A search of Hansard, the parliamentary bible reveals that the two words ‘working class’ were mentioned just 38 times last year, approximately three times a month. Despite this conspiracy of silence, according to a weekend Guardian/ICM poll, Britain remains a nation dominated by class division, with a huge majority, a staggering 89 per cent certain that their social standing determines the way they are judged.
Tellingly the people on society’s lowest incomes are most aware of its impact, with 55% of them saying class, not ability, greatly affects the way they are seen. Overall only 8% of those surveyed think that class does not matter at all in shaping the way people are seen.
Class in other words explains an enormous lot about contemporary Britain: Who it is run for, and who it is run by. The poll also shows that after 10 years of Labour government, social change in Britain is almost static. Despite the collapse of industrial employment, the working class is an unchanging majority. In 1998, when ICM last asked, 55% of people considered themselves working class. Now the figure stands at 53%.
Of people born to working class parents, 77% say they are working class too. Only one fifth say they have become middle class. But even this figure is subject to caution. The marketing industry’s system of socio-economic classification assigns categories according to profession.
Devised by the National Readership Survey, it assigns doctors, barristers and company directors to category A, representing the upper middle class, while B represents middle-class professionals such as teachers or police officers, and C1 the lower middle class – clerical staff, clerks and so on. The skilled working class – Thatcher’s famous C2s – are typically tradesmen, while D stands for working-class manual labourers, and E represents casual labourers, state pensioners and the underclass.
Whatever the merits of the gradations, (the erroneous notion for instance that practically all non-manual employment is middle class) according to the ICM poll almost a quarter of C2’s, brickies and so on, thought themselves middleclass, while nearly a third of D/Es, classified as unskilled labourers, had for some reason come to believe that they were middle class as well.
What cannot be disputed is that despite huge economic change and the government’s efforts to build what it calls an opportunity society, people who think of themselves as middle class are still in a minority. In 1998, 41% of people thought of themselves as middle class, exactly the same proportion as today.
This is clearly a problem for Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead, who while admitting on Saturday that; “when Tony Blair claimed in 1999 that we were “all middle class now” he might have been articulating his ambition more than our reality. Yet as the English gather in their gastropubs later today to drink imported lager and watch the rugby, the country can never have looked less working class.” (Well it probably depends on where you drink, Decca)
It is an undeniable fact of life that all three main political parties now focus their energy and rhetoric primarily on the interests of the middle class, but despite this lavish attention, it remains a statistical minority. Nonetheless the sense of entitlement this fawning has engendered has inevitably leaked into cultural life as well.
Again Decca notes approvingly: “Hit shows in the 70s and 80s used to ridicule middle-class pretensions – not just in ‘Keeping Up Appearances’ or ‘The Good Life’, but in most factual television too. Paul Watson’s famous documentary, ‘The Dinner Party’, was a pitiless exposé of privileged arrogance.
But TV’s victims today tend more often to be the poor and disadvantaged, shamed on ‘You Are What You Eat’ for being fat, taunted as social inadequates by Jeremy Kyle, or cast – like ‘Wife Swap’s’ feckless Lizzie Barnsley – as a public moral disgrace.”
Back in 1937, George Orwell predicted that the middle class was doomed to “sink without further struggles into the working class”. Thirty years later, from the other end of the political spectrum, the Sunday Telegraph City editor Patrick Hutber published ‘The Decline and Fall of The Middle Class’, in which he warned: “It is a time of crisis for the middle classes, who are subjected to unprecedented pressures and unprecedented denigration.” In the 70s, as Lawrence James notes in ‘The Middle Class: A History’, more than three quarters of British people believed class conflict was inevitable, and half even thought it desirable.
And even if the death of the middle classes was greatly exaggerated at the time, an equally profound belief in the class’s infinite ascendancy may well have peaked. According to the survey the younger the respondent, the less likely they are to consider themselves middle class. Half of all 55- to 64-year-olds claim to be middle class, with just less than half – 48% – identifying as working class.
