Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite has written an innovative and important book about class and politics in England over the last fifty years. At the core of Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England is the relationship between popular understandings of class on the one hand and political change on the other. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite's overarching argument is that most understandings of class in England have become characterized by a belief that society consists of a large majority of “ordinary” people in the middle, with a small elite above and a small underclass below. She sees this characterization as developing across most of the postwar period, being encouraged by politicians, especially from Thatcher onwards, but not being purely a product of political discourse. Rather, it is a cultural shift, one that politicians have influenced but also have had to adapt to as they have searched for a politics that can work in this new environment.

To make the case, Sutcliffe-Braithwaite follows the recent trend set by historians such as Jon Lawrence, Selena Todd, and Helen McCarthy to reuse the materials generated by postwar sociology, social observation, Mass Observation, and oral history. To do this effectively is not easy; it involves taking people's own words seriously but not at face value. As Sutcliffe-Braithwaite notes, “In reading these sources, we therefore need to pay attention to intersubjectivity, performance, and the situational nature of class talk” (12). Most of this book is taken up with six studies of such sources. These cover a survey of Tyneside shipbuilding workers’ attitudes to class in the years 1968–1971; various sources on the middle classes, 1969–1979; a selection of working-class autobiographies from ca. 1970 to 1985; Paul Thompson's “100 Families” oral history project of 1985–1988; the study of Mass Observers’ attitudes to class in 1990; and, finally, the BBC/British Library interviews forming the Millennium Memory Bank, 1998–2000.

These detailed analyses of popular attitudes are followed by discussion of two political “projects,” Thatcherite and New Labour, assessing how they understood class and reflected the popular attitudes suggested by the preceding discussion. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite demonstrates that while Thatcher eschewed, indeed anathematized, talk of class, her essentially moral project involved a redefinition of the class structure. In this view, the great mass of people (actually or potentially) were adherents of the “bourgeois” values of hard work, self-reliance, and family centeredness. The main enemy of this moral mass was the state with its bureaucracies. Thatcher then drew, if indirectly, from the postwar sociological embourgeoisement thesis, though unlike most analysts of this phenomenon she regarded it as good thing, and something that rendered the class struggle of leftist thinking irrelevant and dangerous.

At the center of this vision was an appeal to the “ordinary working man and woman and their family,” which became a mantra of the 1980s and 1990s (and beyond). As Sutcliffe-Braithwaite perceptively points out, such phrasing was carefully gender neutral in characterizing the “workers” in contrast to the traditional masculine resonance of “the working class.” Without overclaiming, she argues that this Thatcherite vision of a society made up of a “quiet majority” in the middle (including many Labour voters), an effete establishment at the top, and a feckless underclass below chimed with much popular understanding. Of course, this vision was highly contestable; for example, Thatcher's “establishment” consisted especially of professionals and experts, not those who dominated business and finance, and hence her politics had a pronounced populist feel. But her societal picture went with the grain of changes in how many English people were coming to see their world.

The final substantive chapter of the book deals with New Labour. As in her sophisticated discussion of Thatcher, Sutcliffe-Braithwaite avoids following the caricatures that often dominate analysis of her subject. For instance, she insists that the common story of New Labour abandoning the idea of class, drawing its politics from public opinion surveys and seeking to persuade solely by “spin,” is inaccurate and unhelpful. New Labour had to work with long-standing anxieties about a changing social structure eroding its traditional voting base. Opinion poll evidence showed that indeed old class allegiances were fading and that the language of “ordinary working families” had gained a great deal of traction. For the leaders of New Labour, this situation did not require echoing Thatcher's appeal to the values of thrift and hard work, but it did underscore a need to foreground opportunity and aspiration. Even the language used to discuss those at the bottom reflected this new perspective—e.g., the “socially excluded,” defined by their lack of opportunity. Equally, New Labour countered what they saw as Thatcherite individualism with an appeal to “community,” a concept implicitly embracing the “great middle.” Above all, as the leader of New Labour, “[Tony] Blair came to believe that British society by the 1990s was dominated by a “new middle class” which could retain cultural ties to and pride in “working class” culture and values, but which had very different lifestyles and aspirations” (201).

Sutcliffe-Braithwaite concludes that the second half of the twentieth century saw a long-term, “bottom-up” cultural change with a decline of deference and a rise in new forms of individualism, beginning soon after 1945 but intensifying in the 1970s. This shift followed an acceptance that class distinctions, especially between the middle and working classes, had been diluted (though not erased) and that people's sense of self was less linked to class identities and more connected to notions of ordinariness, authenticity, and individuality. The new mindset generated a kind of egalitarianism in the form of antisnobbishness, but this egalitarianism was highly politically ambiguous. One of its long-reaching consequences may be the kind of antipolitics in which all politicians are denounced as part of the “elite” and expertise and intellect derided. As Sutcliffe-Braithwaite points out in the epilogue, this kind of populist (anti)politics has flourished in the early twenty-first century. But ordinariness can have many meanings: Jeremy Corbyn is not part of any social elite and is hardly a traditional intellectual, but is he “ordinary”? Similarly, authenticity is hard to pin down in political terms. The meaning of authenticity is obviously debatable, and then it may not always be a characteristic compatible with effective politics, which requires precisely the capacity to speak in different registers to different audiences. In any case, effects of the cultural changes Sutcliffe-Braithwaite outlines remain with us. Her book therefore helps us understand our present moment as well as the decades that led up to it.