WeeklyWorker

21.08.2025
That was 1922. What about 2025?

Class composition in a snapshot

We must get beyond abstract dogmas and mere impressionism. Not that official statistics give us easy answers. In his opening article Mike Macnair outlines the different classes in the 2020s

Left discussions of the politics of class in the UK are polarised between an abstract ‘Marxist’ orthodoxy, on the one hand, and mere impressionism, on the other. The abstract ‘Marxist’ orthodoxy takes the form of the claim that, since the internal logic of capital is towards social polarisation between capital and labour, marginalising household production, this must be the dominant tendency in the 21st century UK Therefore the tasks of socialists are simply those of the working class majority taking over.

This line of argument is commonly accompanied by left syndicalism - the belief that the class struggle at the point of production, in the workplace, is decisive. The argument that the working class is the overwhelming majority is essential to left syndicalism, but left syndicalism is not necessary to the argument that the working class is the overwhelming majority or that the dominant tendency is towards proletarianisation.

The mere impressionism starts from the visible decline of militant strikes since the 1970s and of trade union density (down from 58% in the late 1970s to 22% in 2024), the decline of working class participation in the Labour Party and voting in elections, the dominance of students and ex-students in the organisations of the far left, the political role of ‘social movements’, and so on: to reach in conclusion broadly more or less ‘left’ versions of the politics of Marxism Today’s New Times: that is, rejection of the Marxist perspective of the centrality of a link between socialism/communism and the workers’ movement, in favour of forms of broad front, ‘left populism’ or ‘intersectional coalition’.

Addressing this question is seriously difficult. On the one hand, it is necessary to think through theoretically what is the actual nature of the Marxist claim that the internal logic of capital is towards social polarisation between capital and labour. This is not just a matter of acknowledging ‘counter-tendencies’ already recognised by Marx (a point made, for example, by Dan Evans1) since there is a danger that the recognition of ‘counter-tendencies’ produces theory that ‘explains’ all outcomes and therefore actually explains none.

On the other hand, it is necessary to think carefully about what the empirical evidence is actually telling us (and what it is not telling us). This is made particularly difficult by the fact that the statistics produced by the capitalist state are constructed using non-Marxist categories/definitions, which makes it hard to use them to test Marxist theory (the rejection of Marxist theory is built in a priori to the conceptual structure used to identify and to classify the relevant data), as will be seen below. What is needed is the sort of unpacking and reclassification work done by authors working on the rate of profit.2

In this article I am trying to make a very rough stab at the empirical side; afterwards I mean to return to the theoretical side. I do not have the skills to do the empirical work properly. So what I can do is a very, very rough approximation of a snapshot of the mid-2020s UK from the official statistics.

Any attempt to argue from projecting past trends into the future is right now severely problematic, given the movement into overt US protectionism and into ‘guns before butter’ rearmament and social welfare cuts. It is clear that these turns are not just Donald Trump (the current US president is merely more ostentatious about it than Joe Biden was), so they can be anticipated to continue after the 2028 presidential election. But it is absolutely unclear what the implications of these turns will be in five to 10 years time.

I think it is possible to approach the empirical issue from two angles. The first is UK population and the share in it of employed and self-employed; data from the ‘labour force survey’ about ‘social class’; and so on. This is indirect data about class, because the survey categories are non-Marxist, so that what is possible is at most an approximation. This will be the subject of this article.

The second is to look at data about the UK economy, so far as this tells us about imports, exports and locally consumed production, and, in essence, how the UK population as such makes its living in world capitalism. This is again indirect data about class, because, first, a good deal of UK ‘product’ is actually merely income arising from production elsewhere in the world and, secondly, the shares of output are radically disproportionate to labour inputs sector by sector due to varying levels of capitalisation and consequent productivity. A second article will address this data.

In spite of the difficulties, it is worth making the attempt. Hopefully someone else with better skills than me in the field will correct what I have written and, in doing so, take our understanding forward.

Population

We start with population. In the UK it is expected to hit 70 million in 2025.3 The most recent estimates published are for mid-year 2023.4 At that date UK population was estimated at 68.25 million (57.7 million in England, 5.5 million in Scotland, 3.15 million in Wales and 1.92 million in the Six Counties). 15.7 million (23%) are aged 19 or below;5 12.9 million (18.9%) are 65 or above.6 This leaves 39.7 million people of “working age”.

