The Egalitarian Left

 

Here's the Guardian's Jeremy Seabrook on the effects of deindustrialisation on the North: 'Many of those unable to escape poor white communities have seen their status decline from working class to underclass in one generation.'
 
And lest you think I'm quoting out of context, here's how he ends the article: 'These occur in a quite different arena from the repression of women and gays, and are located among the injuries of excess that we have come to regard as normal; and that includes the impoverishment visited upon millions of people who thought they were working class, and woke up one day to discover that they were only white trash after all. '
 
So, there you have - your income drops below a set amount and you automatically become a skank. Conservatives are often caricatured as being obsessed with filthy lucre, yet who on the right would make such an obnoxious statement ? Still, he can be forgiven for making such an ludicrous assertion - after all, factor out the bank balance and all the other attributes of the Underclass - drug abuse, incompetent parenting, sleazy personal lives and the like - are perfectly replicated in Guardian reading circles.

Mind you, they're even harsher over the water. In an NYT article which really should be titled 'How I found success and happiness through abortion', Barbara Ehrenreich gives us an insight into the true nature of Liberal egalitarianism, noting that 'I was a dollar-a-word freelancer and my husband a warehouse worker, so it was all we could do to support the existing children at a grubby lower-middle-class level.'

Cops, nurses, fire officers - grubby scum all.