basis of class politics
As so often, some of the sharpest political insights come not from the sage columnists of our upmarket papers but from comedy writers. They have noticed â and exploited â some of the social class cross-currents that conventional analysis has tended to overlook. Fifty years ago, things were so much simpler. The working classes voted Labour while the middle classes voted Conservative. In 1967 Peter Pulzer, a distinguished political scientist, wrote: âClass in the basis of British politics. All else is embellishment and detail.â He had good reason to say this. Labour had won the general election a year earlier by winning more than 60% of working class votes.