#195 - Lisa McKenzie & Keith Gildart - Who Is Britain For? The Destruction of the Working Class

**Lisa McKenzie** (0:00)
I'm angry, I'm angry at them for what they're doing.

**Keith Gildart** (0:02)
There was active policies that dismantled the working class.

**Lisa McKenzie** (0:07)
You know, once they used to say that they were the party for the working class, but also of the working class, and now they don't say that. I was asking them what did they want? You know, what is it that you want? What do you hope for? And you know what they said, and they're 18, they said, oh, I hope one day I'd be able to buy a house and get married.

**Peter McCormack** (0:27)
Well, we destroyed the pensions. We destroyed savings in banks. Yeah. I'm sure when I was a kid, my dad was getting six, seven percent.

**Lisa McKenzie** (0:35)
We've destroyed the housing market.

**Peter McCormack** (0:38)
Who is our country for now? Who is Britain for?
This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, IREN, the AI cloud for the next big thing. IREN builds and operates next-generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure, all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out iron.com to learn more, which is iren.com. Morning Lisa. Morning Keith. How are you both?

**Lisa McKenzie** (1:09)
Good.

**Peter McCormack** (1:10)
Thank you for coming in. Nice to be here. Yeah. Thank you for coming in.
I really wanted to do this interview because of the research and the work that you both have done. But I really just want to start with quite a simple question. What is the working class today?

**Lisa McKenzie** (1:26)
Do you want to do that one?

**Keith Gildart** (1:27)
You can start with that, Lisa. I'm the historian. You're the more contemporary class.

**Peter McCormack** (1:30)
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

**Lisa McKenzie** (1:31)
That's right. Keith's the historian. So he can tell you what the working class was. I'll tell you what the working class is. Who are the working class today? Working class people today, unlike, I think there's a debate happening in the country about what is class and is it relevant anymore?
But I would argue that of course it is. Our system in Britain is still run on a class system.
We've still got people who are inherently privileged from birth. And we've also got people who are not privileged. And that comes from birth as well. If you're born into a working class family in Britain today, social mobility, this, I suppose, this fabled social mobility that they keep telling us exists, that, you know, it doesn't matter where you come from, it's where you go that counts. Well, the truth is, social mobility in this country has stopped. So you are more likely if you're born in a working class position, you know, people at the bottom, people who are poor, that that's where you're going to stay. And I know that the meritocracy people do not like that. They don't like, well, that's the truth. That is the truth. And why is that?
Well, there's many reasons, the way that our economy works, the way that privilege works, you know, class privilege works. I, you know, I read this, I'm a working class woman myself. I'm from a council estate, from a mining community. My dad was a striking miner in Nottingham. I worked in a factory making tites for 11 years when I first left school with no qualifications. So my mum worked in that same tites factory. Therefore, I'm working class.
So it's, you know, it's unusual now that I'm an academic, but I'm aware that I am an unusual. Everybody else I was at school with, you know, are still living, you know, place where I come from, Sutton in Ashfield. You know, and they still have got working class jobs and working class lives. You know, I've just got this academic job, but I'm still living a working class life.

**Peter McCormack** (3:42)
Do you consider yourself still working class?

**Lisa McKenzie** (3:44)
Yes. Yeah. And the reason why I'm still working class is because I don't own anything. I don't own a house.
I'm renting.
I'm quite precarious.
Universities are very precarious. They're also very class-ridden as well.
So, when you're working class at a university, you don't have these innate advantages. You have the disadvantages of your class. And then you've got to look at the other side of the advantages of your class. So, if you are middle class or upper middle class, you've been brought up in a household where perhaps there's holidays, there's reading time, you might even have gone to a private school. So, rather than in the state school, you've got 35 kids in your class. In a private school, there's sort of 10