country confuse me. Why not vote Conservative and if you're not happy with them in the next election, you don't touch them? why stick with them?

I was born in the U.K. My primary education was in France and we lived in the USA for some time. All childhood holidays in Africa mainly. With all of the faults with the American system (especially for non-white people/margainlised groups), it is more fluid in getting yourself out of poverty/access to social mobility.

All my International friends from Africa to the US are doing better than me, despite us all studying/holding same qualifications. It feels impossible buying a property here despite earning on paper a very decent salary and being a professional. My friends/family abroad all seem to own/build even if they earn less/same.

Once you're paying approx 2K in rent in London (yes you can move out but most people have family/work/community built there),how can you save for a significant deposit with rent, bills, car-note etc? wouldn't most government/policy makers want to help the youth in prosperity since the western world have essentially the systems to make a society less unfair/workable?

I am not saying everyone is poor in this country. It's just a lot of people are suffering needlessly due to mismanagementof the country where only a smaller number get to enjoy life like how it should be.

I actually think it's better to abstain voting than voting the same people/party that have communicated verbally and non-verbally that they do not give a fuck.

I would never consider being an MP but hypothetically if I was, I would surely want money behind me in case I lost my seat or whatever. I actually don’t really understand how the pay structure works tbh but to me it seems very precarious. Surely this rules most “working class” out - everyone complains when MPs get pay rises and claim expenses but if that’s your only source of income you’d need it to be pretty high or have back up funds?

If I’d done spectacularly well in finance or law or whatever or had a nice trust fund, then yeah why not go for more power.

Harold Wilson?

There is nobody currently in the HoC who merits the position of PM.

Untrue- Yvette Cooper is very intelligent, experienced, professional and measured.

I think a good thing would be for any mp going for pm to have to spend time in various places eg in the middle of the densest hardest council estate for a month.

Then shadowing someone working in a care home / live in facility for disabled people.

Go and shadow a ta in a deprived school and learn about sen and how ehcp work and then look at prison statistics for illiterate prisoners.

Mull over how simply improving recognising sen would benefit society as a whole.

Etc etc

It shoud nt matter what anyone's background is but they should all be made to live for a while other people's experience.

You shouldn't confuse being working class with a desire to progress the interests of the working classes. Many WC people have very much drunk the Kool Aid and believe that everyone can succeed in life, and if you don't its down to a failure on your own part. If this weren't the case, we'd never have a Conservative government.
WC people who have managed to rise to positions of power are often particularly bad for this, because they did it, everyone should.
Other WC people want to dissociate and believe that their acquisition of a few modest material possessions represents them 'getting on in life', so poorer and more disadvantaged people should be shaken off and ignored.
I don't really care what social class the PM is born into. I just want one who is sufficiently educated and intelligent to see life more widely than from their own limited experience, and who upholds the values and attitudes I feel are important.

I don't really care if the PM is working class. I only care that they are competent and not always doing things that screw over the country.

Lee Anderson is WC and seems to hate anyone who isn’t rich as much or even more than the Eton educated bunch so being born WC doesn’t mean someone will promote the interests of others who are
Amongst some WC people there is a “I succeeded and so can you if you just work hard enough” mindset that has replaced any empathy or compassion they may have had

Yvette Cooper is nothing but a bloody hypocrite. She was banging on about welcoming refugees and offering to house Syrian refugees in her own home.

She never did.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/hot-topics/migrant-crisis/nick-asks-yvette-cooper-why-she-hasnt-taken-in-syr/

We’ve had a few as others have said. Plus Keir Starmer is one.

The problem with Sunak isn’t his class - and he’s not particularly upper class. It’s his policies!

No - Harold Wilson wasn't working class - his father was an industrial research chemist and he himself had been the youngest don at Oxford (Economics, I think) before standing as an MP. So northern, yes, but at least lower middle class.

Harold MacMillan had an aristocratic demeanour and lifestyle, yes, but his grandfather had been a Scottish crofter, living in a traditional long-house in the Highlands. Oh, the days of social mobility!

Blair has been one of the poshest (along with David Cameron and of course, Boris Johnson) in recent years.

The answer is real social mobility. No system can ever be perfect and I favour the opportunities available to wc children through the grammar school system over any negatives which that may have had. The lesser (by far) of two evils, in my view and I speak from experience!

Meant to add..

I think the priority for politicians and especially the PM are 1) intellectual ability and good education and 2) a moral compass.

Clearly BJ had the first but definitely the second which is why he came to grief, having damaged and embarrassed the whole nation in the process.

I'm not a hugely political animal (have never been able to swallow any ideology whole) so am less bothered by which party or which social class - as long as the person has moral standards. And there are people of all parties of whom this is true (as well as the bad apples). People laughed at John Prescott, and OK, he wasn't highly educated and that was his Achilles heel - but he did have beliefs and principles, whatever else could be said of him.

I think Wilson, Callaghan, Heath, Thatcher and Major all had a moral compass - whether or not you agree with them. They all had strong beliefs and a sense that they wanted to serve their country. Same with Brown and I think, Starmer.

Blair, Cameraon and Johnson I wouldn't trust anywhere!

I think Wilson, Callaghan, Heath, Thatcher and Major all had a moral compass - whether or not you agree with them. They all had strong beliefs and a sense that they wanted to serve their country. Same with Brown and I think, Starmer.

I admire Wilson hugely for refusing to send British troops to Vietnam when asked to by Lyndon Johnson.

Unfortunately, BJ was immediately hit with an existential crisis. Of which he had very little control over. His problem was mismanagement internally, the opposition took hold of that and used party gate etc to oust him.
In my opinion, someone who lacks an understanding of economic endeavours may not be capable of effectively leading a country. Additionally, it seems that those in power tend to implement policies that only benefit a specific group within society.

