These er’re minsters ‘r paid and paid ’andsomely. Paid ’ansomely there are. ’Andsomely. Why! I’d be glad of the pay they get, glad of it. They ’as bulldogs, they ‘as pianos. Champagne. Me and you, Smith, me and you and the middle class generally; we don’t get pianos. We don’t get champagne.’ H G Wells, Kipps
Workers of the world awaken. Break your chains, demand your rights. All the wealth you make is taken by exploiting parasites. Shall you kneel in deep submission from your cradle to your grave? Is the height of your ambition to be a good and willing slave? Joe Hill
The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done. Arthur Balfour
If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. Joseph Ettor, IWW organizer
The laboring man ... ought to remember that all who labor are their brothers, and that all women who labor are their sisters, and whenever one class of workingmen or workingwomen is oppressed all other laborers ought to stand by the oppressed class. Robert Ingersoll, essay Eight Hours Must Come 1890
I knew that the moment the great governing spirit strikes the blow to divide all humanity into just two opposing factions, I would be on the side of the common people. Che Guevara
The people are weary of being oppressed, persecuted, exploited to the maximum. They are weary of the wretched selling of their labor-power day after day – faced with the fear of joining the enormous mass of unemployed – so that the greatest profit can be wrung from each human body, profit later squandered in the orgies of the masters of capital. Che Guevara
The sun. Life … High in the heavens. Far away from them. Metropolis 1927 starring Brigitte Helm & Gustav Frohlich & Alfred Abel & Rudolph Klein-Rogge & Theodor Loos & Fritz Rasp et al, director Fritz Lang, caption
The workers’ city far below the surface of the earth. ibid.
And high above, a pleasure garden for the sons of the masters of Metropolis. ibid.
Look, these are your brothers. ibid. woman in sky city
I wanted to see what my brothers looked like. ibid. hero
It was their hands that built this city of ours, father. ibid.
What will you do if they turn against you some day? ibid.
The machine! Someone must stay with the machine. ibid.
I have created a machine in the image of man that never tires or makes a mistake. ibid. inventor
Let us build a tower whose summit will touch the skies. ibid.
The workers are destroying the machines. ibid.
It is this determination to seize power from the ruling class and transfer it to the people as a whole that differentiates the present political struggle from all those that have gone before. Sir Stafford Cripps, 1933
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. Oscar Wilde
Our cause is a common one. It is war between poverty and wealth ... This moneyed power is fast eating up the substance of the people. We have made war upon it, and we mean to win it. If we can, we will win through the ballot box; if not, then we shall resort to sterner means. William Sylvis
Jack Matthews: killed by social class. He was an unskilled labourer. A member of the lowest social class. Now Mr Matthews has died of lung cancer aged only fifty-four. His risk of early death was twice as great as someone from the middle classes. What’s more he lived in Newcastle. And the north has worse health than the south. The younger you are, the most effectively class kills. Horizon: Death of the Working Classes, BBC 1988
There are five classes: Professional, Managerial, Skilled, Partly Skilled, Unskilled ... The results are shocking. ibid.
The gap has got wider. ibid.
Perhaps the value of the Longitudinal Study [1971-1975] has been to confirm the reality of the health gap between classes. ibid.
The Health Divide: Inequalities In Health In 1980s. ibid. Margaret Whitehead, Health Educational Council report March 1987
Black [report] called for the end to Child Poverty. ibid.
A right to good health: at present that right doesn’t exist. ibid.
The working classes were to emerge from a rigid system, but did that leave much of their distinctive culture as derelict as the old industrial sites? ... The Middle Class despised the working class and its culture. Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture, BBC 2012
Is class as we used to know it still with us? ibid.
The working class at the time could and did nourish genius: Thomas Hardy for instance. And D H Lawrence. He was brought up in a mining community. ibid.
Sorrell is bitter about the profiteers who sat out the war. But he has another target: Sorrell and I presume Warwick Deepings’ real venom is reserved for the working class, who he sees as brutes getting ready for a class war. ibid.
In Sorrell & Son class issues come to be crystalized around the matter of Kit’s education. ibid.
The Road to Wigan Pier was based on Orwell’s experiences of January and February 1936. And his observations of the realities of working class life and unemployment have entered the canon of human observation. ibid.
The old systems driven by private education, land, education and the historical power base of the upper class were still there. Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture II
The middle classes dressed as their parents had done. ibid.
What was new was a third channel. ibid.
By the early sixties there were about five million teenagers. ibid.
Then a new set of working class dandies emerged – the Mods ... Their main aim was to have a good time. They were energetic but frustrated too, and were looking for a way to say so. ibid.
These new satirists [Beyond the Fringe], unlike most of the post-war comedians, were university- and often public-school educated. ibid.
The birth control pill – thousands of women were freed from constant childcare and went to work. ibid.
In 1959 the scientist and novelist C P Snow delivered a lecture called The Two Cultures, which spoke of the rift between the arts and the sciences. ibid.
The more traditional arts were flourishing too. ibid.
The skinheads had just begun to appear, defining themselves against the middle class hippies. ibid.
Perhaps the signs and symbols of a three-tier class system are still there. Melvyn Bragg on Class & Culture III
The miners’ strike was a war between the Thatcher government and the unionised miners. ibid.
Two-tone was a vital cultural fusion. ibid.
Brookside was set in a classic early eighties’ new-build housing estate. ibid.
The middle-class strand of alternative comedy began to dominate on television and radio. ibid.
At its peak Viz sold in excess of a million copies an issue. ibid.
Is this blurring of accents really a sign of blurring of classes? ibid.
They have been called chavs ... A new destructive contempt. ibid.
Gets on your nerves where everything’s filthy. Dirty filthy walls and the vermin in the walls is wicked. So I tell you we are fed up. Housing Problems, woman in apron, 1935
Nothing to do with time,
Nothing to spend,
Nothing to do tomorrow or the day after,
Nothing to wear,
Can’t get married,
A living corpse, a unit of the spectral army of three million lost men. Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole, 1933
Homes like these became part of a landscape of ASBOs and crack-dens that helped sound the death knell on social housing. The hey-day’s legacy is one of failure. Michael Collins, The Great Estate: The Rise & Fall of the Council Estate, BBC 2012
Lord Salisbury proposed a Royal Commission for the housing of the working classes. The impetus for the first in a series of housing acts that signalled dramatic change. ibid.
Letchworth: The world’s first garden city. The brainchild of social reformer Ebenezer Howard, Letchworth was a privately funded project. Its cottages were the vision of a sandal-wearing socialist called Raymond Unwin – the founding father of the British council house. ibid.