Does class inequality still matter? The Great British Class Survey ten years on
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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Good evening, everyone. Good evening. How great to see so many of you here. I'm guessing that all of you think class matters, but...

let's see um so i'm Pfizer Shaheen i'm very lucky to be a policy fellow at the international inequalities institute here at LSE and really so excited about this conversation but even more excited about this incredible panel and and we'll get to that i just want to say from the start that i am not a neutral chair i definitely think that class matters and i've just spent a whole day in a conversation about this and

And I think why a class, as opposed to, say, talking about poverty, is really important is that it's positional, it's political. I don't have a problem with that. You know, it's really about the stratification of society in terms of resources, in terms of power, in terms of respect. And I just think that when you look at Elon Musk and the oligarchy that we see, I don't see how you can't see that class is just really animating our society in a very negative way.

way. And the reason why myself and Mike and others in the room have been kind of picking up this issue of class and wanting to do much more on it again is because we're deeply worried, actually. We're deeply worried about the way in which a very negative story is being told about class in a very

denigrating story about class and a very divisive story about class and those of us from working class backgrounds who consider ourselves working class or do research on it know that the reality is very different and we're really keen to get that out in terms of research and really keen to have these conversations and so thank you again for joining us and today and this event

Particularly, it is about marking 10 years. It's a very important piece of work that Professor Mike Savage led on class. And it started with a big class survey that the BBC pushed in 2013. And it culminated in a book, Class in the 21st Century. And it

social class in the 21st century, which had huge impact. But that was 10 years ago. And many of us feel that that conversation between academics and the public, but just in general, has been lost, unless it's a negative story that's kind of cynically told by certain politicians.

And so we are marking that today, thinking about what's changed over the last 10 years, talking about whether class matters, but also thinking about perhaps, and these are hopefully the questions that you'll come up with, about what we do about the problems, those problems that we face. So I am going to start by introducing this incredible panel, and we will make sure, I'm going to make sure there's at least half an hour for questions, because there's so many of you here. And

Okay, so starting with Professor Mike Savage. I read this bio here. Did you do this bio? It's extremely humble. It's too humble. Professor Savage, just fake retired from the Department of Sociology and is now in the International Inequalities Institute and led this work on social class, but also has just done a lot of work over the years looking at

And actually, unlike a lot of academics, and I can say this, really walks the talk as well and makes the effort not just to do the research, but to try and support people and see the change in the world.

that his work shows needs to happen. So thank you. Aditya Chakraborty, who is the Senior Economics Commentator at The Guardian and writes a regular column. If you're like me, you read it regularly and are just so excited when it comes out because there's a few places where I'm like, okay, yeah, I'm not going mad. This is...

Aditya feels this way too. In 2023, he won the British Press Award for Best Broadcast Columnist of the Year, and in 2017, the British Journalism Award for Comment Journalist of the Year. Very well deserved.

We have Claire McGilvery, is a community worker and has joined us from Scotland. Thank you for coming all the way down. Activist and campaigner, she runs an organisation making rights real, a grassroots charity in Scotland established in 2020 and works alongside marginalised groups using the power of human rights to make economic, social and cultural change possible.

Thank you and welcome. And last but definitely not least is Zahra Sultana, Member of Parliament for Coventry South and a huge hero to many of us. First elected in 2019 and re-elected in 2024, a passionate advocate for social justice, workers' rights, climate action, and of course has been brilliant and we're so thankful for standing up for Palestine in Parliament. Zahra introduced a key number,

including universal free school meals for primary school children and a ban on arms sales to countries violating international human rights law. So, big round of applause to start with this incredible panel. Yes, and we have a crowd with very high expectations. Take it away, Mike. Well, thanks. I'm going to be quite quick because this is an amazing panel. I really want to hear what other people have got to say, but...

I don't really want to spend too much time talking about the Great British Class Survey 10 years ago because we're in a very different world and in some ways a much more class divided world than we were then. I mean, we were very class divided then. So I'm really going to just skate over the Great British Class Survey. But I want to make a couple of points before really focusing upon what's been going on in the last few years and what we should really be concerned about today.

It was amazing. So a number of us who got involved in this project and the Great British Class Survey, we didn't really know what to expect when the BBC said, let's do a project on class, fine. Well, of course, the BBC, being this incredibly slick media machine, came up with this class calculator thing, which you can still do. I mean, if you Google BBC class calculator, you can see a batch of questions, you fill in a few...

Questions about your income and whether you'd like to go to the Opera And whether you know the chief executive and you find out which class you're in and of course everyone hated it Everyone said these LSE professors haven't got a clue about class in Britain But nine million people did that class calculator within a week and what that demonstrates is that British people do want to talk about class and they do given the opportunity

and the encouragement, there are huge issues around class which people bubble under. And if you create the right atmosphere, then people want to talk about that. But also, as soon as we did this project, we got all these media caricatures of what we were talking about, and this is one for The Independent, I think, about the seven classes. And if you look at those seven classes,

You see all the kind of comic character tunes about class. You see the elite who happens to have a monocle. You have the precariat who happens to be wearing a shell suit and has a broken arm. Traditional working class has an orange face and never quite worked it out. It's interesting how you talk about class and it gets bent back, these comic character tunes. It's as if the conversation has to be had, but it's also an uncomfortable one.

And then all sorts of people come in and say, "Oh, it's a bit funny, isn't it?" It's part of British life, this kind of comic approach to class. One of the key things I learned from the Great British Class, Seb, is actually

We need to take those interests and take the public concern about class, but channel it into the fundamental question about the extent of socio-economic inequality in the UK. Because that's what the class concept is about. It's about understanding the UK as all nations as deeply divided. I want to say just a little bit about that.

Because actually, there's a number of us working at the International Inequality Institute trying to think about how to understand class in 2025. And very, very briefly, this slide here is talking about what we call the old model of class. The comic version of this, which is actually the version the BBC used to publicise the Great British Class. You've probably all seen this clip of John Cleese and Ronnie Corbett satirising the three classes.

And that looks back to a world where there's fundamental notions about class divides between working class, middle class, upper class. And those class divides have a long history. So here at the LSE, we have the collection of maps carried out by the Victorian investigator Charles Booth, who coloured all the streets of London different colours to mark out which class you were in. This is looking back to a model of class based on the industrial society

based upon a particular kind of occupational perspective on class. The issue was the collar line. Were you blue collar, were you manual, were you non-manual, and all these things. Now, that idea of class is very much etched in the British psyche, almost, but it's not really doing the job anymore. That's kind of the big takeaway. The big takeaway of the Great British Class Survey, but it's even more the issue which I think we're addressing now, that we need to...

Update. We need to rethink how class is being organised. And, you know, I'm only going to try and speak for seven more minutes. What is the key driver of class in the 21st century? This is a chart showing the amount of wealth assets in the UK per person. It's astonishing, Gaurav. I think, you know, if we want to understand how modern Britain, indeed, the world is changing, we can see this astonishing proliferation of wealth assets.

