Polly Tonybee (2023) An Uneasy Inheritance. My Family and Other Radicals.

Polly Tonybee is an author who writes regularly for The Guardian and Observer. You’ve probably guessed by that she’s left-leaning and middle class. An Uneasy Inheritance shows that doing good is not the same as being good. Her family includes the leading intellectuals of their day, including Arnold Tonybee, the economic historian and social reformer who charted the miserable conditions of how the working class lived in the late nineteen century. Her father, Philip Tonybee, also a writer, journalist and critic, was a Communist and friends with Kim Philby, who defected to Russia in 1963. Her family were radicals and like her working to change the system of privilege that touches on every area of life. Then and now.

But here’s the rub. They could always go back to their wealth. Even when they were relatively poor, they had privilege. It’s in their accent. Their Oxbridge education. Their list of contacts. Doors that open that remain shut for most others including me, especially me.

She acknowledges this and did that thing middle-class people do and take up working class jobs such as working in a factory or other menial job to prove what?

Life is shite for the working class, and it’s not getting better with our children shrinking and people dying younger than their middle-and-upper-class cohort. It’s getting worse. By any and every measure, working class life has suffered since Thatcher took power in 1979, selling the placebo effect of Monetarism. Reaganomics, as it was called the other side of the Atlantic, was a reboot of old conservatism blended with jingoistic nationalism. The state should step aside and sell its assets. Give money to the rich folk and they’ll sort it. The moron’s moron Trump is the latest and perhaps most toxic proponent of this ideology that goes back to her ancestor’s fight with conservatism and protecting inherited wealth, which leads to fascism but perhaps not in a straight line.

She’s taking sides and she’s with us—but also with them.

Her father moved from atheism to agnosticism in his later years. He had problems with drink as did her stepmother. He tried to reconcile his belief in sharing what he had by creating a commune. The Marxist belief all contributed, and all labour had social value created not utopia, but a dystopia full of communards mediating rather than weeding and digging in the few acres they owned fell flat. Self-awareness does not pay the bills. Not unless you write a book about it.

There are limits to liberalism, but some eugenic and nationalist assumptions are just not acceptable in polite society. The poorest pay most for Trump, and his running dogs, in which radical right-wing ideas clash with reality and working-class life mirrors that of the 1930s but without the testing ground of the Spanish Civil War, or World War, but that remains to be seen. Toynbee, like her ancestors before her, brings a rigour and intellectual heft to arguments on the left. Read on.  

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