A rant on who the fuck is (or isn't) working class: The way “working class” and “middle class” get flung around in UK politics and media has become completely detached from reality. It’s no longer about material conditions. Ownership, assets, debt, economic power. It’s now pure cultural vibes: what you eat, how you speak, whether you like hummus or watch Love Island. This isn’t analysis. It’s a rhetorical weapon Let’s get back to the structural, materialist root. Class has always been about your relationship to the means of production and the security that gives you. Do you own assets that generate wealth even when you’re not working? Can you weather a recession without losing everything? Do you pass on real capital (a paid-off house, a business, savings) to your kids? That’s class. Not your Spotify playlist or your accent. Sure, cultural capital exists. Tastes, education, social networks, the “right” cultural signals. It’s real and it matters. But on its own it is insufficient to produce meaningful class politics. Your class is not determined by whether you shop in Waitrose or M&S, whether your accent is perceived as middle class, if you have a uni degree, or if you play the harp. Class is first and foremost a relationship of material conditions and proximity to owning wealth, assets, or the means of production. Of course class produces culture, and perceived culture can sometimes prop someone up or hold them back, but vibes do not define your structural position. The vibes don’t pay the mortgage. Even the more “official” metrics we lean on are flawed. Take the old ABC1 / C2DE social grades (still widely used in polling, media, and politics as shorthand for middle vs working class). These were never designed to measure class. They’re a 1950s marketing tool based almost entirely on the occupation of the “chief income earner.” Managerial or professional roles get you ABC1. Skilled manual gets you C2. They ignore wealth, housing equity, business assets, savings, debt, and inheritance. A highly educated renter scraping by gets labelled “middle class.” A debt-free small business owner with a paid-off home gets slotted as “working class.” The metric flattens real material differences. Yet today the labels are applied almost entirely on those aesthetics and these outdated occupational buckets. A mid-30s couple in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Edinburgh or other regional cities, both on 40k, paying a massive mortgage or high rent, no inheritance, eating hummus and shopping at Waitrose on a budget, they get called “middle class” and told they’re privileged. Meanwhile a couple in their 50s running a small plumbing business or a chippy, living in an ex-council house they bought for peanuts decades ago, with zero mortgage and built-up equity, they get called “working class” and held up as the authentic voice of the people. One is one missed promotion or interest-rate hike from disaster. The other has real material security. But the second gets the political halo. This misapplication isn’t harmless pedantry. It’s now the central trick in British political discourse. People whose material conditions are actually precarious, high combined incomes but negative net wealth, renting in expensive cities, no assets to fall back on, routinely get stigmatised as “middle class” or “elite.” The familiar tropes of “champagne socialists” and “luxury beliefs” get thrown at them the moment they raise practical objections about housing costs, tax cuts for the rich, interest rates or policy failures. Even though they rely entirely on their salaries with zero capital buffer, they’re painted as out-of-touch affluent voices. Conversely, those with real material security, paid-off homes, business ownership, savings, managerial control over their own capital, get elevated as the “authentic working class.” This lends them unearned moral and political weight, even when their lived experience is far more stable than the people they’re contrasted against.