ROSS CLARK: Let's dump the concept of identity politics - it's turned into a monster that's pulling society apart

I already own a flat cap, but maybe I should buy a couple of whippets to go with it. Playing at being so working class, it seems, is going to be the way to get on in Andy Burnham's Britain.

The Government is setting up a new body within the Office for Equality and Opportunity to examine why Britain's white working class isn't doing well.

It will oblige public bodies to ensure that their policies do not discriminate against the nation's Danny Dyers and Del Boys.

I don't doubt that to be born on a sink estate in Britain's former industrial heartlands is to be dealt a pretty poor hand. The disadvantage is there to be seen in school exam results, crime rates, income levels and so on.

A report by the Commons Education Committee in 2021, for example, revealed that just 16 per cent of white pupils qualifying for free school meals (which it used as a marker for being working class) went on to higher education. This is compared with 32 per cent of pupils who are black Caribbean, 59 per cent of black African and 73 per cent of Chinese. I am rather less convinced, though, that the way to put this right is to drag the white working class into the ever-growing tent of identity politics.

Not least because this obsession with race, gender and sexual preference is why the white working class has been elbowed away from opportunities in the first place.

For years, public bodies – as well as many private firms – have been living under the delusion that all white people go through their lives in the warm glow of something called 'white privilege'.

It has led to BBC training schemes being ring-fenced for minorities, education resources being focused in ethnic areas, TV programmes and adverts depicting a Britain that seems to be made up entirely of black and mixed-raced families, with just the odd white person.

Andy Burnham arriving at No 10 North in Manchester on September 10, 2026

Tommy Robinson at a flash protest outside Southampton Central Police Station. Southampton on June 2, 2026 

Now, we have reached the inevitable push-back. The white working class is learning the language of grievance, which you can read and see in everything from Tommy Robinson marches to a June report that concluded: 'The education system is not set up to serve white working class children and families.' That was from Star Academies, an independent trust of primary and secondary schools.

It is not hard to think where this is going to lead. While the Government is not, for now, proposing that white working class heritage becomes a protected characteristic under the Equality Act, there will be growing pressure on it to do so.

We will have quotas, official or unofficial, for working class representation on everything from university courses to arts prize shortlists.

Employers will be asking themselves: dare I reject this candidate with a heavily tattooed neck, only to fall foul of discrimination law?

We will have people shunted into jobs for which they are not qualified purely on account of their having an estuary accent. No doubt, too, we will have demands for reparations for the descendants of victims of the Peterloo Massacre or the Highland Clearances.

Though the main obstacle to all of the above will be determining what being working class actually means. It's a construct that is even more nebulous than ethnicity, which is increasingly rendered meaningless as people have families across racial groups.

Some dogged research by my father has revealed that I can count among my ancestors everyone from the First Earl of Elgin to a couple who ran a grotty pub in Staines. There are farm labourers in there, too, along with horsemen and granite polishers.

Unlike Keir Starmer I don't tend to bring it up on every occasion, but my grandfather was a toolmaker. So, if I am asked to self-identify as a member of a social class, as we do with ethnicity, which am I supposed to pick?

It is true that we can't help seeing class divisions everywhere. It has always been this way. In the year I left primary school, 1978, British society was more equal in terms of income than it had ever been before and has ever been since. And yet there was a visible classroom divide.

As the school lay between a council estate and private housing on the outskirts of Canterbury, the pupils were a mix of middle class kids (who wore the optional uniform and had 'grandmas') and working class kids (loose knitted jumpers and 'nans').

I knew where I belonged: on the lowest rung of the middle class, by virtue of my parents owning their own home, although only just, thanks to Chancellor Denis Healey's eye-watering interest rates.

Another signifier was their willingness to turn up to parents' evening, something which was lamentably rarer among the working class mums and dads.

It is little wonder that their already disadvantaged children didn't do so well in their exams.

Class divisions have always been about more than just income and wealth; they are about attitudes, and also politics.

I was a bit miffed when John Prescott, two decades ago, was still calling himself working class when I couldn't afford one Jag, let alone two. Today, I would say if you go around proudly calling yourself working class you are quite likely a liberal, metropolitan Labour voter. If you feel proud to have escaped the working class or aspire to do so, you are more likely to vote Conservative.

The most iniquitous thing about Labour's focus on class is that the people who would benefit the most would be those who self-identified as working class when they were quite well off. It is they who would fill up the inevitable opportunity quotas. If people want to burnish their class credentials, whether upwards or downwards, then fine.

But please don't institutionalise class into policy-making. Don't have us ticking forms on how we identify: working, middle or upper. In fact, why don't we dump the concept of identity politics and stop collecting data on ethnicity, too? No good has come from it. It has served merely to widen divisions.

It has also led to the absurd sight of people such as the broadcaster Afua Hirsch (Wimbledon High School and St Peter's College, Oxford) claiming victimhood on the basis of her part-Ghanian parentage, when she has led a privileged life of which most can only dream.

Dr Tony Sewell, of the Government's Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, is right when he says that class is more of a division than race in British society.

Nevertheless, I don't want people pigeonholed by class any more than by ethnicity. We are not going to reduce educational and economic disadvantage by pouring favour on one socio-ethnic group one decade and another the next, depending on which way the wind of victimhood is blowing.

We are only going to do so by having schools everywhere that provide a rigorous education. If there are towns with too few job opportunities, then offer companies tax breaks to set up there.

But let's stop trying to classify people as if we were Victorian Darwinists. Identity politics might have started off with good intentions, but it has grown into a monster which is pulling society apart.