Review of 'Split: Class Divides Uncovered' by Ben Tippet

This is a short book (around 130 pages) but it's a really good and comprehensive introduction to the way the world is, with particular reference to the UK. It details the extent of inequality across a number of domains (wealth, work and 'opportunity', housing, vulnerability to environmental degradation), and then looks at the factors and processes that underly it - wealth, gender, race, education. It's well referenced, so that the book can serve as a 'gateway' to a much larger body of knowledge, but the language is accessible. It's well structured, and well argued.

I have a couple of little quibbles. The history of hostility to immigrants didn't start with immigration from the Commonwealth after WW2 - not only were there race riots in many British towns in earlier periods, but the origin of immigration controls themselves really begins with the Aliens Act of 1905, designed to prevent the admittance of Jews from Russia; and the struggles around that, and the divisions within the labour movement, illustrate well the points that the author really wants to make. It's really important not to succumb to the myth that Labour, or the socialist movement, has been consistently anti-racist, or that it was in some previous golden age.

And although he spends an entire chapter on explaining why 'class' is not about culture, and that the working class is not the same as the 'left behind white working class' celebrated by right-wing populists - he still slips into the language of 'working class vs. middle class' - even though the latter is as problematic a category as the former. In the US they use 'middle class' to mean 'working class', or at least that portion of it with regular, permanent jobs. Here in the UK 'middle class' might mean white collar workers, or professionals, or...anything really. Part of the sleight-of-hand that the right performs is to make middle class simultaneously stand for people who send their children to private schools (in reality a small fraction of the population) and at the same time refer to everyone with any distinction that lifts them off the very bottom - education, taste preference, white collar work.

We shouldn't fall for this, and we need to recognise that for the most part this middle/working class thing is really about a dividing line - or more than one - that runs through the working class, that class of people that sell their labour. It's not about culture, and it's not even about employment - lots of people are at the mercy of capital even though they are notionally or even really 'self-employed'.

But like I said, these are quibbles. This is a really good book and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a way in to contemporary debates about politics.