In your editorial (The Guardian view on class politics: it has faded as culture wars have risen, 5 February), you wrote about politicians who “treat class as a matter of culture rather than economics, about tastes and traditions rather than where you sit in relation to power”. I suspect the reality is the other way round, that it is not your culture which defines your class, but your class (however imperfect and shifting the definition may be) that defines your culture, or at least some aspects of it.
When we encounter institutional racism, misogyny, Islamophobia and so on in the police or the armed forces, we should ask whether those views were created in people by the organisation’s culture, or was the culture created by people who already had those views when they joined. If there is a problem with such prejudices being common in the class from which rank-and-file members of those organisations are predominantly drawn, we must recognise that and address it there, or we will never mend the organisations. If someone joining the police at 18 is a racist, it’s already too late.
Mike Perry
Ickenham, London
• Across the world, the policies of the centre are enabling the right because people might not really want Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni or Nigel Farage but, when it comes to it, they really don’t want any sort of left that challenges their wealth. For this reason, they will not adopt the policies that are needed to defeat the right but they continue with the policies that the Guardian identifies correctly as failing.
The right winning is the consolation prize that protects their wealth if they cannot have the centre they would prefer. When the left does get the highest votes, the centre panics and makes deals with the right to keep the left out – see Emmanuel Macron. This isn’t a bug, it is a feature.
Jonathan Fanning
Senior lecturer/associate professor in international strategy, University of York
• Working-class people can be defined by their reliance on having a job. Jobs are not careers. These jobs give no power to workers, who simply do what they are told in the way that employers want. There is little chance of promotion to a level where they can make or participate in the making of decisions.
They clock in and out. They are paid the rate for the job or less, despite equal pay legislation. Any complaints can get them sacked, often by reducing the hours they are given to the point where they have to leave to survive. For many working people, the week or month is longer than wages, leaving debt or deprivation as normal before payday.
Life for the working class might look different from Victorian conditions, but the reality is not. Pawn shops are now cash converters; credit cards and savings clubs still offer a way to stretch funds.
No wonder Reform UK is attractive when the Labour party does not seem to want to reduce inequality, reform Tory taxation to reduce the burden on below‑average earners and give everyone a country with a better Gini coefficient.
Margaret Ingram
Bridgwater, Somerset
• Your leader seems to make the mistake of assuming that class politics is only practised by the left/underdog section of society. The right/reactionary section has never stopped practising class politics against poorer and less powerful people in society. The media may have ignored this or not called it out for what it is, but it has never stopped and definitely not faded.
Mike Daniels
Stoke Golding, Leicestershire
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