Owen Jones has his faults, but he is head and shoulders above the rest of this sorry bunch. It's concerning to see him luvvying up, but he's young and does seem to have decent fundamentals and some capacity to learn.
He made a bad error in not going to see the IWCA when he was a couple of miles down the road writing
Chavs; his magnificent response to the racist Starkey post-riots was marred by his incredibly lame defence of black contribution to Britain (music and sport was all he could muster
); he could and should have done a few years in the real world given that he criticises the culture of going straight into politics with fuck all experience (in mitigation, it was
Chavs wot launched him into the spotlight, and he shouldn't be criticised for writing up stuff he worked on whilst at university - but he didn't have to take
all the jobs offered off the back of it).
On Twitter, he is consorting with his peer group from Oxbridge and the media, and it's cringeworthy. But what he publishes is pretty decent compared to other 'left' commentators with a mainstream platform.
As for this privilege stuff, isn't the whole point of it to recognise all sources of power, not fucking rank them? A white working-class man may have more power (on average) than a black working-class man, but he is considerably less powerful (on average) than a black middle-class woman.
One of the problems for the Oxbridge types, as I know from painful experience, is dealing with crippling middle-class guilt. Jones is upfront about his class privilege and his analysis is class-based and sound. But a lot of these people are on the left because they want to be liked by poor people, not because they 'get' the politics. That is why they are so easily distracted by the killing of brown people abroad and so absent from community and workplace action at home. And most of them cannot bring themselves to admit the full extent of their privilege: they can't help who their parents are, their heart is in the right place, and that's enough.
They're so busy denying their privilege they never get to realise that it is not enough. It doesn't mean they can't ever be taken seriously on the left, but they have to work at it. They have to realise that being more confident and articulate does not mean they have more knowledge. That being highly educated does not make you well-informed. And the million and one other differences in life experience and the unquestioned assumptions that they have to get their heads around before they can presume to speak for anyone.
