In the late 1960s, a group of sociologists visited then booming Luton, interviewing workers at Vauxhall and elsewhere for a renowned series of books, titled The Affluent Worker. Its central question was: when the working classes get middle-class salaries and mod cons, what happens to their class identity? Sixty years later, Britain is running the experiment in reverse , driving working-class families into deprivation and smashing up their communities.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51