With the death of Pope Francis, the world loses not only a church leader but also a moral compass

AN insidious aspect of neoliberalism’s ideological blitz has been to convince certain parts of society that working-class people being unable to “get on” is an individual, moral flaw — some sort of gene-deep character deficiency.
Aside from being — at best — a glib display of ignorance, it also neatly sidesteps any structural analysis of class, what functions people perform in the economy and how this reproduces class privilege.
What our backgrounds are — where we come from, our access to certain social networks, what kinds of support we can access (in short, the kinds of economic, social and cultural capital we can harness) — and how these affect our trajectories, cast very long shadows.
LUKE FLETCHER pours scorn on Labour’s betrayal of the Welsh steel industry, where the option of nationalisation was sneered at and dismissed – unlike at Scunthorpe where the government stepped in


