Lucy Mangan and the working class

Guess which newspaper talked about the British working class in these terms today:

Half turned up late or not at all ... Those that did eventually arrive were a woeful sight.

You looked in vain for a glimmer of shame or embarrassment in any of them, but came up emptyhanded.

The infuriating dozen, stunned by the prospect of physical labour, resentful of any advice, childish.

The Daily Telegraph perhaps?

No.

The Daily Mail then?

No.

It was Lucy Mangan in the Guardian.

I did not see the programme she was reviewing, and I suspect I might have agreed with her views if I had.

But it is a fact that she would not have described the British working class in these terms if she had been comparing it with the middle class.

But the Guardian has a hierarchy of desert every bit as much as the Daily Mail does. And in it the working class comes firmly below immigrants.