The UK’s General Election is more about class than at any time since 1945. Yet few want to say so. The media focus on the characters of the leaders and posturing on Brexit. But as in other countries, the election is really about the crisis in the Global Transformation, the point at which the inequalities and insecurities have become such that neo-fascist populism is the only feasible option for the rentiers, plutocrats and elites gaining from the rentier capitalism that they have nurtured since the 1980s.
They cannot achieve their goal alone, of course. They must play on the discontent of what remains of the previous working class, the industrial proletariat, and the relatively uneducated part of the new mass working class, the atavistic part of the precariat.
The Atavists, as explained elsewhere, are those who have fallen out of the old working class or who had parents who were in it or who come from communities dominated by that. They listen to populist rhetoric because it is easy to comprehend and a convenient way of absolving themselves of responsibility for their predicament. They are prepared to be the foot-soldiers for Brexit, for law-and-order, for xenophobia and punishing perceived scroungers dependent on benefits.
