A 72-year-old woman sends a message to Jeff Bezos. Her name is Mary Hill. A 72-year-old woman shouldn’t have to say this—but here we are. When people who’ve lived through decades of struggle are still calling out the same kind of greed and imbalance, maybe it’s time to listen.

summary: Benedict Bridgerton longs for more than society’s expectations, drawn instead to art and freedom. Y/N, a fiercely talented but struggling artist, fights for recognition in a world that dismisses women of her class. When their paths cross, fascination sparks—a shared passion for art bridging the divide between privilege and survival. But their growing connection threatens them both in a world where reputation is everything. As scandal looms and duty calls, they must choose: conform to society’s rules or risk everything for love, ambition, and the art that brought them together.

total word count: 68.2k

Red = Smut

The left feels so grossly disconnected from the working class at this point, I genuinely believe that the reason the working class rejects the left isn’t because they don’t agree. It’s because they don’t trust them.

I’m working-class, I grew up in poverty, and I’ve been reminded at multiple intervals that I’m a piece of shit for my background. Still now, I'm not getting through the month with any money left. So why is it that, even when I agree with the sentiment, leftist activist spaces feel like people like me don’t belong in them?

I live in a working-class army town that, for the first time ever, voted in a Labour MP. The general feeling is that everyone regrets it. Our MP would struggle to inspire a fart out of a constipated person, frankly. And our town is a mess. The high street is dead. Homelessness is through the roof. We have people protesting asylum seekers being housed in local flats. Violence among young men is rising. If you take a stroll through town, you’re likely to be harassed by a vape-smoking teenager on an e-scooter.

The language of politicians and activist spaces is something my brain has decoded through a natural obsession with justice. I was reading On Liberty at 13, giddy at the prospect of moral frameworks that made sense of a world I couldn’t cope with. So, unlike some, I didn’t go to university and then start coming home and ruining tea for everyone. I was already ruining tea thanks to a potent mix of autism and being insufferable.

I was always frustrated by my working-class family saying things like, “At least Thatcher stuck by her word.” and calling Churchill a “strong leader”—because I fucking used Google. I knew about the Bengal famine. The 1911 transport strikes. Conservative MPs putting northern towns into active decline. And I couldn’t reason with their ignorance, so I spent most of my childhood screaming into pillows.

Then I went to university. And suddenly, I got it.

The eye rolls I used to witness from my family, I was now doing myself, sitting in rooms full of predominantly white, middle-class academics. The language they spoke felt like an exercise in self-identity rather than a tool for action. It felt stagnant, self-postulating, and frankly, fucking infuriating.

I sat in lecture halls full of blatantly privileged people—not that they’d admit it. They’d seek out people like me for ‘validation’ of their relative deprivation, then argue amongst themselves about who had it worse in their leafy Surrey suburbs. Meanwhile, the men with a ‘nice guy’ complex were still pulling out chairs like 20th-century gentlemen—before you found out half of them had SA’d multiple women.

I went from being excited to be around like-minded, politically engaged people to feeling more isolated than I ever had in my life.

Because it wasn’t about fixing anything. It was about proving how right you were. The truly talented people in the room kept quiet unless it counted towards their grade. The rest just shouted over each other.

I watched one girl throw a pencil case at someone over an ontological debate.

To be fair, that was pretty funny.

But here’s my biggest issue with middle-class activists: they don’t understand the difference between academic rigour and lived experience.

In the same way that reading about WWII doesn’t give you the lived experience of a soldier, reading about the working-class experience doesn’t give you the right to speak over us and pretend you know what it’s like.

And working-class people can sniff that out a mile off. It feels disingenuous. You can empathise, you can imagine, and maybe you experience prejudice in other ways, but that’s not the same as living under centuries of classist policy designed to keep us at the bottom.

And this is exactly why the right is growing across Europe.

Because the left refuses to have hard conversations. Instead of engaging with working-class people who are becoming increasingly disenfranchised, they dismiss them as bigots, fools, or victims of misinformation.

What could possibly go wrong?

Working-class people aren’t stupid. They know their towns are changing. They see the high street is dead. They see more people out of work. They know a yearly holiday is a pipe dream. And yet, the only people speaking directly to them are racist, posh twats who have convinced them they have their best interests at heart.

The left could fill that gap.

But it won’t.

Because it’s more obsessed with policing language than winning arguments.

Every time there’s a glimmer of hope about a Labour government, someone on the left immediately tries to put it out because it’s not Corbyn swinging a block of tofu around his head.

There’s a denial of reality in activist spaces. A refusal to accept that socialist policies can’t be implemented without actually involving the working class in the conversation. But instead of creating a space where difficult conversations can happen, middle-class leftists have made activism a gated community where people are exiled for using the wrong terminology.

They care more about catching someone out on Twitter than asking why working-class people don’t respond to them.

I don’t have a resolution.

Consider me the perfect Philosophy student.

But I wish that, instead of constantly holding up mirrors to others, the left would hold one up to itself.

They would have also bonded over their mutual hatred for being looked down upon and experimented on by humanoid aristocrats.