There were 2.9 million students in higher education (HE) in 2023-247 and just over one million over-19s in further education (FE).8 Since the FE numbers do not distinguish between full-time and part-time, and the HE numbers include 18 year-olds, it is probably an acceptable rough approximation to reduce “working age” numbers by 2.5 million, leaving 37.2 million.

As of August-October 2023, 9.3 million aged 16-64 were “economically inactive”: that is, not in employment, not seeking work in the last four weeks and not available for work in the next two weeks. 2.4 million of these were students; 2.8 million were long-term sick or disabled; 1.7 million were home-makers; 1.1 million were early retired; 1.1 million were “other”; 172,000 were short-term sick; 28,000 were “discouraged workers” who did not believe jobs were actually available.9

Out of these numbers “home-makers” fall to be categorised according to the class of their breadwinner; the long-term sick and disabled again fall to be located in class position on the basis of family background or prior employment; the early retired (where this is not a result of long-term sickness) fall into the class of petty rentiers.

In any case, in terms of the analysis of the relative size and social weight of classes in Marxist analysis, the starting point has to be the economically active (though we will modify this later by adding some pensioners and some of the working-age economically inactive into the petty-rentier class and by dividing the under-18s in rough proportion to the economically active classes). This would yield an ‘economically active’ category of those between 18 and 64 of 32.8 million.

Inconsistently with the calculations above, in June-August 2023 33.5 million people aged 16 and over were in employment.10 I guess that the difference arises from 16-18s and over-65s who are in employment. (Just for an arbitrary example, I am retired but do a limited amount of part-time teaching. Having retired from a fairly well-paid job I am actually living on investment income from my pension provider, which makes me a member of the petty rentier class.)

As of the third quarter 2023 there were 4.4 million self-employed,11 or 13.4% of the economically active population. As of October 2024, of 5.5 million total businesses, 4.1 million have no employees, and another 1.2 million are ‘micro’ businesses having one-to-nine employees. Of 2.1 million actively trading registered companies, 920,000 did not employ anyone except the owner.12 This information corroborates the ‘ballpark figure’ of about 13%-14% of the economically active population being, at least technically, in business for themselves.

How many of these are cases of “sham self-employment” - that is, where the ‘self-employed person’ is actually dependent on a single potential employer or arranger of jobs13? In 2020 Mark Harvey argued that the government’s figures of who was eligible to apply for self-employment support for the Covid lockdown showed that a million at least were cases of “sham self-employment”.14 Certainly, the lockdown led to a sharp fall in reported self-employment, from five million to 4.2 million.15

Employed middle

The Office of National Statistics’ ‘Labour Force Survey’ produces for July-September 2023 33.4 million in employment; excluding full-time students who have jobs, there are around 32 million. Of these 7.05 million (22%) are “higher managerial and professional”, 9.3 million (29%) are “lower managerial and professional”, 4.1 million (12.8%) are in “intermediate occupations”, 3.1 million (9.6%) are “small employers and own-account workers”, 1.9 million (5.9%) are “lower supervisory and technical”, three million (9.4%) are in “semi-routine occupations” and another three million (9.4%) in “routine occupations”.16 The result would be 51% “professional and managerial” plus another 9.6% small businesses, making the middle classes the very clear majority of UK society.

These figures are immediately suspect, in the first place because there is a flat inconsistency between 4.4 million self-employed or 4.1 million businesses with no employees, and only 3.1 million here. Secondly, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) is recognised to be unreliable, due to massive falls in response rates, making the sampling methodology problematic. 600,000 workers reportedly went missing because of this problem ...17

Third, we need to consider how the categories are set up. It is notoriously the case (and was already observed by Adam Smith in The wealth of nations) that what counts as ‘skilled’, as opposed to ‘unskilled’, labour is highly arbitrary. The same goes for ‘professional’, contrasted with ‘skilled’ or ‘technical’. The LFS categories are based on the ‘National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification’, as revised in 2010.18 This categorisation is explicitly designed to generate a classification congruent with the pollsters’ ‘social classes’ for marketing purposes, and it is based on JH Goldthorpe’s schema, which was from the outset based on the rejection of Marxist class analysis in favour of a Weberian version.19

For our present purposes, the problems are with ‘higher managerial and professional’, ‘lower managerial and professional’, and ‘lower supervisory and technical’ (the ‘intermediate’ category - “clerical, sales, service and intermediate technical occupations” - straightaway are clearly part of the working class in Marxist terms). In each of these three cases, the LFS/NS-SEC categories conflate skilled work with managerial authority over those below.

