Class is back in fashion. Having spent the past decade rehabilitating racial differences, praising men in dresses for being real girls, and celebrating fat, disabled and queer ‘communities’, left-wing activists are changing direction. They appear to be talking about problems facing working-class people for the first time in years.

Last week, the UK’s Labour government launched a new ‘Class Unit’ designed to focus attention and resources ‘on improving the lives of low-income families, disadvantaged communities and rooting out child poverty’. After years in which privileging posh trans or brown people for internships and well-paid jobs was all the rage, and even hinting at problems with class inequality prompted accusations of racism, this is a move that should – in theory – be welcomed by critics of woke. So why does it leave me cold?

First, there’s the breakneck speed with which the shift from culture to economics, from identity to class, is playing out in so-called progressive circles. It seems like only yesterday that girls were being taken to task for ‘cultural appropriation’ if they wore hoop earrings or tied their hair in knots. We’ve barely had a chance to catch breath since then Labour leader Keir Starmer was photographed taking the knee for Black Lives Matter alongside then deputy leader Angela Rayner, now the UK housing secretary. And just moments have passed since anyone who questioned whether it was appropriate for drag queens with names like Flow Job to read stories to young children was branded a bigot.

But now, all of this is simply to be laughed off. ‘Woke 1 was crazy!’, giggled the movement’s erstwhile poster girl, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, last month. Today, she aligns herself with the Democratic Socialists of America, which campaigns under the slogan ‘Workers Deserve More’ and whose goal is ‘a democratic society of the working class’. Her comrade-in-arms, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, wants to control rents, provide free universal childcare and run cost-price grocery stores. In Britain too, we’ve moved from Starmer’s virtue-signalling to Andy Burnham’s capped bus fares and a ‘focus on working-class people’s experiences of public services, health disparities and access to employment’.

‘It’s time to end the squeamishness’, declares the government’s press release marking the launch of the Class Unit: ‘Working-class people will be at the heart of a renewed government drive to tackle entrenched inequality.’ But who, exactly, is ‘squeamish’? Some of us have never had a problem talking about class: only Labour’s woke activists found it politically inconvenient.

On the surface at least, this looks like a shift to what sounds like an old-fashioned left-wing agenda. Yet it has taken place not just in the absence of a reckoning with woke’s legacy but also with many of their bizarre initiatives remaining in place. Just last week we learnt that gender-fluid police officers can carry both male and female identity documents.

Indeed, the new ‘Class Unit’ will sit ‘within the Office for Equality and Opportunity alongside units on race, women, LGBT+ and disability’. This positioning makes clear that in the minds of today’s government ministers and civil servants, the working class is not a political force with its own distinct interests but just another identity group in need of recognition.

Adding ‘working class’ to the list of identity groups deserving of special treatment raises the thorny question of definition. If working class means poor, then how do we label well-paid self-employed plumbers and plasterers? Or the laptop ‘creatives’ who earn very little but know that, when push comes to shove, daddy will lend a hand? If it means lacking degree certificates, what about the autodidacts? And if it means family background, then at what age do we judge people on their own merits, not where they’ve come from?

The problem with seeing ‘working class’ as another identity category goes deeper than the question of definition. It suggests that Labour views the working classes as an entirely passive group: people without political agency, in need of handouts and affirmation. This reinforces the political establishment’s existing tendencies, from its willingness to dole out welfare payments, allowing people to remain out of work and on the sick, to its determination to water down the academic expectations placed on schoolchildren.

This warped and degraded identitarian view of what it is to be working class means that the new Class Unit is unlikely to do anything to improve people’s lives. Labour plans to introduce a ‘socio-economic duty’: ‘a new power in the Equality Act that will legally require public bodies to consider how to improve the lives of lower-income families as part of decisions around issues like transport, services and budgets.’ The existing public-sector equality duty means that public authorities and organisations must ‘have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations’. In practice, it is used to justify highly paid bureaucrats devising internships that exclude white males. Adding a ‘socio-economic’ identity to this mix will mire businesses and institutions in yet more bureaucracy and pave the way for more mad identity celebrations.

We do have a problem with class inequality – and the very same woke activists who now claim to offer solutions have exacerbated it. But the concessions, benefits and bureaucracy they now offer are worse than useless. Change will only come about when the working class is able to pursue its political interests – from Brexit to stopping mass migration to ending economically crippling Net Zero policies. Sadly, these ideas are unlikely to make their way into Labour’s Class Unit any time soon.

Once upon a time, scientific and technical advisers were titans in their fields. Patrick Blackett was a physicist who won the Nobel Prize before he became a key adviser to prime minister Harold Wilson, where he put British computing at the top of the government’s agenda. Chemist Henry Tizard’s work and advice allowed Britain to deploy advanced radar research into its air-defence systems. Polymath Solly Zuckerman, the first formal scientific adviser to a UK government, possessed expertise in fields ranging from zoology to systems research.

Now, policymakers look to capital instead of scientific expertise. More than anyone else, it is supposed that venture capitalists can divine a unique knowledge of the future. Which explains the extraordinary rise of Matthew Clifford, chair of the government’s AI-focussed Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA).

By contrast to his distinguished predecessors, Clifford is a former McKinsey consultant with a degree in medieval history. He rose through David Cameron’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ scene, where he honed his legendary schmoozing skills as a networker. He created a business incubator and investment vehicle, Entrepreneurs First, in 2011. Two weeks ago, Clifford confirmed that he would join Anthropic’s international-affairs team, a position that will see him lobby governments throughout Europe on behalf of the AI firm.

However, Clifford’s cake-ism has created an obvious conflict of interest. Which politician, adviser or senior official would seek to antagonise companies that can offer them a handsome salary in the near future?