Who makes up the working class - any plumbers I know are self employed. We all get 13 years of free education. If you end up with no paper qualifications is it the gov to blame?

Really hope so, with Wes Streeting. But last time I saw him on tv he said he wasn't interested in the PM role but one of the other heavyweight offices (can't remember which one right now).

@CoffeeCantata "I'm not a hugely political animal (have never been able to swallow any ideology whole)"

These two sentences have nothing to do with each other.

There seems to be a very strange tendency on here to equate "working class" with "doesn't have a standard English accent."

KimberleyClark · Today 11:35
I think Wilson, Callaghan, Heath, Thatcher and Major all had a moral compass - whether or not you agree with them. They all had strong beliefs and a sense that they wanted to serve their country. Same with Brown and I think, Starmer.

I admire Wilson hugely for refusing to send British troops to Vietnam when asked to by Lyndon Johnson.

Totally agree, Kimberley. I think history will judge him well. He also had the grace to resign when he got the first inklings that his intellectual powers were failing (early dementia). He stood up to the US too, as you say.

CurlewKate · Today 12:02
There seems to be a very strange tendency on here to equate "working class" with "doesn't have a standard English accent."

Yes, I agree.

But have you tried defining working class recently - or any class for that matter?
Things have changed so much since these labels were first used. On MN posters will sometimes lump in a group which used to be called the 'underclass' (lumpenproletariat in Marxist terms) with the working class, and they're entirely different.

For example, WC used to imply you did physical work and didn't own your home. Now so many people own their homes (whom might have rented in the past) does that mean they are MC? I just don't know! And then you've got the problem of 'is it your origins or your achievement in life which defines your class?

Nightmare territory! I think most people would agree that say, Angela Rayner is WC. But other than her...so many grey areas. Used to be more clear-cut in the past when so many people did physical jobs and many politicians came up through the trade unions.

But you're assuming the other option/s are better

Wales has been Labour led since the senedd was created- 24 years and most of our key metrics (health care, education, unemployment etc) are even worse than englands.

Whereas Scotland tried something new and has had a SNP majority for a significant time now but are also struggling in key areas.

I think it's more of a lack of a viable alternative than people wanting to keep voting Conservative.

I'm confused by the discussion here because when people have given examples of people who had working class upbringings but then became PM, the answer seems to be that they are no longer working class because they now have money/ education etc. But anybody who becomes an MP and subsequently PM will have some money because they'll earn £85k ish as an MP and then £150k ish as PM.

And does this mean that anybody with a working class upbringing who is bright and pursues education, or establishes a successful career then ceases to become working class? So working class people can't be successful, and if they are then that disqualifies them from being working class? Saying we want someone who has only had a "normal" (presume this to mean average?) life to be PM, by definition can't happen because by becoming an MP and then PM they obviously haven't been average! So I don't understand the question really.

Working class people can be aspirational can't they? Education used to be very highly valued by many poorer families as a route out of poverty, not something to be shunned. As indeed it still is in many immigrant populations. Grammar schools - when they were available in every catchment in every town so not dependent on tutoring or living somewhere expensive - were a huge engine for social mobility and gave immense opportunities to intelligent working class kids. As did proper technical apprenticeships that led to skilled and well-paid roles. It's a shame all of that is gone, but I don't really get the idea that those working class kids that benefitted from those opportunities therefore ceased to be working class at all by doing so.

I suppose I don't really understand the whole idea of "class" beyond a measure of income. What does it actually mean? If you are reliant on income from work to be able to live surely you are working class. I agree that having people as PM who are so wealthy this is not the case is unhelpful because then they have no real concept of working life and how most families live. But I don't understand what the problem is with having people who have worked hard at other careers first and have useful skills from that?

Presumably we want intelligent and focused people with a wide range of professional skills and experience to be MPs. Having a Government full of people who have no expertise in finance, economics, business, healthcare, education, defence, science and tech etc does not serve us well, because then we have people making policies on matters they do not understand and making a huge mess of it.

Yes reverting to ‘sleeping to the top’ claim is a strange tactic and a poor one. Really bad whoever the woman is.

That doesn’t mean everyone will heap praise and look up to AR as you do. But I object to your version as it doesn’t help any woman anywhere.

Exactly. I don't think the labels make sense anymore. The difference is usually about wealth, not occupation/ education, because social mobility has all but vanished and due to the devaluation of salaries over many decades "middle class" as it once was has pretty much ceased to exist. Many in professional occupations who even a generation ago would have had children in private schools and owned their homes are now renting and struggling. Whereas many in the generation before who had traditionally working class occupations could buy a house, now own it outright and have large pensions, therefore more wealth than those a generation younger in traditionally middle class occupations could hope for today.

Basically now wealth is king, earned income gets you nowhere unless you are earning perhaps £250k/ £300k per year. So you have really now only got three groups as far as I can see:

a) Wealthy people who either have family money/ assets OR own a business or have very highly paid jobs earning several hundred thousand pounds per year, who can build up wealth from those earnings.

b) Pensioners whose working lives coincided with a period where working people could buy a home and had final salary pensions and consequently have built up sufficient money to live relatively comfortably for the rest of their lives.

c) Everyone else, who no matter their education/ profession will struggle to get by due to extremely high housing and childcare costs, terrible pensions and punitive levels of tax if they do manage to increase their earnings, meaning they won't be much better off than those in social housing earning minimum wage and receiving benefit top ups.

Maybe she needs to present herself as someone who is awkwardly reading off an autocue that has got jammed on the same paragraph like Rishi Sunak then.

At least she'd actually get shit done.

Unlikely.

Though I'd just like a competent one and competent ministers, as most of what government does is or should be non-partisan. Things like being able to get a passport in a reasonable time, or a driving licence renewal.