Session Four: Who Is Working Class — and How to Communicate With Them

Ask a room of planners, policy experts, strategists and marketers to describe the working class and you get a job, a postcode and a shopping basket. Ask a working class person the same question and you get something else entirely — a story about their dad, a set of manners, a strong view about who looks down on them.

That gap is where most mainstream campaigns quietly fail. Not with a disaster — just with work that is slightly off, that people watch without recognising themselves in, that gets a flat response in research groups and nobody can quite say why. Policy fails the same way, for the same reasons, and usually with more at stake.

This session — hosted by The Outsiders and supported by Resilience & Reconstruction — was presented by Steven Lacey and moderated by Thomas Brayford. It looked at where that gap comes from, why it is so persistent, and what it takes to close it — drawing in part on fieldwork from our earlier Unite the Kingdom ethnography, where this same disconnect showed up repeatedly among what the team called the "Hard Pressed": a broad, often mixed group for whom class wasn't an ideology but a lived condition, tracked in very specific terms — the price of bread and milk, buying ten cigarettes instead of twenty, a policeman who's no longer a visible presence on the street.

What came through in that research, and carried into this session, is that "working class" as a category has drifted a long way from how the people it describes actually talk about themselves. The planners' version is demographic — a postcode, a job title, a basket of goods. The lived version runs through inherited manners, mainstream and unremarkable pleasures (the dogs, the pub, the park run, the choir), and a sharp, specific sense of promise-breaking: COVID and Partygate came up again and again as the moment trust broke, not any single policy failure.

Above all was a dislike of being spoken down to by people who don't share the same reference points — George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier was invoked more than once as still the clearest account of that particular grievance, a century on.

That's also why figures seen as authentically "one of them" — however imperfect — earn a hearing that credentialled experts don't. The session argued that this isn't really about persuasion technique. It's about whether the person or institution speaking has bothered to understand the texture of a life before trying to change a mind attached to it.

Watch: YouTube