This is what you want, this is what you get.

TUC General Secretary Frances O'Grady echoes Max Keiser's tirades only without wit or insight, from the BBC:

Ms O'Grady's speech to TUC delegates in Liverpool expanded on the annual conference's main theme of living standards.

She said: "Are we going to settle for a nastier and poorer Britain - a Downton Abbey-style society, in which the living standards of the vast majority are sacrificed to protect the high living of the well-to-do?

"We are piling yet more riches onto a privileged few. Economic growth is back but there's no sign of it in most workers' pay packets. In fact, the gap has got worse. Top chief executives now earn 175 times the wages of the average worker.

"Silver spoons are ever more firmly clamped in the mouths of those who were born with them. And under this government, class prejudice is becoming respectable once again."

She's missed the point about class prejudice, that was always there and cuts both ways.

Even worse, she's really missed the point with the whole 'silver spoon' thing.

As Max Keiser has pointed out, the real distinction is between the rentier class and the wealth creating class and the problem is that everybody aspires to be a rentier and looks down on wealth creators.

So people who bought their council house in London for a song, have since sold it at a massive profit and retired to Spain on the proceeds belong to the rentier class; the occasional entrepreneur like James Dyson, even if he is a bit posh, belongs to the wealth creating class.

Hugely overpaid corporate executives from whatever social background are rentiers; NHS surgeons from middle- or upper-class backgrounds count as wealth creators etc etc.

Fun Online Polls: Newfangled social classes & The Clash

Thank you everybody who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll, another good turnout. Results as follows:

In which, if any, of the BBC's newfangled social classes do you consider yourself to be?

Elite - 11%
Established middle class - 9%
Technical middle class - 19%
New affluent workers - 2%
Traditional working class - 6%
Emergent service workers - 4%
Precariat - 8%
None of the above - 40%

I don't know how many people bothered to do the test at the BBC and how many just gave their own opinion/guessed, but it doesn't seem to matter, the test results seem to be fairly haphazard. FWIW, I ended up as "technical middle class".

It's reassuring to see forty per cent refuseniks, that's the main thing.
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I started listening to The Clash again about ten days ago, for no particular reason. Once everybody started banging on about the early Thatcher years, it seemed to be an appropriate musical back drop so I have been listening to them fairly full time. Inevitably, I find myself wondering which my "favourite" Clash album is, and predictably enough, I find myself concluding: "Well, if I had to choose just one, I think it'd have to be London Calling."

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll, which is your favourite Clash album?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Generating capacity & the BBC's new class system

The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

How much of the UK's current electricity generating capacity will be shut down under the EU's Large Combustion Plants Directive?

One percent - 2%
Five percent - 2%
Ten percent - 7%
Fifteen percent - 20%
Twenty percent - 70%

If we include those power stations which were shut down recently in the numerator and denominator, the answer is somewhere between 15% and 20%. Two people who know about this stuff confirmed this.

So well done 90% of you. You do wonder, do they have any sort of back-up plan, and if so, what is it, or are they just plain nuts?
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The BBC did their own gloriously daft Fun Online Poll last week, I ended up as Technical Middle Class, whatever that means; the labels used were suitably anodyne so that nobody feels too hard done by.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll, in which, if any, of the BBC's newfangled social classes do you consider yourself to be?

Take part here or use the widget in the sidebar.