real utopias

Having caricatured the working classes in his first book, Owen Jones caricatures the ruling classes in his second. Where in Chavs the less well-off were held aloft by our pitying author as the ‘victims of social problems’, ‘vulnerable’, and ‘lacking… toys, days out, good food’, in The Establishment the rulers of society are denounced as ‘venal’, ‘greedy’, ‘despicable’, ‘zealots’, ‘scroungers’, and possibly even psychopathic. To read Jones’ books is to enter into a super-moralistic world in which all shades of grey have been banned for fear of muddying the narrative. There are only the put-upon and the putters-upon. It must be nice to live in such a binary moral universe. I wish I lived there.