And one way of looking at that is to say it took several millennia to get to an average wealth per head of £100,000. It took us to the early 1980s. I don't know how long we want to go back in human history, many thousands of years, but it took that long. That doubled, that amount doubled per head in 30 years. So it's around £200,000 per head now. Now, by wealth, I'm basically saying any kind of asset. It could be...

property you own it could be savings could be stocks and shares now i guess most of you in this room are saying well i don't have 200 000 pounds um that is exactly right that is the point because wealth is the most unevenly divided distribution you can find much more unevenly divided than income so the rise of wealth inequality brings about fundamental pulling apart the top and the bottom if you like

And this is the driving force of contemporary class divisions. But that also needs to be set in the context of what is happening to public wealth. Because, of course, wealth does not need to be privately owned. Wealth can be owned by governments, it is owned by corporations. But we have also seen a massive run down

of public wealth in the last 40 years. This is a graph showing the shifts across six countries. The orange line is the UK. In the late 70s, 25% of total wealth in the UK was owned by public, by you and me, in a way. Nowadays, we're in a negative territory. Only China has a significant amount of wealth, public wealth.

So we've seen this big shift towards private wealth and the running down of public stock. One of the implications of that, of course, is that these days, if you have, like I had a problem with my tooth last week, I went to the dentist, I had to have a cramp, he cost me £1,000. I can afford that, because I'm a well-paid LSE professor. But if you're not, you've had it. It basically means you have to have tooth extraction down the road or you can't afford to go on holiday.

That's the world we're living in now. It's private wealth or nothing. And it's creating this huge fracture between those with and without wealth assets. Now, I'm just going to quickly skate over a couple of graphs, and I'm not going to get into the heavy economics of this at all, but I do want to make important points about... One is about the significance of the link between class and race. These two things...

People often talk about intersexuality. It's really, really significant. But this is a really interesting and important graph produced by one of our LSE colleagues, Eleni Karigan-Arki. And what she has done is she has broken down the UK population, if you can see it, according to where you stand in the income distribution, or sorry, the wealth distribution of different ethnic groups, white, Asian, Indian, Pakistani and so forth. Over here, the bottom 25%

of all those groups have, people have no wealth or negative wealth. We are talking about a society where amounts of wealth have massively increased but none of that has gone down to a very substantial proportion of people at the bottom. So when Rachel Reeves talks about economic growth, my question to her is we've seen huge economic growth in the last 40 years but we're living in a society

25, 35, 40% of people haven't seen another drop of that. So what reason do they have to think any of that growth will feed down in the next period, even if we get any growth? If we look at the top, on the right-hand side, the top 10%, we see the battle of wealth.

massively go up and of course they've only got the top 5% if you did the top 1% it would be even more striking. That goes alongside big racial divides too, white Britons are the best, have the most wealth, Bangladeshi's the least, black Africans very little. So you're seeing this festering of racial and class divides at the top, as the top pull away. I'm going to have just two more minutes before I finish.

but i also want to make it's getting worse okay a lot of a lot of young people in the room um i'm sorry to say uh this is this is research done by one of our colleagues at the the i mean mama zada he's done this brilliant study comparing uh people born in the 60s because of my generation and people born in the 80s that's quite a generation um we have this conversation and i bet you're looking by your social class background the amount of wealth you have

according to which class you were born into. If you were born in the 60s, actually you can see the red bars don't vary that much. You know, you've got a decent chance of getting a degree of wealth even if you come from a working class background. Why is that? Well, one of the reasons is because Margaret Thatcher allowed working class people to buy council houses. So there were opportunities for working class people to get wealth if you were born in the 60s. If you look ahead to the 80s, it's a very different picture.

Basically, if you come from a working-class background, classes six and seven here, you've got a very good chance of getting wealth. The class which is short ahead is class one. This is people like myself, higher professionals and managers, who are often helped by their parents through the back of mum and dad to get on the housing ladder, get a deposit for their house. And so we're seeing this divide kind of massively increase. And this is only 60s cohort. Many of you are, you know, it's 80s cohort, 90s cohort.

2000s couples. We don't have a data yet, but the chances are it's got a lot worse. So actually the fracturing of British society has got even more marked. Skip over that. So this is kind of what we need to confront in terms of the 21st century class divisions. We need to kind of move beyond the kind of old stereotypes of class, some of which played into the Great British Class Survey, and we can laugh about them.

but they don't really give us the handle on what's going on today. We need to think about class not just as fixed by your job or whether you necessarily even went to university. It's things like how much can you access wealth assets in a society seeing massive expansion of wealth inequality, well, not wealth inequality, but the rise of wealth assets as a whole.

And following on from that, recognising that the prospects of younger generations are increasingly bound up with their parents' wealth. So we're living in a society where we can expect to see a slowdown of social mobility. And in my view, I'm not being very academic about this, I'm just giving a very clear view of my own. Just calling for economic growth, which our government is, is not giving us a handle on the frustrations

and the feelings of being alienated, which many, many people in the UK are experiencing today. We need to have a more fundamental discussion around what is going on with these divides. Currently, the political right has to be better able to capture that anti-establishment, anti-elite discourse.

and they've positioned that discourse against immigrants and all sorts of things. What they haven't done is understood the drivers of this which are to do with the nature of wealth and equality and that's where I think the conversation on class needs to be at. It's why we need the concept of class to try and capture some of that. Thank you. I don't have slides but I'm only Asian height so unless I stand up you won't see me.

Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be with you all. It's a particular pleasure to be talking about a project that was held by Mike Savage. Although, as I was saying to him, I got rather a start when I heard that he'd retired because as a consumer of academia, I'd somehow imagined that he was eternal. I come to the question class as a journalist.

someone who keeps one eye on Westminster but is much more interested in society around it. I spend a fair amount of my time travelling around the country, reporting, staring at numbers, talking to people. And from that point of view, asking whether class matters in today's politics seems rather odd.

Think about it. You have a Labour government with a whopping majority, a cabinet filled with ministers who went to state school, and after years in which prime ministers hopped off the conveyor belt from either Eton or Winchester, you have one Keir Starmer. And what's the one outstanding fact about his background? He was the son of a toolmaker. LAUGHTER

Perhaps, like me, you've heard him mention that fact. Indeed, his opposite number, Kemi Bagnot, leader of the Tories, has also recently discovered working-class roots. She says she became working-class...

after doing a few shifts at McDonald's. So class is as prevalent as it's ever been. In fact, probably in my memory of kind of recent political history, more prevalent. It's kind of the, it's part of the origin story that every politician now tries to mine. But class and inequality, well, that's a different matter.

The manifesto that propelled Keir Starmer to his landslide majority featured the phrase working people 21 times. It mentions inequality just once. And that's not because it's got some stand-in euphemism. I looked. Labour ministers talk endlessly about being at the service of working people, but they end up in a complete muddle when they try to define what they mean by working people.

You might remember just last autumn, just for the last budget, Starmer and his team were asked over and over, "Who are your working people?" And the PM said, "Well, it didn't include people who had ISAs or buy-to-let properties." And then his spokesperson clarified that actually it might. And then Number 10 issued a statement that defined it in part as, "Those who do not always have the means to write a cheque."

A cheque. A cheque. Can I just ask, who here has in the past year written a cheque? I see one hand. Not many others. Well, my fellow non-working people or...

