23/10/2025
G U T H
N À
N D A O I N E
(Raise Your Voice)
What stinks the most about cancel culture is not the moral outrage or the online mob, but the reek of inherited wealth at the forefront. The loudest voices crying for accountability often come from those who’ve never had to be accountable for survival.
Their comfort cushions them from consequence. Academics, journalists, activists — many of them haven’t bothered to look at the root or fundamentals of the so-called “extremists” they condemn.
I say this not as an outsider, but as someone caught in the contradiction. I, too, am a benefactor of the same inherited wealth I now criticize. I live in a world that was never meant for me but somehow became mine. The same empty barrels always seem to have the “solution,” as if their degree or lineage grants them authority over social wounds they’ve never had to feel.
I struggle, of course, while being a benefactor. I love this life, but I am not from this life. I did not grow up in it. There’s always a small ache in moments of luxury — I awkwardly shuffle a little ordering Eggs Benny on organic sourdough when I’m with dad. (Far from hollandaise sauce you were reared as the mackerel dances in the oil on the pan!)
I grew up on a council estate, a child of Irish immigrants, a product of what social economists would call a “disproportionately disadvantaged background.” The language of policy has always tried to tidy up what poverty feels like.
When white, uneducated children from council estates express their defiance — their anger at being left behind, mocked, invisible — they’re labeled “far-right extremists.” The system that prides itself on fairness and meritocracy has no room for the inconvenient truth that despair and alienation doesn’t discriminate.
Meritocracy swiped the brainy kids from the estates and created the middle class. Promising a ‘better life’ Leaving working class areas exposed and without leadership.
To create a new class where the lad from the estate doesn’t belong and struggles to pay for his big house, keep his wife and entitled kids happy and sadly will never be good enough for her father. Sadly - also- he doesn’t belong in the place he grew up either.
Those kids aren’t radical because they hate; they’re radical because no one has ever listened.
For people like me, the path to education was never a given. I didn’t go to university until I was forty. Not because I lacked ambition or intelligence, but because access was an illusion where I came from. There was no direction, no guidance, no one saying you could be more.
This much I know the student coming out with a 2:1 or 2:2. They are not from the privileged class. They paid for thier own education, worked a part time job while putting them self through university, juggled childcare, bills, forgoing holiday’s abroad, studied late into the night while folding laundry, making dinners
And making lunches for the next day. Repeat.
No bank of mum and dad to fall back on. - that was my story anyway. I limped and crawled over the finish line.
Despondency becomes a kind of inheritance too — despair passed down like debt, leading many of us into bad directions, bad company, bad decision making just so we can feel like we matter or we belong to somthing.
There was no access to cultural capital, no easy pathway to social mobility. The world of museums, literature, debate — it existed, but for the kids who grew up in the ‘nice’ postcodes
The meritocracy that raised me up now keeps others down. I’ve learned how to code-switch, how to soften my accent, how to perform and belong. I have sat at tables where the politics of inclusion are debated over craft coffee, yet the people being discussed could never afford the craft coffee or the bus fare to the discussion . The irony gnaws at me — I am both proof that the system “works” and evidence of how deeply it fails.
Cancel culture, meritocracy, inherited wealth — they’re all part of the same theater. The actors change, but the script remains. Some of us get to narrate our trauma into TED Talks; others get their pain translated into police reports. I don’t want to cancel anyone, nor do I want to excuse harm. I just want us to look honestly and reflect at where we come from — and who gets to speak fo us?
Who is our voice?
Catherine Connelly doesn’t just speak our language. She speaks the language.
Connolly for President
