I was about to be sprung from my class status. My father worked in a factory, my parents owned a tiny house and a secondhand car, they were socially awkward and didn’t speak very good English; I didn’t really know what a rise in status would entail. I had no desire to work in finance or to join any clubs. All I knew was that I would be avoiding the sort of life to which my parents had been sentenced. Nevertheless, I referred to myself as working class, and was even more insistent about it in college, when I met kids from fancy backgrounds. This was partly in emulation of my proudly Socialist father, partly because I was an outsider in so many ways that I had no choice but to be defiant about it, and partly because it was 1972. Revolution, the great panacea of a few years earlier, had definitively been scratched, but hopes had not yet crumbled.

Neither had a certain romantic notion of the working class. The United States was famously supposed to be classless, of course, but then almost everybody knew better. In 1972 the working class (along with a few other more or less murky categories, such as ‘street people’ and ‘our brothers and sisters in prison’) was still being floated among middle-class would-be revolutionaries as an edifying model for imitation and as a permanent source of guilt. It was a bit complicated, because ‘hard-hats’, unassailably working class, had beaten up antiwar protesters on the streets of New York City and been hailed as pillars of the Silent Majority by Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. But there remained the lingering aura of the Wobblies, of the miners’ strikes and auto-workers’ strikes of the 1930s, as well as a cascade of images from the Paris Commune and the October Revolution and the Long March. We imagined basking in the radiance of that aura when we wore our blue chambray shirts and listened to the MC5, not suspecting that within a decade or two so much of American industry would be exported or terminated. Then the remnants of the working class would either be handed neckties and told they were middle class, or forced into fast-food uniforms and told they didn’t exist.

And yet someone had to make toy sand-shovels for the world. What, in a just society, could ever induce someone to do that sort of work? Should all youths be conscripted to work in factories for a year? Should plastics-factory labour be reserved for the punishment of white-collar criminals? Finally I decided that salaries should be determined by a factor that averaged the arduousness, tediousness, futility and imbecility of a job. The richest people in the world then would be coal miners. Injection-moulding machine operators or tenders would fly to work in their own planes, and competition for such work would be stiff. Having had the experience, I would be quite content to be poor.

[...] In 1890, after new tariffs were introduced by the United States, the velvet workers at Lister’s were told to expect a cut in their wages of up to twenty-five per cent. The velvet workers did not have a trade union. They called for support from the Weavers Association, but Lister and his directors refused to budge and on December 17 a strike began at Manningham which lasted for nineteen weeks. At first only the velvet workers came out, but by March the dyers and spinners had joined them and almost 5,000 workers were on strike. There were violent confrontations between strikers and the police, but the strike was defeated and the production of velvet resumed. This had a large, lasting and unexpected consequence, because, by drawing attention to the lack of union organization inside the Yorkshire textile industry, it helped cause the formation of a political party to represent the interests of the working classes. The Independent Labour Party, later the Labour Party, was founded in 1893 and one of its first branches was in Bradford.

This brings us back to Mario Buitrago, who slept outside Lister’s on that very cold night. The day before the opening, the staff of Urban Splash found him freezing on their doorstep when they arrived for work at seven in the morning. They invited him in and gave him a cup of tea. It made a wonderful story for the local papers. He spoke little English but was ‘all smiles and handshakes’, according to the Yorkshire Post reporter who interviewed him. He explained that he wasn’t waiting to buy a flat for himself. He had been paid to queue on behalf of an anonymous client, thought to be a private investor from London and staying in a Bradford hotel, who was keen to secure a particular flat and willing to pay somebody else to sit out in the cold to do it.

[...] Hilary couldn’t believe that they sounded just like girls at school, scurrying in the rat-run of learning and testing, trying to outdo one another in protestations of how little work they’d done. Not once did any of them actually speak seriously about their subjects. Hilary now felt so deeply disappointed in university life that on the spot she made up her mind to dedicate herself to something different and nobler, although she wasn’t clear what. Neil and Julian were concentrating upon sticking a brown lump of something on a pin and roasting it with a match. From her indifferent distance she supposed this must be drugs, but she wasn’t frightened of that now.