THE governments of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair have left a “generation of working-class people” unable to “correctly identify either how society is organised or what their place within it is”.
That’s according to Orwell Prize winner Darren McGarvey – aka Loki – who recently took to our screens again with his latest BBC series Class Wars, the third part of which airs on Tuesday.
The rapper, writer and activist criticised the legacy of the former UK prime ministers for concealing wealth gaps with promises of largely unachievable goals for all citizens.
In an interview in today’s Sunday National, he told Gerry Hassan: “The concerted effort of both the Thatcher and Blair governments – to paper over class disparities with myths about merit and social mobility – has backfired. It’s since left a generation of working-class people unable to correctly identify either how society is organised or what their place within it is.
READ MORE: A different class: Darren McGarvey's BBC show breaks TV's unstated barriers
“When people blame migrants for their rundown communities and asylum seekers for housing scarcity, they do so because they lack class consciousness.”
Sunday National contributor Hassan also spoke to Rachel Statham of Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) Scotland about the changing role of men and women over the past half century, especially with regards to marriage and how social class has “tightened its grip” on it.
She said that in the post-war era it was much more common for women to marry into a higher class.
She said: “In the past, marriage was one of few available routes to upwards social mobility for women.
“While more than one in three women born in 1958 had a partner in the same social class as themselves, just as many women married into a higher class.
"Women born 20 years later, however, were far more likely to marry someone in the same class as their own.”
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