Working non-people, I don't know which we are. As you've just been reminded by Mike, there is a legitimate question about how you define class in an era of mass asset ownership. Let's, just for the sake of argument, take the example of an academic at the LSE.

just because we're here, right? There's a tremendous difference between those academics who rent their home, those who own their own home, and those who might just be buying to let two, three more properties within the middle class. But that argument, that's not what's tripping up Keir and Kemi. I just think that for them...

Working class is about culture rather than economics. It's about your tastes and traditions rather than where you sit in relation to money and power.

In other words, working people is about who you are rather than what you do. So the way that the Labour team appeal to working class voters nowadays is by having Union Jack flags everywhere so that all their election material looks like it's on loan from GB News. LAUGHTER

And that's a huge change in the political argument over just a few years, as Pfizer and Mike pointed out. Just think about the book and the project we're talking about this evening. When it was launched 10 years ago, class politics really was everywhere. You'd had the banking crash, the start of austerity across Europe, riots in Greece, mass protests in Spain, in New York and London, Occupy were protesting right in the heart of the financial districts.

You had tax justice movements and lots of brilliant reporting around tax dodging in my own newspaper and elsewhere. Ed Miliband talked about predatory capital. His successor, Jeremy Corbyn, talked about an economy that was rigged in favour of the wealthy. Now, you might not agree with all those arguments. You might have thought some of those terms were simplistic. I took the Great British Class Survey in part as an attempt to nuance the discussion and a welcome one at that.

But it doesn't mean that all the old arguments are wrong. Far from it. Since, as Mike says, this government talks so much about growth, let me deploy just one pair of statistics. The only ones I'm going to use tonight.

It's from an excellent book published last year called When Nothing Works, produced by a group of academics and researchers. And they show that of all the growth in take-home pay between 1999 and 2020, the richest 10% of households made off with 25% of the gains. The bottom 10% got just 3%.

So from Tony Blair to David Cameron to Boris Johnson, Prime Minister after Prime Minister talks about growth. And yet where you are in the class system determines how much of it you enjoy. Since the pandemic, it's actually got worse. And that's where a lot of the anger in Britain, in politics in Britain, comes from. Whether it's Brexit or Boris or Corbyn or Farage, a sense of the system just isn't working. But it doesn't always get expressed like that.

Instead of hearing about an economy that's built on low and stagnating average wages, or about how one in seven people in England are now mood-changing antidepressants, you hear about the left behind, or the white working class, a phrase that I think is really more about the white bit than the rest of it. It's a kind of analysis that, like the politicians, talks about its subjects as though they are butterflies under glass.

Exotic, immovable, somehow outside politics. Let me tell you a brief story. In 2019, I was reporting in Ashington in the North East. Elections were coming up and Labour activists were discussing their manifesto. Their meeting room was inside a library, which was inside the council's gym, which was inside the shiny, great glass and steel hulk knocked up by Carillion.

the giant who used to hoover up pfi contracts until it went bust. Ashington's a town that was built on coal it was home to the Pittman painters the extraordinary band of miners who turned themselves into artists but that economy and its traditions were long gone. The morning had been spent by the labour activists on this fruitless round of door knocking nearby and the voters were glaring at the labour people as if they were bothersome Jehovah Witnesses

The wind was whipping from the North Sea. It was all around a pretty punishing morning.

In the meeting room, I noticed that nearly all the Labour activists were not from Ashington. They were from better places along the coastline. There was just one guy from the town itself, and he was easily the oldest. He'd said that he'd signed up because he'd heard that there were cheap drinks. And he was wearing this fantastic white suit, so he looked like a rather aged John Travolta. And I noticed that the Momentum organiser kept trying to stop him from talking to me.

which all in all is a kind of tableau. It tells you quite a lot about how politics, whether you're red or blue, Corbynista or Cameroonian, it's really a middle-class leisure pursuit now for lots of people. Out of the window, you could see a huge Asda. On the other side, you could see a big Lidl.

Both offering their customers cheap food and their workers low wages. And that was basically a vista of Britain today. Bombed out, an electorate visibly estranged from politicians and a shrinking public sector getting picked over for cash by a parasitic private sector.

At the end of it all, I was collared by a woman who'd been a teacher nearby and she really wanted me to understand that for her kids, places such as the Guardian, Parliament, Natural History Museum, probably the LSE, were all far too far away. They involved long hours on the coach which required cash that their parents didn't have and days out that their school couldn't afford. "They've never been to central London," she said. "They live in a different country."

And that, in short, is where a lot of class politics has ended up. The idea that England, Britain now is two different countries. We are now talking in the world city of London with its bankers and its multicultural communities and apparently we're having it large. And these are some of the feelings tapped into by Brexit and Boris and Nigel Farage. Rich remainers, citizens of nowhere, you know the rest.

What makes it poisonous is that it purposely covers up the whole story. It talks about Notting Hill, but never Grenfell. It ignores how you could clear the entire city of Manchester of every one of its residents and stuff it with children from London living below the poverty line and you'd still need more room. Now, I'm a Londoner. I think of myself as an Aboriginal Londoner. I was born here, brought up here, educated here. I'm bringing up my kids here. I've not yet been moved out yet.

I come from part of London, which isn't often talked about. It's right on the tip of North London. It's actually just over from Pfizer's stomping ground at Chingford. It's a place called Edmonton. It used to have tons of light industry. MK Electric, Thorny MI, you name it.

And now all of those factories have gone and so has the economy in a manner that the residents of Ashington would recognize down to the letter. And teachers at the local school, including my old school, talk about how many of their kids leave because their parents have no proper housing so they get moved on. I've actually spent quite a bit of time hanging around the area doing research for a book I'm writing on Edmonton. One conversation I remember from one of the primary schools was about a girl aged about 10

who spent a year riding around with her mum on night buses because they didn't have a house to live in. The teacher told me that the kids in her class never visited museums or attractions, just half an hour away on train. The phrase she used was, "Central London might as well be another planet."

Very sound, very familiar. I asked the research firm to go through the figures for Ashington and my old home of Edmonton. And in many ways, they look very, very similar. Household income is, if anything, slightly higher in Ashington, while private tenants in my old neighborhood spend almost triple their counterparts in the northeast on rent. Overall, Londoners, my Londoners, make do with half the disposable income of those in Ashington.

The one big difference is in looks, because the residents of Ashington are mainly white and a lot older, while Edmonton has young families from Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Somalia, and all the rest. Yeah, I'm just coming to the end. Now, why does that matter?

Because economically, there's so much that these communities have got in common. You might say in class terms, they're very, very similar. So what's the only game left for those on the right who want to pick them apart, as Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and the rest are doing? Well, to prise them apart on the grounds of culture. And the great shame, the great...

glaring outrage of removing class inequality from modern politics is it removes any sense in which we might actually change things for the better. Thank you. Thank you, Edith. And actually, you were talking about Edmonton, which is where my husband's from. And it's true that my father-in-law worked in one of those factories, which is now closed. And it's true that we never hear that story. We never hear that story of that part of London. And it's absolutely done on purpose because you want to divide...

people want to divide by London versus everyone else and certainly especially when it's multiracial. Thank you so much for that and really helpful to get a sense from the ground as well. We're going to get more of that now. Thank you.

