Is the working class with us in the room right now ?

The Privilege Olympics never end

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Since I started lying with the media-grifting dogs (aka political commentators), I find myself on panels with people who are millionaires, media or property tycoons themselves or married to such, who accuse me, an immigrant who fled the Greek financial crisis to rent in London on a charity sector salary, of being part of the metropolitan elite who can never understand the concerns of the working class. I know of one right-wing commentator, a landlady, who goes around the media circuit calling me a ‘typical spoiled middle-class girl’.

There was a time when that accusation embarrassed me. In university, lefties like myself joked about being spoiled, abusing phrases like ‘third-world problems’ and taking the stereotype of the sheltered millennial on the chin. When I was running for student council, my campaign manager ordered me to stop wearing suit jackets to my law lectures (which in Greece, and in particular in my city, was a common way to dress to go to uni as an aspiring-take-me-seriously-18yo) and wear jeans and t-shirts instead to look more “approachable”. People coming across me thought I came from a ship magnet family because I exuded largess. Alas, growing up in Greece in the naughties, you didn’t get brownie points for being poor, so Greeks learned how to hide disadvantage and exaggerate comfort as much as the British learned to perform humility and invent hardship.

In London’s activist scene, I was taught I should be ashamed of being both left-wing and middle-class- a champagne socialist. It was a sign of self-awareness to volunteer submission to the accusation that, as a middle-class person, you were out of touch with the needs of the ‘normal people’ (aka, peasants, coal miners and other imaginary straw man ‘poors’, unlike you, a silver-spooned freak who thinks enforcing pronouns is equal to seizing the means of production) and should be ashamed when you feel like your life is hard because most people have it so much worse.