Further, both ‘higher professional’ and ‘lower professional’, so far as they are distinct from ‘technical’, are purely subjective categories, defined by reference to the prior use in ‘Registrar General’s Social Class’, as defined in 1921, and ‘Socio-economic groups’, as defined in 1961.

At the time of writing, the capitalist media and the government are engaged in acampaign of slander, using the methods traditionally employed against strikers - against resident doctors. The same methods have been used repeatedly against teachers. Both groups are ‘traditional professions’ for the purposes of the Goldthorpe schema; both have also been subject to efforts to cut the cost of training by deskilling - ‘teaching assistants’ and ‘physician associates’. ‘Professionals’, here, mutate into skilled workers from the point of view of capital, its state and its media.

Presumably, someone, who was better at working with the data than I am, could get hold of what underlies the LFS figures, could systematically disaggregate ‘professional’ from ‘managerial’ and as a result get a clearer sense of the issue. For a couple of examples, in 2025 there are 614,391 FTE teachers in UK state schools.20 NHS England employed 741,747 “professionally qualified clinical staff” as of April 2025.21

Statista has for 2018 2.4 million employed “managers, directors and senior officials”. For 2018-19 there are 317,000 “finance managers and directors”; 244,000 “marketing and sales directors”; 63,000 “purchasing managers and directors”; 204,000 “human resource managers and directors”; 107,000 “IT and telecommunications directors”; 132,000 general managers and directors - adding up to 1.1 million.22 Statista also confirms that nurses and midwives count as ‘professionals’, as do a wide range of other NHS skilled staff.23 In the ‘lower managerial and professional’ category, there are 172,000 office managers and 32,000 office supervisors.24

As I have said, I do not have the technical skills (or the time) to get into the raw data, disaggregate them and reconstruct them on the basis of Marxist categories. But what would the ‘Marxist categories’ be?

I have argued previously that the Ehrenreichs’ “professional-managerial class” is an amalgam.25 On the one hand, the managerial class has authority over those below and, as Kautsky put it,26 performs the functions of capital - that is, coordinating the work of organised groups of workers in objectively socialised production.27

By way of a very rough guesstimate, I think we can probably take Statista’s 2.4 million “managers, directors and senior officials” as the component of the LFS 7.05 million ‘higher managerial and professional’ that corresponds to this managerial class - 34% of the larger figure - and apply this percentage also to the LFS’s 9.3 million ‘lower managerial and professional’, giving 3.2 million; and its 1.9 million ‘lower supervisory and technical’, with 646,000; giving a total figure for managers and supervisors of 6.25 million - or 19.5% of the economically active population.

Skilled

On the other hand, the remainder of these three LFS categories may be guesstimated at 12 million people or 37.9% of the economically active population. In terms of their apparent economic position, this large category is skilled workers: they are not in business for themselves, but work for wages (salaries), under personal capitalist or managerial authority. How they self-identify in class terms is more variable.

The background is that, as I have argued before, this group does not sell bare labour power, unlike unskilled and semi-skilled workers (the LFS’s 4.1 million in “intermediate occupations”, three million in “semi-routine occupations” and three million in “routine occupations” - in total 10.1 million or 32.8% of the economically active population). Their skills are assets - informal intellectual property rights - which can be parlayed into concessions from capital, which function as a form of ‘technical rents’. That is, as long as the collective skill monopoly is maintained (as Paul Demarty has argued28). These concessions may take the form of more money (including better pensions); of better working conditions (I can say from personal experience that it is more agreeable to work in a university than in a car factory …); of lower-intensity supervision and direction; and, at the marginal edge, of low-value status-markers of social inclusion with the managerial class (executive toilets, university senior common rooms …).

They may also be able to save from money concessions to acquire small-scale investment assets;29 numerically most significantly, as I have already indicated, in the form of pensions saving. Or, if the circumstances are right, they may be able to move from employment into self-employment. The banks provided loan funding for dentists to bolt out of the NHS. The recent upshot is the displacement of the small dental practices created in this wave by firms owned by private equity.30 The dentists’ fate is thus like Engels in 1888 on the Irish peasantry: “A purely socialist movement should not be expected from Ireland for some time. The people first want to become small landowning peasants and, when they do, the mortgages will come along and ruin them once again …”31 Skilled building workers are able to move more fluidly between employment and self-employment.