Hi everyone and thanks for inviting me here today. I'm Claire McGillivray and I'm the director of Making Rights Real, which is a small and mighty charity that works with communities in Scotland addressing human rights concerns.

So the big question, does class inequality matter? Does it still matter in this disunited kingdom? And I mean disunited from a constitutional perspective as well as in terms of race and gender and lots of other perspectives in the UK.

And I don't really think it's a simple question. It's maybe I, maybe no, and who really knows somewhere in between? And I'm sure that those words, maybe I, maybe no, have not been heard in this prestigious place before. But anyway...

I'm going to talk to you a little bit about where I come from because what's really important for me when I think of class inequality is that it's a really personal thing as well as all of the political issues that we've talked about here. When I was a kid, I grew up in Dundee. Has anyone heard of Dundee? Yes, fantastic. Has anyone heard of Mary Brooks Bank?

No. She was a socialist, a weaver, a singer, a songwriter who grew up in Dundee in the Jute Mills. And one of my earliest memories is sitting on my granny's knee and her singing to me the Jute Mills song. And one of the verses to that is, "'Oh dear me, the world is ill-divided. "'Them that work the hardest are I the least provided.'"

And those words stuck with me from childhood and have made me work in this field of human rights and grassroots organising to tackle the inequalities that I see. So they've lived in my heart and compelled me to action. So class always had a big way of defining me growing up.

But now I'm not sure that I would define myself as working class or coming from that background. It doesn't quite work anymore. Class is still bedded into the systems of inequality that communities that I work with are embedded with.

certainly in those small places close to home. If you've ever heard of Eleanor Roosevelt, who was a part of the drafting committee when she wrote the Declaration of Human Rights, part of that was around where do people actually feel their human rights work come?

Awesome, maybe I, maybe not in Big Spin. I had to get that in there. And there's Mary Brooks Bank. Oh dear me, the world's ill divided. Them that work the hardest are I the least provided.

So Eleanor Roosevelt, when she was drafting the Human Rights Declaration said, "Unless human rights mean something for people in their small places close to home, they have very little meaning anywhere." And for me that also means things like the right to an adequate standard of living and poverty. Poverty is embedded, deeply embedded, in all the communities that I work with. One of the groups that I've been working with are

travellers and double dykes in Perth. I've got their updated report. Go on our website makingridesreal.org and have a look at some of the inequalities that they're facing.

They're talking about children's rights not being upheld, they're talking about sewage coming up through their sinks, they're talking about mould, they're talking about unsafe conditions, and they're talking about 100% of those people on that site have faced inequality, discrimination and racism.

So don't tell me that this is all about class. It's not. It's about in our embedded systems, the people that we're working with are experiencing inequality in every single aspect of their life. And we're about supporting communities to name and claim their rights.

Have a look at that, when you go home, giggle the Tinker Experiments. There's a group of people who live in Bobbin Mill in Pitlochry who were subject to the Tinker Experiments which was the forced assimilation of gypsy travellers in Scotland. These were their conditions until 2009 when they got hot running water and electricity.

They're living and paying the same as you would pay for a two-bedroom rent, by the way, for these properties. So they've been working with us to name and claim their rights, to put their considerations over to the United Nations to try and get some action on what their rights are.

So for me, those discriminatory factors which mean that people have not been able to live in good quality accommodation, which are basic human rights, means that inequality is rife. It's rife, it's racialised, it's also in a gendered sphere as well.

There's Hamza Gurman when he used to be the First Minister and is no longer. But Fosside Women and Girls Group in East Lothian I've been working with to do some gender-based budgeting because the decisions that are being made by politicians are not reflecting the gendered realities of women and girls in Scotland. So in East Lothian, two-thirds of single parents can't afford food.

70% can't afford to eat their homes. And this is in a county which also has North Berwick, which is the most expensive seaside place in Scotland. So let's look at that juxtaposition, really.

And they've been carrying out their own research to figure out, okay, what does inequality mean to us? What does it look like? And it means they can't feed their families. It means they're choosing between heating and eating. They're not choosing between going on fancy holidays or 9.50 holidays in the sun. They're choosing about life and death issues. And so gender-based budgeting we're using to support communities to hold power to account. So for me,

There are other groups we're working with, North Highland Women's Wellbeing Hub are talking about the right to health and having to travel five hours to get to Inverness in snowy conditions to get access to maternity cover. There are other issues with Gypsy Travellers and Cooper who have just recently written to the UN and to the Scottish Housing Regulator and hold them to account because there have been failures in the way that they're living.

So you can't say to me that it's all about class because it's also about gender and racial inequality and those are increasing. We've seen the gaps that we saw there. So if you're someone who is living in one of the communities that we're working with, you quite often will face the double, triple, quadruple, whammy, is whammy a word in English? I don't know. Sorry. LAUGHTER

those multiple intersection inequalities which continue to create that impact in a disproportionate way by rights holders. For me, what helps using a rights-based approach is transforming that language from being just someone subject to research, but actually as a rights holder, holding duty bearers to account to change systems.

So my last point there is how do we dismantle the systems that perpetuate those inequalities? We know we're doing it with rights-based action, we're seeing change happening and I urge you to also be part of that journey where we're all taking that collective action. One of the most beautiful things that we see is when you have rights holders in a room and suddenly the light goes on that says, what do you mean I've got a right to housing?

What do you mean? Just on Thursday there we worked with a group in the banana flats. Anybody seen Trainspotting? Right, do you know them banana flats? They're called that because they're shaped like a banana. Anyway, they've got really poor housing conditions. And on Thursday they reported to Edinburgh City Council that their rights were being breached. The council has announced 70 million quid's worth of investment.

in order to fix the homes that are not working. So for me, a rights-based approach can be really helpful in tackling these inequalities. I'll pass you on now to the star of the show, I think, why you're all here. Thanks, Jo.

Well, hi everyone. Last but not least, it's really difficult to follow everyone who has spoken, so I'll try to not repeat the points that have been made. I want to thank Pfizer and the International Inequalities Institute for having me here to speak today. It's nearly a decade since I was last at LSE, not as a student, but campaigning on campus with the SU and the Black Students Campaign in the NUS, so it's lovely to be back.

And spoiler, yes, I think class matters today. In fact, it has never been more relevant, like Aditya said, in today's politics. Far from being a relic of the past, it is now packaged as meritocracy and opportunity. But when we strip away some of the fancy language and the rhetoric, it's clear that wealth and power remain concentrated in the hands of a few.

while working class communities like the community that I grew up in, in inner city Birmingham, an area called Lozales, remain, continue to face systemic exclusion and hardship. And it's really interesting because I went to a state comprehensive

And it wasn't until I went to a grammar school for two years in sixth form that I realised that not everyone grew up like me. It was really interesting then when I went to the University of Birmingham and I realised it was nothing like Birmingham.