Clifford’s register of interests is perhaps the longest ever to be disclosed by a government adviser. As one of the biggest early investors in AI in Europe, there was little incentive for Clifford to say or do anything that might puncture the hype, lest it impair his personal investments. For example, do you suppose that the ‘AI Opportunities Action Plan’ that he wrote for Labour in January 2025 included the information that AI GPs get 70 per cent of their diagnoses wrong? Of course not.

Nor is what’s good for AI investors like Clifford and ‘frontier labs’, as OpenAI and Anthropic pretentiously call themselves, necessarily good for the economy as a whole. Both AI giants have attracted criticism from other tech CEOs, including Palantir’s Alex Karp and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, for their unethical practices. Essentially, firms that use AI end up unwittingly providing the AI models with invaluable know-how, which is then sold on to all-comers, thereby destroying the firm. You don’t consume AI – AI consumes you.

On AI, the UK government has outsourced its expertise to Clifford. But his own lack of a technical hinterland has meant he has had to outsource this expertise to others. And this is where his most lasting influence will be felt.

Take the obsessive speculation about outlandish, existential risks posed by some future AI. Britain’s most distinguished tech investor, Hermann Hauser, has questioned why UK AI policy seems so focussed on this, while other nations have been far less interested. This is because, with Clifford’s help, associates of the Effective Altruism (EA) cult – a radical utilitarian social movement described as ‘The Scientology of Silicon Valley’ by one former follower – have been elevated into important advisory roles. Of all their obsessions, the existential risk of a killer or rogue AI ranks highest.

Under Clifford, EAs captured the agenda of Rishi Sunak’s 2023 AI Summit, which in turn recommended the creation of a £100million department reporting to No10, dedicated to existential AI risk. This has entrenched itself as an island of Effective Altruists in Whitehall: the AI Security Institute (AISI). Unsurprisingly, this quango has gleefully participated in the recent ‘AI gone rogue’ scare stories.

The founder of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, Ciaran Martin, spoke for many frustrated security experts when he criticised AISI’s antics in The Economist recently. AI models were ‘not going rogue’, he explained, when they carried out cyberattacks. They were simply ‘doing what humans had told them to do’. The fiction of rogue AI has been a damaging distraction when, out in the real world, hostile hackers have been penetrating Britain’s critical infrastructure, such as power plants and water facilities, with ease.

It isn’t Clifford’s fault that he stumbled on an intellectual vacuum at the heart of British policymaking. Today’s political and adviser class is bereft of scientific and technical experience. Engineers are rarer than glaciers in Whitehall. Instead, capital is assumed to have the answers.

Matthew Clifford prospered because he promised something to ministers who find the reality of governing – of securing our borders and making dysfunctional institutions work properly – messy and difficult. When senior government figures can’t assess the fairytales for themselves, then the likes of Clifford will thrive.

They say you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. On current form, the Green Party of England and Wales seems intent on campaigning in Urdu and governing in Lahore.

What else could explain Green leader Zack Polanski’s decision to make a video in Pakistan’s official language? He’s barely been his party’s candidate for Holborn and St Pancras five minutes and already he’s decided to dust off Google Translate and take to social media.

Truly, Zack is a man of many talents. In his latest viral video, the all-singing, all-dancing, bap-boosting eco-bore makes his pitch to the voters of this Central London seat, left vacant by the resignation of Keir Starmer, in some very (and I’m no expert) ropey Urdu.

What’s he saying? I’ve no idea. But nor will almost all of his would-be constituents. The most commonly spoken ‘main languages’ – other than English – in hyper-diverse Camden are French, Bengali and Spanish. According to the council, ‘Other South Asian’ languages are the main language of 575 people in the entire borough. In other words, only a tiny handful of them would be incapable of understanding Zack if he had simply spoken in English.

The Greens have rightly been hauled over the coals for their willingness to campaign along sectarian lines, to ride Britain’s crisis of integration to inner-city electoral success. At the Gorton and Denton by-election, Hannah Spencer tried her hand at Urdu, too. Whole videos in Urdu were released painting Reform as ‘Islamophobes’ and Labour as in the pocket of India’s Narendra Modi.

It made for a dispiriting spectacle, all but making a virtue out of the fact that some of Spencer’s now constituents are so poorly integrated they can’t speak solid English, all while ruthlessly exploiting ethno-religious divides.

But at least that made a rank kind of sense. Gorton and Denton, unlike Holborn and St Pancras, has a sizeable Pakistani-origin population (both, incidentally, have significant numbers of Bangladeshis). It’s hard to work out whether Zack is merely ignorant of those he seeks to represent or trying to rage-bait us into talking about him.

Whatever the reasoning here, the Greens’ Urdu electioneering reminds us of the Balkanisation of British politics wrought by mass migration, multiculturalism and outdated, lax election rules that allow Commonwealth citizens to vote so long as they are legally resident in the UK. They needn’t be British citizens nor speak the language nor have been here for any particular length of time. And yet they have the same vote as anyone else.

This has only incentivised political parties to engage in pork-barrel identity politics whenever an election rolls around: campaigning in foreign languages, leaning into tribal grievances, and even – in some cases – exploiting ‘kinship’ networks to ‘harvest’ votes. What should be an exercise in universalism, in appealing to voters as voters, has been reduced to an ethnic headcount.

The Greens are just more shameless and online about it all. Where before Labour would push leaflets through letterboxes claiming the Conservatives don’t care about Kashmir, or Tory London mayoral hopefuls would fear-monger about Sadiq Khan betraying Sikhs, now Polanski et al are funnelling purposefully divisive content into the TikTok-Instagram-WhatsApp-group pipeline.

Like so much the Greens do, these Urdu election videos are as sinister as they are cringe. Beneath the ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ exterior lurks a grim new sectarianism.