The existence of generation left dominates politics in the UK despite being largely ignored in mainstream political discourse. It's the absent yet structuring problem, if you like. When it is recognised it is dismissed by separating it from, or even opposing it to, class… https://twitter.com/KeirMilburn/status/1380502066284662785

Yet, age is currently a key window onto changing class composition. So, dismissing the generation gap often devolves to the defence of an outdated conception of the British class structure with the NRS social grade system (ABC1 C2DE) as the vehicle for doing so…

Jon Cruddas has written a book steeped in heady nostalgia which aims to attack Corbynism by attacking the Generation Left thesis and the anti-work politics of the four-day week. The popularity of the latter, of course, emerges out of the work and life experiences of the former...

The Cruddas book is a defence of 'dignified' work, based on the kinds of working conditions common in the post-war period but increasingly rare now. One day we’ll have to face up to the idea that the post-war years were the exceptional blip rather than the norm of capitalism...

Andy Beckett is in the Guardian today seeing off Cruddas’s attempt to turn actually existing class structure on its head.
"Cruddas’s book undermines itself by misrepresenting who the modern British left actually are...

“Young urban educated cosmopolitan winners,” he writes, have “replaced the workers” as the left’s priority and main source of support. But today these urban radicals often are the workers: making drinks all day in cafes, riding delivery bikes in the rain…

They may be well educated and cosmopolitan, but with poor wages and no job security, bad rented housing and student debt, they’re not our economy’s “winners”...

Those are more likely to be found in what politicians and the media still reverently call the traditional working class – for example, the retired, formerly Labour-supporting property owners of the red wall...

Such new realities may be difficult for the Labour right to accept, having assumed for decades that the voters who matter are relatively conservative homeowners rather than 25-year-olds with blue hair. But Britain has changed a lot since Blairism’s glory days."