Claire Ainsley (2018) The New Working Class

Whether Guy Standing's books on the "precariat", Didier Eribon's recollections of struggling with his working-class and gay identities, or the numerous books on the "white working class" published in the wake of Brexit and Trump, sociological discussions on social class are no longer frowned upon.While explicitly Marxist discussions on class as a social relation remain marginal, status group models and, in particular, culturalist explanations have gained in prominence in recent years.It is against this background that Claire Ainsley's book The New Working Class: How to Win Hearts, Minds and Votes needs to be analysed.As the Executive Director of the British anti-poverty organisation, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Ainsley draws upon rich empirical material and data to showcase the depth of Britain's economic, social and political crisis.Yet, unlike other books on social class, Ainsley uses her expertise and knowledge not only to analyse the shape of the new working class but she also takes the opportunity to advance a new policy agenda.After all, Britain remains one of the few countries in Europe where productivity has not returned to pre-2008 crisis levels and 68 per cent of workingclass people agree with the statement that Britain has changed for the worse in the last twenty to thirty years (p.16).Above all, this has created political turmoil, with the Brexit vote, the Scottish National Party's rise, and Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour Party leader in 2015, to just name a few.Rather than re-shuffling British working-class politics, Ainsley identifies that political parties have become disconnected from the "new working class".According to her, the traditional class cleavage in politics is to be upheld yet it is mediated by age, educational degree and technology among others.Similar to the writer Michael Lind, who has recently published a book titled The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elites, Ainsley identifies geographic location as central to the disconnect between political elites and low-income voters.It is not only the divide between city and countryside, but also between different areas within metropolitan cities that are decisive to reproducing marginalisation.Readers of this Journal will be particularly interested in Ainsley's definition of "the new working class".For her, economic, social and cultural factors contribute to the shape of the working class.She shallowly defines the new working class as "multi-ethnic, comprised of people living off low to middle incomes, and likely to be occupied in service sector jobs like catering, social care or retail" (p.2).While it might be useful to her daily work to conceptualise the "new working class" in this way, there are two interrelated theoretical problems which arise from such a definition.First, this definition does not treat class as a social relation.Second, it remains questionable how "new" this working class really is.After all, the decline in employment in the manufacturing sector, the end of the male-breadwinner model, the concomitant feminisation of the workforce and rise

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