The net effect is that this large category of skilled employees necessarily overlaps between the working class, on the one hand, and the employed middle class, on the other. At this point self-identification becomes important. Members of this category may self-identify in relation to their employment relationship, as workers, resulting in union activity and strikes; or they may self-identify in relation to their assets, as members of the middle class and individual ‘savers and strivers’ victimised by taxation and so on.

The 2023 British Social Attitudes Report finds that 52% of total population (as sampled) self-identify as working class, down from 58% in 1983. The primary drivers of this identification are education and income: “60% of people who left school with the equivalent of a GCSE or less identify as working class, compared with just 28% of those who went to university” - in this respect Dan Evans’ account of class as defined by education appears to ‘capture’ something about self-perception.32 And “People in the lowest quartile of household incomes (52%) are also more likely than those in the highest quartile (32%) to identify as working class.”33

Taking all this in sum, and keeping in mind the level of guesswork involved, we can divide the economically active approximately into managers and supervisors (19.5%); small business operators (9.7%); skilled workers/skill-based employed middle class (37.9%) and semi-skilled and unskilled workers (32.8%). If all the skilled workers/skill-based employed middle class self-identified as working class, that would make the working class 70.7% of the economically active population. Obviously, they do not.

Dependent

But in addition we now have to put back in the economically dependent or inactive. Starting with those of working age, as I already said, 1.7 million ‘home-makers’ fall to be categorised in class terms according to their breadwinner; the 2.8 million long-term sick and disabled again fall to be located in class position on the basis of family background or prior employment. The data do not provide (as far as I can see) enough detail to discriminate further.

The proportions among children and youth are affected by fertility differences between the classes. The most recent ONS data are for 2014.34 Down to 2010 data were published by father’s occupation, while the 2014 data shows mother’s occupation. Megan Pope showed in a 2013 study of infant mortality that a “combined” approach using the higher of the two parental occupations produced substantially different results. The 2014 data shows 33% ‘unclassified’, which makes the dataset practically useless (reflected, I guess, in the failure of ONS to publish analogous data since then). The most recent old-style data that appears to be online is for 2008, so I have used this to guess percentages.35

The 1.1 million early retired (where this is not a result of long-term sickness) must fall into the class of petty rentiers. I have referred already to this class. I think the 1.1 million ‘other’ probably also fall into it: that is, people who live off a moderate investment income, whether inherited or resulting from a windfall or a short period of high earning (like a sportsperson, an artist or a novelist who makes a killing in youth, but does not carry on business and would then be self-employed).

Life expectancy is substantially higher among the wealthier classes.36 As of February 2024, 1.4 million people were in receipt of pension credit, which is thought to be 66% of those eligible, which would make 2.1 million eligible.37 At the other end of the spectrum, as of May 2025 a little over one million pensioners were paying higher-rate income tax (exigible on incomes over £40,000 a year).38 In FYE 2023 17% of pensioners were in the top fifth of the overall income distribution, and 13% in the bottom fifth; 49% were in the top half of the income distribution. 70% of pensioners received private pension income.39 We should probably identify this 70% (9.03 million) as falling into the class of petty rentiers: those whose income depends primarily on investment performance.

Finally, the 2.9 million students in higher education occupy, like the professional/skilled/technical workers, an ambiguous class position. In theory, HE students are on the road to middle class occupations. At the same time, however, they are temporarily separated from the “dull compulsion of economic relations” that constantly reaffirms social order;40 they stand in a relationship of subordination to the institution and only acquire direct managerial responsibilities over others as student union officials; and the process of training them in decision-making skills for managerial responsibilities involves exposing them to conflicting views, which means views outside the control of the press barons (which is why the press barons have been campaigning against HE for many years).41

Significant shift

Putting these elements back in, we get a slight, but significant, shift in the picture of the classes that we had purely by estimating from the ONS ‘social class’ data on people in work. The relative size of the professional/technical/skilled worker sub-class comes down to 31%. Semi-skilled and unskilled workers come down to 25.3%. Petty rentiers at 16.3% are the third largest class group, followed by managers at 15%. The ‘classic’ small business petty bourgeoisie comes down to 8.1%, while HE students are 4.2% of the population.

