British people are not good at talking about class. (Something we attempted to remedy in our Class Ceiling series back in 2023.) Bestselling musician Sam Fender noted this collective foible in a recent interview with the Sunday Times: “We are very good at talking about privileges — white, male or straight privilege. We rarely talk about class, though,” he said.

It’s unsurprising that class is “rarely” spoken about these days: in recent years Britain has become more and more stratified and today it’s no longer possible to neatly delineate society into three simple segments of ‘working’, ‘middle’, and ‘upper’ class. Can anyone confidently define what exactly it means to be ‘working-class’ in 2025? If you have to work for a living, for example, does that make you working-class? (Marx would have said so.) Or is being working-class now less to do with your job and more to do with where you live, how you speak, how you spend your free time? Whether or not you own property? There aren’t straightforward answers to these questions, which is arguably why conversations about class often lead to confusion, disagreement and frustration.

Fender, a 30-year-old artist who hails from North Shields, went on to say that the lack of consideration given to class (and, by extension, the overemphasis on ‘white privilege’) is fuelling the rise of misogyny among the white working class. “And that’s a lot of the reason that all the young lads are seduced by demagogues and psychos like Andrew Tate,” he said. “They’re being shamed all the time and made to feel like they’re a problem. It’s this narrative being told to white boys from nowhere towns. People preach to some kid in a pit town in Durham who’s got fuck all and tell him he’s privileged? Then Tate tells him he’s worth something? It’s seductive.”

Predictably, Fender’s comments have sparked conversation – confused conversation almost entirely devoid of nuance – about the reasons why so many young men are, as he puts it, “seduced by demagogues and psychos like Andrew Tate”. Writing in the Spectator, for instance, Patrick West argues that Fender is entirely correct to blame the “doctrine of ‘white privilege’”, claiming that the “constant disparagement” faced by working-class boys “is leading many to seek consolation in misogynist online narratives”.

This, of course, is ridiculous. I’m not sure I agree with Fender’s (and West’s) view that young men in “pit towns” are being “shamed all the time” and told they’re “privileged”. Is anyone really beating white working-class men over the head with the message that they sit at the apex of society simply because they’re white? People might have a ‘feeling’ this is happening, but where’s the proof?

Conversely, there is evidence everywhere that social media – where young people now do the majority of their ‘socialising’ – amplifies misogynistic, right-wing content (and not videos about ‘white privilege’). Young men don’t need to “seek” out this sort of online content either because, as an ever-growing pile of investigations suggests, it gets shunted onto their FYPs whether they like it or not.

Elsewhere, writer Rebecca Reid noted that privately educated boys are just as capable of being misogynistic as working-class boys. It’s hard to disagree with this: in 2021, after swathes of young women and girls anonymously shared a litany of harrowing stories about sexual harassment and rape culture at school via the Everyone’s Invited website, it was noted that eight times more private schools were named on the site than state schools. Misogyny, as Reid writes, “is not the preserve of working-class boys”.

But at the same time, I think it’s fair to say that if you’re feeling alienated, you’re more susceptible to falling down rabbit holes. This is by no means something that’s unique to the working class, but if we consider the challenges facing them in particular, it’s pretty clear that there’s a connection between their material circumstances and mounting political discontent.

“You only have to go to coastal towns and deindustrialised communities to see there’s very little there, they’ve been left to rot. [These places] are just ripe for this anti-politics discourse to cut through,” sociologist Dan Evans told Novara before the UK election last year. He was speaking specifically about why many white working-class men are drawn to Nigel Farage, but the idea of alienation begetting radicalisation remains relevant with regard to the rise of figures like Andrew Tate (plus it’s fair to say there’s a lot of overlap between supporters of Tate and supporters of Farage).

Underpinning all this, of course, is the ugly spectre of misogyny. Some have pointed out that the female equivalents of these young men growing up in poor towns have not become radicalised in the same way despite facing similar economic and social challenges. It’s obvious, but bears reiterating, that clearly being working class does not mean you’re destined to become an extremist driven by hate. Being born a man still seems to be a greater risk factor.

Nonetheless, it’s worth listening to Fender’s point about how “white boys from nowhere towns”, ignored by politicians for years, are particularly vulnerable to being seduced by the right and the likes of Andrew Tate. But we can’t pin all the blame for the radicalisation of this demographic on their class identity or on the plague of misogyny. If we’re serious about tackling this problem at its roots, we should acknowledge that we’re dealing with these factors intersecting in a terrible, toxic way.