And then, you can see this as like a progression, I enter Parliament and I realise, oh wow, it's just classism on steroids, this journey that I've been on. Obviously, I think about my grandparents' generation, class divisions were way more obvious back then, linked to industry, coal miners, steel workers and factory workers like my grandad on one side, and on the other side, financiers, politicians and aristocrats.

and it's been mentioned that Thatcher's deindustrialisation shattered this landscape, but it didn't erase inequality, merely shifted it out of sight.

Today's working class includes not only traditional industrial workers, but care workers, delivery drivers, nurses, teachers and countless others who keep this country running. These workers, the ones that were described as key workers during the pandemic, are the ones that are often denied wages, job security and dignity. And within this group, like the point that Claire was making,

women and ethnic minorities face even greater barriers. In particular, women of colour are overrepresented in low-paid, precarious jobs, while black and Asian workers experience pay gaps and workplace discrimination.

The capitalist class continues to grow wealthier, and we saw that in the many important graphs that Mike showed, hoarding assets to avoid taxes and lobbying for policies that entrench their power. It's evident in the insecure, low-paid work

unaffordable housing and our crumbling public services. Anyone who's tried to get a doctor's appointment, anyone who's had to wait in A&E, you can see the state of our public services. And so the economy that was reshaped by this class is no longer driven by industrial production, but by financial speculation. Think the city of London, think about stocks, think about shares, rent extraction, and the exploitation of precarious labor.

What's the result of this? Well, the richest 1% in our country own more than 70% of the wealth.

Three in ten children, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, now live in poverty. That's over four million children. And while I'm saying these numbers, those are people, real people, real children. And there's millions of them and they have lives and they have dreams and aspirations and they are forced to live in poverty due to political choices. There are millions of people who are unable to afford basic necessities like housing, like food and childcare.

And these rates around child poverty are disproportionately higher in black, Asian and ethnic minority households, while single mothers overwhelmingly

remain as the most economically vulnerable. We are a really rich country. You wouldn't think that, but we are. But food banks have become a permanent fixture. In one of my earliest speeches in Parliament, I said there are more food banks in this country than McDonald's restaurants. Just deep that for a second. That is insane.

And it's all deliberate. Energy bills have spiralled out of control while private energy companies are regularly reporting record profits. Banks in this country

our quotas that say we have so much money we don't know what to do with it. Public services like the NHS, schools, our public transport system, underfunded and overstretched. And these aren't just coincidences, they didn't just happen naturally. Directly, they are the direct consequences of policies designed in my workplace to protect the wealthiest at the expense of the working class. And again, not an accident, but deliberate political choice. And we see...

Parliament as the institution that is doing this. If we take one example, I'm going to focus on Rishi Sunak. I know Keir and Kemi have had a shout out, so it's only fair if I bring Rishi into the mix. As the former Prime Minister and the wealthiest Prime Minister in British history, he has regularly featured in the Sunday Times Rich List with, at the moment I think it might be a bit more, but last time I checked, an estimated fortune of £651 million.

And if anyone wants to embody the divide between the ruling class and the communities that they are supposed to govern, I think it's our boy Rishi. Does anyone remember that infamous moment where he was captured on camera, where he admitted to diverting funds from deprived urban areas and actually said that he was giving them to areas like Tunbridge Wells?

Yes, not a slip of the tongue, but a direct admission of what's actually going on. A glimpse into the priorities of a government that has pushed policies that disproportionately benefit the rich. And if we look at austerity and the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen mass theft. We have been completely...

bamboozled massive transfers of wealth from public resources to private hands. And if we just take this statistic, the total wealth of UK billionaires in 2013 was £246 billion. A decade later, an astonishing £684 billion has

Every single day for 10 years, that's an increase of £120 million. Yet in government, the Tories implemented a series of regressive tax increases that put the economic crises on working class communities. They had to pay for that.

And so I just want to also say that this isn't just a conservative problem. The current government, the government that we have today that I was elected under, continues to accept vast donations from wealthy elites, including hedge funds, cosying up to billionaires and amplifying those voices of the very wealthy and sidelined working class voices. And therefore our political system is shaped by these interests and outcomes are shaped by those with the deepest pockets

And the nurses and teachers in my constituency don't have their bank accounts, are able to get this access to power. This is class war, plain and simple, and it's played out in the corridors of power. If we just take the two-child benefit cut, for example...

Every day that this Tory policy stays in place, hundreds of thousands of children in our country are pushed into unnecessary poverty. They do not need to be starving. It doesn't need to be this way. And research shows that scrapping this would be the most effective way to tackle child poverty. Yet, January, now in February 2025, still exists.

disproportionately affecting working-class families particularly those from ethnic minority backgrounds and i voted to scrap the cap i would vote to scrap the cap again because it's the right thing to do even if it meant that

that the whip was taken off me. I also voted against the means testing of winter fuel payments knowing that that would push pensioners into fuel poverty. And for me, these decisions aren't actually difficult. There are people and their lives and not having to make difficult decisions around heating and eating like Claire was talking about.

I just want to quickly, I've got about two minutes left, just talk about who benefits from this deeply unequal society. And it's been touched on with the rise of reform and Nigel Farage. We see far-right movements gaining traction both in the UK and across the world. Growing inequality, anyone who's learned anything from their history classes knows inequality,

Economic crises leave communities desperate and disillusioned and into that void steps the far right, exploiting their anger and stoking hatred against migrants, Muslims and people of colour for the struggles that they are experiencing. And we have to be really clear here that the enemy of the working class does not travel by migrant dinghy, they travel by private jet. And your enemies and the person in the queue with you at the supermarket or queuing up to get the bus

It is a system and the people that perpetuate and run this system that prioritise profit over people, where they cut services and hand tax breaks to the very wealthy, allowing inequality to flourish. The far-right Nigel Farage reform do not offer solutions. In fact, they are on a mission to deepen inequality and they will dismantle social security nets, erode worker protections and consolidate wealth among people.

the elites and we see that in hungary we see that in poland and in particular um i have to say that the labor party has a really real special responsibility if they do not improve the material conditions of people in this country in elections to come perhaps the next election we will see an ushering in of fascism and that is what worries me that is why we have to resist

And resistance to inequality in the far right has actually come from working class communities, the very people affected by these injustices, whether it's trade unions, whether it's grassroots movements or local organising, it's working class people.

It's migrants, it's people of colour defending their rights and fighting back. And I just want to end with a point of hope, I guess. We saw this resistance in action after the far-right riots in July. In Bristol and Plymouth, locals formed human shields around mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers to protect them from far-right attacks.

These acts of solidarity show that collective action is the antidote to division and hate. And history shows us that progress is achieved when we fight collectively. From the Chartists to women's suffrage and the miners' strike, as well as today's movements around renters' rights, workplace safety and fair pay, another world is possible.

a world where wealth is more evenly distributed, where public services are properly funded and everyone has access to opportunities regardless of their background. And it is on us, every single person in this room, to do what they can to make that happen. Thank you so much. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy.

LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, back to the event. A huge thanks to Zara and all the panellists and really appreciate that call of urgency at the end. I'm going to take some questions, first from the audience and then also from online for those online that want to write a question. Thank you. I'm going to take three at a time. It seems like the panel are pretty much in agreement about the issue of class and that it exists but now that it's financially rooted.