On this basis the working class appears as the majority if the whole of the non-managerial employed professional/technical/skilled class is included: 56.3%. On the other hand, the ‘classic’ small business petty bourgeoisie, petty rentiers, and managers and supervisors who have actual authority over subordinates, add up to 39.4%. A minority, but by no means a small minority. The self-perception as working class reported in the British Social Attitudes survey, at 52%, is below the 56% produced by the analysis, but not radically below it.

The actual capitalist class proper of large employers and speculators who personally set money in motion for the circuit M-C-P-Cʹ-Mʹ is missing from this picture. The main reason is that it is numerically too small to be separately visible in the ONS statistics. Secondly, the generality of incorporation means that this class appears in the statistics hidden among ‘senior managers’. And thirdly - a great deal of UK business is now actually US-owned, as Angus Hanton has recently argued.42

Hanton’s book places the UK economy and ‘British capital’ in an international context, both of its subordination to US capital and in comparison with continental European capital. The present snapshot of classes in the mid-2020s poses related issues. The large middle class does not consist of peasants and artisans conducting production on a household scale; as Dan Evans argued, even the ‘classic’ small-business petty bourgeoisie consists largely of fragments of supply chains subordinated to monopsonists. The petty rentiers and the managerial class are largely unproductive classes. How does the economy support them?

The issue is, in fact, by no means unique to these classes. In the next article in this series we will look at the distribution of employment - and find that a large proportion is in unproductive sectors, or sectors that depend on production elsewhere and subsidies. Britain’s place in the world will again turn out to be fundamental.

  1. D Evans A nation of shopkeepers London 2023, pp142-44.↩︎

  2. Various references are available at thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/a-world-rate-of-profit-important-new-evidence; D Basu et al, ‘World profit rates, 1960-2019’ Review of Political Economy Vol 37 (2025), pp92-107. Anonymous objections at unlearnecon.medium.com/the-astonishingly-poor-empirics-of-the-tendency-of-the-rate-of-profit-to-fall-a9d062d0dc64 (anonymous witnesses are prima facie to be disregarded, but some of the substantive arguments may be worth considering).↩︎

  3. www.icaew.com/insights/viewpoints-on-the-news/2025/may-2025/chart-of-the-week-uk-population. Here and below I have generally rounded to one decimal point of millions, but occasionally to two decimal points.↩︎

  4. www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/annualmidyearpopulationestimates/mid2023.↩︎

  5. It is an inconvenience of the spreadsheet that it does not provide data for age 18 or below, which is both the legal age of majority and the school leaving age, and thus a more natural indicator of economic dependency.↩︎

  6. In spite of recent increases in pensionable ages this is a reasonable rough proxy for the retired, since ‘early retirement’ has been used as a job-cutting measure for some time.↩︎

  7. www.hesa.ac.uk/news/20-03-2025/he-student-statistics-2324-released.↩︎

  8. explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/further-education-and-skills/2024-25.↩︎

  9. www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/economicinactivity/datasets/economicinactivitybyreason
    seasonallyadjustedinac01sa/current    .↩︎

  10. www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/timeseries/mgrz/lms.↩︎

  11. www.statista.com/statistics/318234/united-kingdom-self-employed; see also www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/datasets/ employeesandselfemployed
    byindustryemp14.↩︎

  12. www.gov.uk/government/statistics/business-population-estimates-2024/business-population-estimates-for-the-uk-and-regions-2024-statistical-release.↩︎

  13. The legal rule is more complicated (to protect employers), but dependence on a single employer seems to be the better economic basis.↩︎

  14. www.essex.ac.uk/blog/posts/2020/05/14/coronavirus-exposes-britains-bogus-self-employment-problem.↩︎

  15. www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/understandingchangesinselfemploymentintheuk/january2019tomarch2022.↩︎

  16. www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/datasets/employmentbysocioeconomicclassificationemp11.↩︎

  17. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/dec/03/ons-replace-labour-force-survey-uk-jobs-market.↩︎

  18. www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/classificationsandstandards/otherclassifications/thenationalstatisticssocioeconomic
    classificationnssecrebasedonsoc2010    .↩︎

  19. For pollsters’ social classes see note 18 above at section 8. As for the ‘Weberian’ analysis, that refers to Max Weber (1864-1920), as interpreted by post-World War II western academic sociologists. See J Gubbay, ‘A Marxist critique of Weberian class analysis’ Sociology Vol 31 (1997), pp73-89.↩︎

  20. www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/how-many-teachers-are-there-uk-england-scotland-wales-northern-ireland.↩︎

