ABSTRACT
We began our study by noting clear signs of a developing consensus among social scientists about the changing basis and forms of distributional conflict in the United Kingdom during the past decade of economic recession. It is commonly argued nowadays that decisive shifts in the structuring of social inequalities have generated original forms of sectionalism to replace the longstanding solidarities associated with social class. Accompanying shifts in values and life-styles allegedly have encouraged individualism and privatism. Both processes are said to be discernable in a decline of class-based politics in Britain since 1979. Class analysis, according to its many critics, will therefore prove to be increasingly bankrupt in the explanation of social inequalities and schisms.