My question is, how do we change things? How do you make the wealthy give up their wealth? Yeah, okay, great. No, that's really important. Yeah, this guy behind, yeah.

Hello, just an observation that at the age of 18 we tell about half the country that they should go to university and develop their minds. And we tell the other half that they should go straight into the workforce. And across the Western world this seems to be the line that is polarizing our societies.

And what has happened over 50 years is that the relationship between... Sorry, I'm just because I know there's lots of people. The relationship between people who've got university degrees and where they vote has gone from right-leaning to centre-left and left-leaning. So my question to this group is, when a new left party is built over the next few years, as it needs to be done, how does it communicate across this divide and how do we ensure that doorways

that door knocking and campaigning is not simply, as Editha said, a leisure activity for the middle classes, but a duty for us all. Thank you. Thank you. Great question. And one other, there's one on this side. I have seen that hand on the other side, but I'm going to... Hi there. How are you doing? Really, really inspiring, and I really do agree with the whole fact that inequality is creating such deep problems within society.

My background is as a geneticist, and we do some stuff in medicine around categorising people in racial groups and gender groups. How is class different in economics? And is there a risk that categorising people can create divisions more than unite people together? OK, let's come back to the panel quickly, and I know there's a couple of hands here, and we'll come back to them. I'm just aware that the mic holder will need to run over. OK, shall we...

Mike, do you want to pick up any of that? Create intervisions with us? Yeah, look, I mean, in terms of how to challenge the kind of class and wealth fracture of society, we have been living in a policy world where the general view is you cannot raise taxes. That's kind of been the doxa. That's the shared assumption across Labour, Conservative...

I actually think that is beginning to play out now. And I think, for instance, at the LSE, we've had a wealth tax commission which has been exploring the notion of a wealth tax. Recent survey evidence shows that British people would be supportive of a wealth tax. And so I think we are moving now. People are increasingly recognising that we can tackle wealth

All sorts of issues are addressed around that. One of them is that the rich will find loopholes and so forth. But these issues have been studied, and I think they are malleable. Second question, I'll just quickly-- it's a really important question about this divide between graduates and non-graduates, the significance of credentials and how that is a stratifying force. It's absolutely one of the things which we looked at in the Great British Class Survey, actually.

And actually, I've got to be honest, I am an academic, but academia is part of the problem, because there's an ingrained elitism in academic life and in the way higher education works, and that's increasingly leading to the...

But what that's also doing is creating higher education institutions with very different resource levels and it's creating this extremely, extremely inequality within higher education. So my feeling is we've got to think about finding resources for people who have not been to university to think you have a voice. You are empowered and you're encouraged to think about things. We must not just use the...

go down the route of having credentials as the answer and that also involves higher education institutions including the LSE thinking about how to question our practices and try and do things differently and better yeah I'm just thinking in your journey around the country if you've seen things that you're like well yeah this is the thing to do this is helping um

Yeah, I definitely have. I'm really interested in your question about whether class divides people further. The argument about a new left party, I want Fais and Zahra to... Just to come back on the university and the division thing. I'll do them back front. The class thing, actually, I don't think it divides people. I don't think it is... Because...

One of the things about having an economic identity is it puts you together with people who you might otherwise not have that much in common with. You might not think look like you and all the rest of it. So you've heard Zara and Pfizer talk about growing up in working class areas, right? But the one thing about ethnicity is I can't change how Bengali I am. I'm still a Bengali, right? But I can be working class, middle class or whatever, right? You can band together people. You can change things through policy.

you can't change who you are, obviously. You can't change whether you're old or young or whatever. So actually I think class is... And the way that...

Those institutions, trade unions, political parties, represent class interests, is actually positive. One of the things I feel sorry about looking at this current political landscape is how much those institutions are either withering away or have failed, completely failed, like the Labour Party. I agree with what Zara said about how it's now a creature of rich donors in a large part. That's right. So these institutions have failed.

I think some of how things change is down to having new institutions.

just to push back just mildly on the university point of your thing, those other institutions have failed and they failed because people really wanted them to fail as well as their natural failings. People really wanted the trade union movement to just die, right? What drives the right mad about universities is it's got all these young, quite left-wing people. They hate that. They really hate that. But universities...

as a form of giving people a kind of coherent identity, which, again, goes beyond their ethnicity, goes beyond other affiliations they might have. And that's why it's so much in the targets, I think, of the right. They hate the fact that here are these people, half of young people, as you say, go to universities and they come out with identities they simply can't handle.

Thank you. I do want to say on that point about if it's divisive. One thing we were talking about today is how much, not just working class people, but working class and middle class people actually are sharing experiences of precariousness now and difficulties, looking into their kids' future on housing, for instance, and how it can be used to unite people. And I think one of the reasons that I like talking about class in terms of a unifying force is because it does cut across one of the major ways in which they're trying to...

divide us which is race and that's not to say that racism isn't important it's hugely important but it does mean that like though and when we talk to people there's a lot of shared experience and it means that we can emphasize that and it can also point to the bad guys as well who are there is you know there is an elite group that are that hold power and privilege and that are making that policy so it does help us tell that story and Claire and Zara I guess to both of you in a sense there's a point there about um

but also about kind of what we do. And Claire, I think you had a really helpful provocation there about, you know, a rights-based approach. I think here in, I don't know what it's like in Scotland, but in England, it doesn't have huge policy salience, but that's not to say it isn't important. It is, but I think...

Yes, okay, go on, you tell us. Well, I mean, for me, those divisions really come from people feeling disenfranchised or feeling like no one's talking for them. And part of that is around public services failure. I don't know if anybody knows that in Scotland, put up your hand, that we have a different tax system. So I pay more tax in Scotland than you do here in England. And that's been a political choice. And to

To be honest, there wasn't that much of a stushie about, there's another Scottish word for it, around getting that into the manifestos and that dialogue. So actually people know that they pay more for public services, but guess what? We get free education, free prescriptions in Scotland. So there's a bit of a dialogue there about this is a political choice.

Let's not move away from that. In a different world, it is possible. You know, we spend a lot of our budget in Scotland mitigating the failures of Westminster.

for the poorest people. So what do we need to do differently is that we need to think differently about the tax pie. We need to not shirk away from that because the state has an obligation to progressively realise rights using the maximum available resources.

It's an absolute disgrace that the UN Rapporteur for Extreme Poverty came here and said that the UK is failing. That's an utter disgrace and it should be ashamed. We should all be ashamed of that. So for me, let's actually talk about tax justice. Let's actually talk about who owns the wealth, where it's coming from, how it's getting spent and how we as rights holders can be involved in those dialogues.

Sarah, pick up any of that but obviously we do need to answer this question. Yeah, sure. I want to first touch on the question about how can we force politicians to do anything. What I found is that politicians often respond to what is happening in our communities and it is that

That dynamic throughout history that has ever won. If we think about the NHS, if we think about the right to vote, if we think about sick pay, maternity leave, it's all been fought in our communities, in our workplaces, through trade unions. And then Westminster has responded. And it's so important to hold politicians to account.