  21. digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-workforce-statistics/april-2025.↩︎

  22. www-statista-com.ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/statistics/770071/managers-directors-and-senior-officials-employed-uk; www-statista-com.ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/statistics/768099/functional-managers-and-directors-employed-in-the-uk. (These and other numbers from Statista are behind a paywall; accessed from Bodleian Library.)↩︎

  23. www-statista-com.ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/statistics/778351/health-professionals-employed-uk.↩︎

  24. www-statista-com.ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/statistics/779758/individuals-employed-as-office-managers-and-supervisors-uk.↩︎

  25. ‘American Blue Labour’ Weekly Worker April 15 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1343/american-blue-labour); see also ‘Centrality of class’, June 3 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1350/centrality-of-class-mike-macnair-replies-to-foppe-).↩︎

  26. ‘Completely different foundations’ Weekly Worker June 26 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1544/completely-different-foundations).↩︎

  27. Pro-capitalist ideologues define the function of capital as that of the ‘entrepreneur’ - the innovator who finds a market gap and exploits it. This is merely ideological - and, so far as policy is made on this basis, tends to be destructive in effect, as, for example, in the UK water industry.↩︎

  28. ‘Manufacturing consensus’ Weekly Worker September 2 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1361/manufacturing-consensus).↩︎

  29. An observation already made by Kautsky in The dictatorship of the proletariat [1918] against the franchise in the 1918 Soviet constitution: “Another clause excludes from the franchise everyone who has unearned income: for example, dividends on capital, profits of a business, rent of property. How big the unearned income must be which carries with it loss of the vote is not stated. Does it include the possession of a savings bank-book? Quite a number of workers, especially in the small towns, own a little house, and, to keep themselves above water, let lodgings” (www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1918/dictprole/ch07.htm).↩︎

  30. decisionsindentistry.com/2024/06/how-private-equity-is-reshaping-dentistry-what-every-dental-professional-needs-to-know.↩︎

  31. Interview in NY Volkszeitung, quoted from Draper KMTR ii 428.↩︎

  32. See note 1 above (chapter 4); see also my review, ‘Rising middle classes?’ Weekly Worker July 3 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1545/rising-middle-classes).↩︎

  33. natcen.ac.uk/news/40-years-british-social-attitudes-class-identity-and-awareness-still-matter.↩︎

  34. www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/articles/anoteonchildbearingbysocioeconomicstatusandcountryofbirthofmother/2016.↩︎

  35. webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20151014092059/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/vsob1/birth-statistics--england-and-wales--series-fm1-/no--37--2008/index.html.↩︎

  36. www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/bulletins/trendinlifeexpectancyatbirthandatage65bysocioeconomicpositionbasedonthenationalstatisticssocioeconomicclassificationenglandandwales/1982to1986and2012to2016.↩︎

  37. www.gov.uk/government/statistics/dwp-benefits-statistics-february-2024/dwp-benefits-statistics-february-2024; for the take-up rate, see www.gov.uk/government/statistics/income-related-benefits-estimates-of-take-up-financial-year-ending-2023/income-related-benefits-estimates-of-take-up-financial-year-ending-2023.↩︎

  38. www.independent.co.uk/money/pensioner-tax-rates-allowances-fiscal-drag-hmrc-b2754443.html.↩︎

  39. www.gov.uk/government/statistics/pensioners-incomes-financial-years-ending-1995-to-2023/pensioners-incomes-financial-years-ending-1995-to-2023#pensioners-incomes-within-the-overall-income-distribution.↩︎

  40. K Marx Capital Vol 1, chapter 28: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch28.htm; and see N Abercrombie, S Hill and BS Turner The dominant ideology thesis (Sydney 1980) and the same authors’ edited collection, Dominant ideologies (Abingdon 1990).↩︎

  41. See also M Macnair, ‘Driven by ideas’ Weekly Worker February 14 2008 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/708/driven-by-ideas); J Turley, ‘The campus and the state’ Weekly Worker April 23 2008 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/718/the-campus-and-the-state); M Macnair, ‘Organising for an alternative vision’ Weekly Worker September 21 2011 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/882/organising-for-an-alternative-vision).↩︎

  42. A Hanton Vassal state: how America runs Britain London 2024; see also my review, ‘Vanishing capitalists?’ Weekly Worker April 10 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1533/vanishing-capitalists).↩︎