Britain has a new class system – which one are you? | Politics | News

Britain’s old class system is dead and its replacement is altogether more troubling.

Instead of being defined by who your parents are, you are now defined by what you think.

So gone are the upper, middle and working classes.

In their place are the progressive, aggrieved and bigoted classes.

How do you know which one you are in?

Simple. What did you think about the grooming gangs scandal?

Do you have concerns about the small boats crisis?

Can men and women change sex?

Traditional class distinctions became so blurred the elite had to find a new way to keep ordinary people in their place.

Instead of signaling your status through how you speak, the job you do, the club tie you wear, you now show you are part of the gang by thinking the right things.

What are they? Generally the opposite of what the majority believe.

How do you win debates when your arguments do not stack up? Easy. Shut people up.

So if you spoke out about men of Pakistani heritage carrying out horrific sexual abuse on young white girls, you were dismissed as a racist.

Even if (especially if) you were a former Labour MP from the party’s old heartlands, rather than its metropolitan seats.

Ann Cryer, who represented Keighley for the party, was denounced as racist and shouted down in meetings for airing her worries.

In 2017, Mrs Cryer, who had first raised the alarm bell about the issue 15 years before, said that despite a number of convictions, “some on the Left still refuse to accept that these are culturally rooted crimes”.

She warned that middle managers “steeped in political correctness” were “terrified” of being seen as racist.

Just two years later, Labour adopted a definition of Islamophobia that suggested using the term Asian grooming gangs in relation to Muslims was racist.

Last week, Keir Starmer linked anger about the issue to the “far-Right”.

Belittling people and branding them bigoted, while changing the words that are acceptable to use, are the ways of shutting down discussion when you are unable to provide actual answers.

Labour has a track record for it.

Gordon Brown notoriously branded Rochdale pensioner Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman” for raising immigration with him during an election campaign stop.

As the late, great Rumpole creator John Mortimer wrote of one his fictional left-wingers: “She believed that, in an ideal world, the working class would rule the country, but she had no particular desire to ask any of them to tea.”

The class system was diluted decades ago and being viewed as “posh” is now seen as a hindrance rather than a help in some fields.

The evidence is clear from how many people in Westminster talk up their supposedly humble backstories.

But as seen with Communist regimes, a hierarchy always emerges.

So the “progressives” and the “aggrieved” classes – who are not victims like the girls in northern towns, but those who found a useful shield to hide behind for everything that is wrong in their lives – assert their superiority by inventing linguistic tests for the rest of us, the “bigots”, to fail.

Transgender is okay but transvestite is not. Queer was deeply offensive but is now embraced.

Non-binary means you do not identify with either gender and prefer to be referred to as they/ them.

Saying “either gender” is actually no longer the fashion. The BBC claimed there are “100, if not more” gender identities.

Can you keep up? Hardly. The language is designed to trip you up so you know your place and are too afraid to speak out.

When that fails and someone still dares to point out flaws in argument, then brand them a bigot.

So anyone raising concerns about men who say they are women being allowed into single sex spaces is attacked as “transphobic”.

Women lost their jobs for pointing out there are two sexes, including Maya Forstater. When the case went to court, the judge said her position, shared by most of the country, was “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

Nicola Sturgeon was a fully paid up member of the progressives and told Scots that “trans women are women”.

But her linguistic gymnastics spectacularly cartwheeled into reality when the former first leader was asked if Isla Bryson, a convicted rapist, was a woman.

The whole world could clearly see he – Adam Graham – was a man, not least because of the clingy pink leggings he was pictured in before being jailed.

Words matter. Tone matters. Inflammatory language will not get us anywhere. But it is time the progressives realised silencing the majority can also ruin lives.