Before I got elected, I was working as a community organiser in the West Midlands. So I was working when the Labour Party had a community organising unit and thought it was important to actually talk to working class people and find out what their issues were and build power. I was working in Brexit, like leave areas in the West Midlands, Wolverhampton, Stourbridge and Hilton.

And what you teach and train people to do is to identify who holds the power. And initially you protest maybe, or you lobby. And if you're not making progress, then you find ways to replace those people

and therefore when it comes to politicians, we have to also hold them to account. You can't just let people vote through austerity, keep children in poverty, allow a genocide to take place in Gaza and not hold politicians to account and that's why it's so important to do that and I guess that connects to the issue around door knocking. I love door knocking. I know it sounds so cliche and yeah, of course you do but that

That's where you hear voices that you might not actually agree with. And I spent a bit of time knocking doors in places like Nuneaton and elsewhere, and I was hearing quite difficult things that I actually would otherwise have walked away around immigration. And that tells me exactly where we're heading when you hear a lot of people kind of blaming the fact that they're

mom can't get social care support and it's because of x y and z and challenging that and the reason why i think door knocking is so important you really get not you know what journalists think is going on if you think about twitter journalists and some of their takes um you have to sorry not you

I'm not on Twitter. They are great. It's the same with podcast bros. Everyone's got a podcast and everyone says the same thing.

But when you talk to real people in real places, not just in London, although I have to say I don't really accept the London bashing all the time because people just think, oh, it's just London. London's really wealthy. And you realize that actually London is this microcosm of everything else that's going on where you have extreme wealth and extreme poverty literally side by side. So, yeah, going back to the point, you have to talk to people.

You have to hear their concerns, but you have to challenge them. You can't just say, "Well, yeah, if so-and-so thinks this, "oh, you know, that's their prerogative, that's their right, "they're allowed to have that opinion." It's really important to, as someone who's a socialist, someone who's on the left, to talk about the fact that if their mum can't get access to social care, it's because of government underfunding, it's not because of a Muslim or a Polish neighbour or anyone else. And those conversations just aren't happening.

at the scale that they need to be to stop what we see that has happened in the US, in Brazil, far-right governments across Europe, working class communities and trade unions and other organizations. That link has been broken in many ways because we just don't have that infrastructure anymore. And I think that's really important. So yeah, door knock and don't make it this kind of passive activity. Have those persuasive conversations, have those intentional conversations and challenge people

um don't get into a fight obviously but you if someone's being racist and someone's saying something that you seriously disagree with you have to challenge them and i also think some of those conversations start at home it's not always going to another area and having a chat with someone on their at their doorstep um we also have to challenge people in our family and our friendship circles um and i think that's really important and okay um

The new left party question. You also have to answer this question. I'm tearing, I'm tearing. This comes up quite often. And I think until recently, until the election of four independents plus Jeremy, five independents, people...

would say you know we have a two-party system you can only ever get elected if you are running as a tory in tory safeties or if you're running as a labor mp in labor safeties doesn't exist if we think about voting intentions and how actually class linked to voting intentions have been completely skewed

That means a lot of those questions that people have about a new left party come to the fore. And for me, the Labour Party was built by the trade union movement, founded by the trade union movement to be the political wing of the trade union movement, to represent Labour, I guess the clue is in the name. And what I struggle with, I guess at the moment, is I don't think it lives up to that.

Obviously, there have been really positive pieces of legislation. I am talking for too long, but I will shut up soon. Obviously, there have been some positive things that have happened. Employment Rights Bill and moves to renationalise our railways. But I really struggle with legislation that is perpetuating inequality, the two-child benefit cap,

the mean cession of winter fuel payments and like I mentioned genocide and being an active participant and facilitating genocide and therefore while my future right now is precarious I guess I don't know what's going on you guys might find out about it before I do online

Because that's what happens. That's what happens. It's briefed out. You find out when a journalist gets in touch with you because they all have your number. It's just like... It's like those people who give CDs of their mixtapes. Your number just gets passed on. And again...

But what I would say is, for me, whether it's a new left party or whatever, I don't really care. For me, it's really important that there are conviction politicians and people who stick up for what they believe in. And there'll be things that people disagree with me on. But what's important is I don't see this as a game. I'm not playing 4D chess. For me, when there's things that come up in Parliament, honestly, when there's questions about votes...

The question that I have to ask is, what is the right thing to do? Is this going to harm people? And if the answer is yes, I won't do it. And I hope that I will continue that way. But that's what it comes down to. Whose side are you on? And I'm on the side of working-class people, and that is whether they're in the UK or abroad. Yeah, just quickly on what we do. I think one of the things I learned, for those of you that don't know, I ran in a marginal seat twice in the UK.

Anyway, it's a long story. And one of the things that really stood out to me is how you can bring people together around a particular issue. So the community centre's being shut, botched academisation of a school. You will see all walks of life come and you work with them and you see, you know, through that action together, people change their minds. And I can see really proud, I can see some people that I met doing organising, going and speaking at schools here in the room and...

That stuff can work, but it takes a lot of effort. It isn't just about sitting up here on the stage. You have to go in, speak to people, organise, let other people speak, be there, back them up. And it is a long-term process, but that's what real organising is. And just to be clear, I was told off by the Labour Party for doing that.

Okay, so just, we don't have loads of time, so I'm just going to take a quick fire, ask that you keep it short so we can get in as many people as possible. I'll come straight to the point. What is your blue sky thinking of the lessening and maybe dissemination of inequality in Great Britain?

Okay, blue sky thinking. Okay, there was someone around. Hi, I was trying to get this really quick, but I was going to ask, you mentioned sort of like the difference now between income inequality and sort of like wealth inequality and how it should be shifting more to like talking about wealth. So in my generation, like I'm 22, a lot of people will say like to me, like, you know, I'm only earning like 30K in London, that's not enough. But they'll have like a decent amount to inherit when their parents pass away because their parents own their homes.

I'm like a single parent family in Tower Hamlets, nothing to inherit ever. Might be earning a bit more than my peers, yes, but I don't know, how do we shift that conversation to talking more about wealth, especially when it's hard because you don't have that wealth yet, but you will inherit it eventually. Yeah.

No, definitely this is a big thing now. Class will be massively animated by how much inheritance you get. Let me take a couple of questions up here, right at the back in the corner over there. Good evening. Thanks for your insightful speeches. My question is, does meritocracy as societal ideal reinforce or rather mitigate class inequalities?

Hi, thanks for the speeches. On Mike's diagram there was this one in the middle that was this young professional. How do you stop this, presumably some of them are socially mobile, how do you stop them from moving towards conservative policies given that they've been working class before and might want to protect their future and their children and things like that? I'm so sorry, I've got to give these guys time to answer. So do you want to take it? Should we take a couple of questions? Any big ones from online? Yeah.

I'll do two questions from online. So the first one says, I'm from Stoke-on-Trent, a very working class town, and my family are very much on the side of anti-immigration. How would you suggest having the conversation with them to try and allow them to see the full works at play against them and push them to think in another way?

The second question is from Ryan Smith, a PhD student at Cambridge. How does the class divided society impact on mental health? Is the mental health crisis depoliticized, diverting attention away from collective grievances to the individual?

