AS Trump and Musk unleash a new kind of barbarism and open class war on US workers based around the cuts to domestic spending and the renewal of the tax giveaway to the billionaires, it is especially worthwhile to revisit and acknowledge the work of Stephen Knight who through a series of series has charted the brutality of the British ruling class in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

Knight’s most famous, though not necessarily his most trenchant, series is Peaky Blinders.

The Peakys are a family gang in Birmingham in the 1920s whose mixed heritage of outsiders — Irish and Roma — forced them to claw their way up the ladder to a final hard-won respectability. The two brothers, the lead characters, were both damaged in the World War I trenches and the series was the first to deal specifically not only with the effects on the home front of that war, but also to locate those effects as necessary results of the barbarity of that war, where the European ruling classes ordered their workers to the trenches to kill each other and a whole generation of poets and artists on both sides were either murdered or mentally destroyed in that onslaught.