Middle-Class Parasites
- Ray Hargens Hire
- Aug 16
- 5 min read
How They Stole the Arts and Shut Out the Working Class
AUG 17, 2025
Remember when art meant something? When music came out the mouths of lads with dirty fingernails, guitars bought at pawn shops, and a chip on their shoulder? When comedy wasn’t a panel show or podcast echo chamber but a welder from the Clyde sticking two fingers up to polite society? Those moments weren’t accidents. They were eruptions of working‑class life into a world never meant for it. And every time, like clockwork, the middle class swept in with soft hands and sharp tongues, diluted the rage, and repackaged it for dinner party chatter.
Here’s the truth: the arts in Britain are not for us. They never were. And the numbers back it up. In 2024, fewer than one in ten arts workers in the UK came from working‑class backgrounds. That’s not a glitch. That’s design. Nearly 60% of the cultural sector is staffed by the middle class. Actors, writers, musicians—half the ones who came from our side of the tracks in 1981 were gone by 2011. A halving of working‑class representation in a generation. They call it progress. I call it theft. And the theft isn’t just in jobs or platforms. It’s in our stories, our dialects, our very ways of seeing the world, stolen and re‑phrased for palates that find authenticity uncomfortable unless it’s been sterilised.
When one of ours breaks through—an Oasis, a Billy Connolly—they’re immediately neutered, rebranded for polite consumption. Connolly started out as a welder with jokes, stories sung in a tongue people pretended not to understand, and he broke the world open. Oasis were two lads from Burnage, scrapping, snarling, turning their estate into a universe. But within a decade both were being paraded at middle‑class dinner parties as “icons.” The working‑class hero becomes a character, a novelty, a bit of grit in the oyster that makes middle‑class pearls shine brighter. We’re allowed in only as tropes: the cheeky lad, the tragic drunk, the salt‑of‑the‑earth straight man to their clever irony. The authentic voice of the streets is translated, captioned, polished until it can be dissected in Guardian think‑pieces, consumed by middle‑class voyeurs who treat our lives like edgy exhibits rather than lived realities.
This is why we don’t step forward. Why we don’t submit our manuscripts or scripts. Because standing at the gates are the cultural custodians: well‑spoken, well‑heeled, Oxbridge‑seasoned. And this doesn’t just live in the arts. It’s the same pattern in every field where working‑class folk attempt to ascend. The further you climb, the more the gatekeepers demand you change. In the NHS I saw it first hand. Nurses and healthcare assistants—my people—made me feel at home. They swore, they laughed, they cared with rough hands and warm hearts. But in the corridors of Neuroscience, among Clinical Psychologists and Neurologists, I was an imposter. Mock interviews told me to sharpen my tongue, ditch the common words. A friend from Lanarkshire was told to drop her farmer’s accent if she wanted to be a Clinical Psychologist. You can play the game, but you’ll never own the board. At best, you’re a guest tolerated as long as you keep your head down.
Imposter syndrome, then, isn’t just doubt. It’s class manifest. It’s the weight of knowing you don’t belong because the space was never built for you. You belong where you came from, and every step into their marble halls is another reminder of how unwelcome you are. It’s not a flaw in you—it’s a feature of the system. And the worst trick they play is convincing you that your discomfort is your own failing, rather than their fortress doing what it was designed to do: keep you out.
That’s why, as a writer and musician, I refuse to bow to their arty farty‑tribes. I don’t want to be part of their literary salons or their clinking‑glass cliques. My words, my stories, my riffs—they’re for the lads who keep the country running. For the folk too busy driving lorries, wiring houses, pouring pints, or working rigs to read The Guradian or Telegraph. They deserve novels, music, and art that recognises their struggle, their humour, their swagger—not middle‑class approximations of it. I don’t want my work reduced to an anecdote at a book festival wine reception. I want it to live in council flats, on offshore platforms, in the pubs after shifts when the jukebox is loud and the chat is louder.
Scotland is riddled with the worst kind of arts class: the nauseating middle‑class types who speak in whisps and flourishes, who can quote MacDiarmid while sneering at you for liking football. They attend the festivals, swap bursaries, write reviews for each other. They don’t speak to or for the working class. They speak over us, about us, around us. And then they get Arts Council funding to do it again. It’s an ecosystem built on exclusion, disguised as opportunity. The result? The same voices echoing in the same chambers, while the real stories—the ones you hear in chip shops, building sites, and housing schemes—never get past the front door.
I’m not saying don’t better yourself. But this fantasy that class is a ladder you must climb? Dead. The truth is simpler and harder: we are who we are. We must remember where we came from. And we must know this: we are just as capable—more capable, I’d argue—of making cool shit. The only difference is time. We don’t have it, because we’re busy keeping the lights on, the hospitals open, the streets moving. But we can make the time. We must. The middle class have leisure and legacy; we have urgency and reality. And reality, when harnessed, is art in its rawest and most unfiltered form.
Look at Connolly, welding by day, comedy by night, turning Glasgow’s shipyards into global punchlines. Look at Oasis, swaggering out of Burnage, guitars like weapons, songs like scripture. They were on the brew, not a pot to piss in, but carrying a belief that they were fucking awesome—and that was enough. They weren’t exceptions because they lacked talent. They were exceptions because they bulldozed through gates locked against them. Imagine how many Connollys, how many Gallaghers, got turned away and silenced before the first gig. Imagine how many painters, filmmakers, poets have stayed invisible because they couldn’t afford London rent or unpaid internships. Their voices didn’t vanish—they were smothered before they could shout.
So yes—the arts are rigged. They are owned and operated by the middle and upper classes. But the answer isn’t to beg entry. It’s to create outside of it. To build our own presses, our own labels, our own stages. To build book clubs in pubs, gigs in warehouses, film nights in community halls. To write for our people, not for approval. Because art isn’t theirs to keep. It’s ours to take back. And when it’s reclaimed, it will be dirtier, louder, funnier, angrier—and far more real—than anything they could ever imagine. No longer a spectacle for middle-class voyeurs to point at from behind glass, but a living, breathing roar they cannot contain or control.
-Ray x
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