Yes, says David Miller, 11 October 2009

It is well known that Alex Salmond was an economist with one of Scotland’s biggest banks in a previous life.   His background is not out of place alongside those of  his colleagues in the Scottish and Westminster Parliament’s. 

In the last thirty years the proportion of elected representatives from working class backgrounds has declined precipitously.  Now we have career politicians.  The expenses scandal is the logical outcome of this corrupting process. The public look on in scorn and bafflement.  Seeing no alternative to business friendly parties they either don’t vote or are pushed into the arms of the far right.  And those that are turned off the most are those at the bottom of the class hierarchy.  The poorest Scottish constituencies are exactly the same as those with the lowest voter turnout.

Some try and pretend that class has been abolished.  They dismiss the fact that most Scots still stubbornly see themselves as working class and wish away inequality by noting the decline of the ‘manual working class’ and the rise of the service sector.  But social class has no more disappeared than a job in a call centre is well paid professional post.

The extension of class power ushered in by the decade long rule of Margaret Thatcher required the destruction of the two most important working class institutions: The Trades Unions and the Labour Party.  New Labour is the result of this process  - a party so ‘intensely relaxed’ about people getting ‘filthy rich’ (to quote Lord Mandelson) - that they have appointed an unprecedented number of ministers straight from the ranks of the most powerful corporations. Corporate lobbyists now dominate almost all areas of government policy. The result is that inequality is growing under Labour – and is now as bad as it was in the Victorian era. They have undermining almost all of the remaining gains made by ‘Old’ Labour between 1945 and 1979.

The allegedly ‘new look’ Tories say that we must all pay for the national debt created by the bailout of the greedy bankers.  George Osborne’s version of ‘all’ became clear when he outlined a pay freeze for everyone in the public sector earning more than £18,000 (less then £350 per week before tax).  When it comes to the bankers – many of whom earn more than £18,000 a week – the medicine is more palatable: The Tories will do nothing.  Could there be a more vicious demonstration of the importance of class in politics.  Osborne (heir to a wallpaper fortune), Cameron (former member of the exclusive Bullingdon club while at Oxford) and their cronies, mostly come from extremely privileged backgrounds  and they show all the signs of being determined to defend and extend the privileges of their class  if elected.

So class is no longer a significant fact in politics?  Only those deluded enough to live in the ‘matrix’ (portrayed in the Hollywood film of the same name) of the political elite could think so.  In the real world the facts of class division and of the dominance of the rich in politics is plain.

 A version of this piece first appeared in the Sunday Herald 11 October 2009.  Download a scanned version here.