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.