In late twentieth-century England, inequality was rocketing, yet some have suggested that the politics of class was declining in significance, while others argue that class identities lost little power. Neither interpretation is satisfactory: class remained important to 'ordinary' people's narratives about social change and their own identities throughout the period 1968-2000, but in changing ways. Using self-narratives drawn from a wide range of sources - the raw materials of sociological studies, transcripts from oral history projects, Mass Observation, and autobiography - the book examines class identities and narratives of social change between 1968 and 2000, showing that by the end of the period, class was often seen as an historical identity, related to background and heritage, and that many felt strict class boundaries had blurred quite profoundly since 1945. Class snobberies 'went underground', as many people from all backgrounds began to assert that what was important was authenticity, individuality, and ordinariness. In fact, Sutcliffe-Braithwaite argues that it is more useful to understand the cultural changes of these years through the lens of the decline of deference, which transformed people's attitudes towards class, and towards politics. The study also examines the claim that Thatcher and New Labour wrote class out of politics, arguing that this simple - and highly political - narrative misses important points. Thatcher was driven by political ideology and necessity to try to dismiss the importance of class, while the New Labour project was good at listening to voters - particularly swing voters in marginal seats - and echoing back what they were increasingly saying about the blurring of class lines and the importance of ordinariness. But this did not add up to an abandonment of a majoritarian project, as New Labour reoriented their political project to emphasize using the state to empower the individual.

About the Author
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite did her undergraduate degree in history at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and her MPhil and PhD at St Catharine's Collage, Cambridge, supervised by Jon Lawrence. She was subsequently a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge before moving to UCL where she lectures in Twentieth-Century British History. She is also an interviewer for the History of Parliament Trust's oral history project, and co-editor of Renewal: a journal of social democracy.

Reviews
[T]his very interesting study attempts to answer the questions, Why Thatcher? Why Blair? That is, how and why did the traditional class and political alignments of Labour and Conservative voters fracture and realign themselves during the last third of the twentieth century? To analyze these fundamental shifts in political attitudes and class identifications, Sutcliffe-Braithwaite revisits previous sociological studies, oral histories, mass observation records, and related materials to reconstruct how popular languages of class and society changed during this period. Summing Up: Recommended. * J. A. Jaffe, University of Wisconsin Law School , CHOICE *
The result is not only a major contribution to understandings of class, popular identity and political change in the last third of Britain's twentieth century, but also a model of the virtues of qualitative analysis for sociology and politics, no less than for history ... Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England successfully shows that class became obscured as a category of popular identification during the late twentieth century; draws upon those findings to reframe the political successes of Thatcherism and New Labour; and -- most ambitiously -- offers a compelling explanation of the complex relationship between social experience, popular perception and political change. * Guy Ortolano, Journal of Contemporary History *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198812579
Author Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Format Hardback
Page Count 262
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 242mm * 163mm * 23mm