Great, okay. Aditya, I might pick on you. You just don't have to answer all of that because we don't have loads of time. But that mental health thing we were just talking about as we were walking in. So just quickly on the mental health point. If you think about the past few decades, since the 80s, right? 80s, massive de-industrialisation. All the forces have kind of...

reducing Britain's manufacturing base come to a head. And there you see really public spectacles of economic failure. Factories closing, communities closing down. That at least has the benefit of being a public thing. You come to the area of austerity and that's privatised. That's privatised despair. People feel that within their households. It's not something you can share with other people. And I think that explains a lot of why so much of what's been going on more recently. We don't have big volume employers anymore.

routinely across Britain's economy anymore so when people find their hours are cut that's something they bear on their own when people find that their benefits aren't what they expect it to be that's something they bear on their own that's where so much I think of mental health despair that's where that intertwines with poverty and inequality yeah a few points there um

What about mental health and class inequality? It's baked into the system. You know, if you don't have enough money to eat and live, then you're going to have poor mental health because you can't actually engage with the systems of participation or any way that is providing a good life. So again, that's a political choice and also needs a collective movement against it. If you get a chance, look up PPR, which is Participation in the Practice of Rights in Belfast.

who are doing amazing grassroots work around collective thinking of new scripts for mental health. How can we change the system so that we change the dialogue and change what we're doing around mental health? But I think inequality...

and mental health go hand in hand and until we can shift the political systems that's not going to change much. In terms of having conversations with family and friends who are anti-immigration I don't know how to have those conversations my husband's Palestinian, my family are welcomed, I'm

like you know i have those conversations at a relationship level and having those conversations where people can come together with different ideas is always really helpful which i think you know this kind of evening is is really good to to have those chats

In terms of blue sky thinking around inequality and what about income and wealth inequality, I mean, I think a lot of that is to do with Thatcher's children and Thatcher and the point of view of the death of community and the death of...

you know, the birth of the individual above all else in terms of the common weal. So for me, while there's still those inequalities in housing, it means that kids, my kids, can't get on the housing ladder. They don't have the generational wealth to be able to say, by the way, I'm going to get 100 grand when my mum pops her clocks. But, you know...

These kind of things are all embedded in the systems which are the ecosystems which continue to oppress people. So, in terms of the young person who finds himself loaded and how do we stop them voting Tory? I have no idea because I like... I don't know. I would never vote Tory. So, I'm lost for that one. Anybody that's got an idea about that, give us a shout.

Yeah, I'm just going to follow up on that. I think if that is the political trajectory of someone, they see everything that they've achieved as their individual success, not the teachers that taught them, not the community that they grew up in, not their neighbours who took care of them and therefore everything that they've achieved is a product of their own and it's the thinking that you have to work on and I don't have a

a personal experience of dealing with anyone like that. But I think you have to, yeah, explain that what you've been able to achieve isn't because you're amazing and really clever. It's because of all of these public services and public institutions and public workers, you know, teachers, nurses, doctors, you know, that got you there. And I don't know if that's a thinking that everyone has, but it's definitely what I grew up with. I just want to touch on a few things.

especially I guess just very quickly on mental health.

and how this disproportionately affects people affected by inequality, but especially disabled people. And I guess I've got recency bias touching on disabled people because yesterday there was the second reading of a bill called the Fraud, Error and Recovery Bill, which is basically mass surveillance powers to spy on bank accounts of people that receive benefits. That could be carers, parents,

disabled people, essentially the state giving banks powers to surveil. And we know that it's a slippery slope. And with mental health in particular, 14 years of rhetoric that is now 15 years of benefit scroungers, people who are just kind of faking it, people who can work.

and the levels of mental health within the disabled community, the levels of suicide and how that's not changing. And until we build a social security system that is based on dignity and respect, this is only going to get worse. And it deeply saddens me that even under a Labour government, there's still some of this byproduct of what the Conservatives had around disabled people. And it's, like you said, Claire, we have to fight back

and we have to organise on grounds of solidarity. It's not if you're disabled, you speak up for disabled people, or if you're Muslim, you speak up for Muslims. We all have a common interest in fighting for each other, and that's what solidarity is all about. And just finally...

The question from online, I think, about Stoke-on-Trent and difficult decisions around immigration. I mean, Nigel Farage has managed to cosplay as a working class person despite being a former stockbroker with millions of pounds and very good media connections. And I think of the complicity of the BBC and ITV in his normalisation.

And he's able to kind of pretend that he cares about working-class people and has had recently, he had to defend, you know, he doesn't believe in the privatisation of the NHS. And that's bullshit as far as I'm concerned. But we have to...

make those arguments with even our family members that the reason why you are angry and the far right have managed just to monopolise the anger of the working class and the working class should be fucking angry like how can you not be after 14 years of austerity after what has happened to our public services we should all be angry on so many levels but they've managed to monopolise that

And it's for us on the left to reclaim some of that anger and channel it into socialist alternatives. How are we advocating what we believe in? How are we challenging some of that racist, bigotry, hatred, divisiveness that's coming from them? And that is the work that needs to be done. And like Pfizer said, when it comes to organising in our communities, you can't do it overnight. It's not going to happen. This takes years of work.

And it's at work happening. We should have started ages ago, but the second best time is now. Thank you. Mike, we've got two minutes left. I'll give you one minute. I mean, I think especially on the inheritance wealth point, yeah. On the point raised up here about meritocracy, which links into the question about wealth and inheritance, actually, because...

The main reason given in modern society is as to why people accept inequalities, because there's some kind of meritocratic system. So people kind of deserve to get paid more because they work harder or they're more talented. 80-90% of people believe some version of that. It's the dominant defence of why inequality is okay. But it's precisely that argument which I think is being undermined by wealth inequality, because...

If someone is able to buy a house in London because their parents give them a huge deposit and their friends can't buy a house because they can't access that money, you can't really defend that in terms of you deserved it. It's to do with you were born to the right parents. And that is playing out across so many walks of life. University education...

internships, getting a start in, you know, there's all the debate about to be an actor these days you need to have rich parents who can subsidise you for 10 years to get your break. So actually I think that meritocratic defence is getting weaker and weaker. And in that way, I hope it's a bit of a hopeful note to end, that I think that people realise it's on the ground actually, and I think we just need, we need the political leadership. So...

..Bio-Prizer, beyond, you know, a bigger community, including in the Labour Party, hopefully, to actually push this argument out there, because I think people are ready to listen to this. I mean, if ever we... If ever I felt that we're just, like, starting a conversation, it's definitely today, and I'm sure there's so many other thoughts that have come out of this. I think this is for us to maybe organise a series of events on class, I think. And just to say...

you know so much of what needs to happen on class

and change in this country is a different story of who we are. And I'm so proud to be on this panel today, and this is, you know, a story of who we are as well in this room. And don't forget that. I think it's really easy to feel downhearted when you watch the news and you hear what's happening. But there are millions of us, millions of us, that feel the same. And if we come together and work together, I do think it's... Even despite everything that's happened, I still have hope. All right, let's meet again. Thank you so much. APPLAUSE

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