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In late twentieth-century England, inequality was rocketing, yet some have suggested that the politics of class was declining in significance. This book addresses this claim, showing that class remained important to 'ordinary' people's narratives about social change and their own identities throughout the period 1968-2000, but in changing ways.
List of contents
- Introduction: Class, Politics and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968-2000
- 1: Tyneside Shipbuilders: Workers' Attitudes to Class, 1968-1971
- 2: Middle-class Voices, c. 1969-1979
- 3: Working-class Autobiography, c. 1970-1985
- 4: Attitudes to Class in the '100 Families' Study, 1985-1988
- 5: Mass Observers' Attitudes to Class, 1990
- 6: Class in the Millennium Memory Bank, 1998-2000
- 7: Class in Thatcherite Ideology and Rhetoric
- 8: New Labour, Class, and Social Change
- Conclusion: Class, Politics and the Decline of Deference, 1968-2017
About the author
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite did her undergraduate degree in history at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and her MPhil and PhD at St Catharine's Collage, Cambridge, supervised by Jon Lawrence. She was subsequently a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge before moving to UCL where she lectures in Twentieth-Century British History. She is also an interviewer for the History of Parliament Trust's oral history project, and co-editor of Renewal: a journal of social democracy.
Summary
In late twentieth-century England, inequality was rocketing, yet some have suggested that the politics of class was declining in significance. This book addresses this claim, showing that class remained important to 'ordinary' people's narratives about social change and their own identities throughout the period 1968-2000, but in changing ways.
Additional text
The result is not only a major contribution to understandings of class, popular identity and political change in the last third of Britain's twentieth century, but also a model of the virtues of qualitative analysis for sociology and politics, no less than for history ... Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England successfully shows that class became obscured as a category of popular identification during the late twentieth century; draws upon those findings to reframe the political successes of Thatcherism and New Labour; and -- most ambitiously -- offers a compelling explanation of the complex relationship between social experience, popular perception and political change.