But with each drop in age, however, the middle class shrinks, while the working class steadily grows. When you get down to 25- to 34-year-olds only just over a third consider themselves middle class, compared with 56% claiming to be working class.
Meanwhile less than a quarter of over-65-year-olds said their parents had been middle class, compared with 73% who said they’d been working class. But as you work down through the age groups, the proportion again steadily shifts, and among 18- to 24-year-olds, half say their parents had been middle class, and only 40% working class. In other words, social mobility among young people today is not rising at all, but actually declining. This reversal of social mobility has been supported by a number of other studies.
There is a huge irony here. Ever since 1979 the primary purpose of government has seemingly been to keep ‘Middle England’ happy and inflate its numbers when ever possible, invariably at the direct expense of those just beneath them on the social ladder. Home ownership, selection in schools, the emphasis on ‘choice’ in health care are all important manifestations of this bias. (MRSA, a burgeoning underclass of nihilists, staggering rates of illiteracy, and bulging prisons are flip sides.)
But for the neo-liberal policy makers this investment in a policy of social bigotry, (laughingly presented as ‘a meritocracy’) and with it the entrenchment of privilege has just revealed a catastrophic down side. Even if through the management of politics, media and culture they manage to convince the vast majority that ‘the middle class dream’ is actually desirable, it can only ever be attainable for a minority; and a self-serving minority at that who are always quick to pull up the ladder behind them.
The upshot of a policy of ‘jobs for the boys and girls’ will sooner or later affect society in a variety of ways, as increasingly the dull-witted are over-promoted, while the naturally talented, denied the prospect of conventional advancement, seethe with resentment on the rungs below. Historically this resentment has always found a political outlet. In short, neo-liberalism is busy creating its own gravediggers.
A search of Hansard, the parliamentary bible reveals that the two words ‘working class’ were mentioned just 38 times last year, approximately three times a month. Despite this conspiracy of silence, according to a weekend Guardian/ICM poll, Britain remains a nation dominated by class division, with a huge majority, a staggering 89 per cent certain that their social standing determines the way they are judged.
Tellingly the people on society’s lowest incomes are most aware of its impact, with 55% of them saying class, not ability, greatly affects the way they are seen. Overall only 8% of those surveyed think that class does not matter at all in shaping the way people are seen.
Class in other words explains an enormous lot about contemporary Britain: Who it is run for, and who it is run by. The poll also shows that after 10 years of Labour government, social change in Britain is almost static. Despite the collapse of industrial employment, the working class is an unchanging majority. In 1998, when ICM last asked, 55% of people considered themselves working class. Now the figure stands at 53%.
Of people born to working class parents, 77% say they are working class too. Only one fifth say they have become middle class. But even this figure is subject to caution. The marketing industry’s system of socio-economic classification assigns categories according to profession.
Devised by the National Readership Survey, it assigns doctors, barristers and company directors to category A, representing the upper middle class, while B represents middle-class professionals such as teachers or police officers, and C1 the lower middle class – clerical staff, clerks and so on. The skilled working class – Thatcher’s famous C2s – are typically tradesmen, while D stands for working-class manual labourers, and E represents casual labourers, state pensioners and the underclass.
Whatever the merits of the gradations, (the erroneous notion for instance that practically all non-manual employment is middle class) according to the ICM poll almost a quarter of C2’s, brickies and so on, thought themselves middleclass, while nearly a third of D/Es, classified as unskilled labourers, had for some reason come to believe that they were middle class as well.
What cannot be disputed is that despite huge economic change and the government’s efforts to build what it calls an opportunity society, people who think of themselves as middle class are still in a minority. In 1998, 41% of people thought of themselves as middle class, exactly the same proportion as today.
This is clearly a problem for Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead, who while admitting on Saturday that; “when Tony Blair claimed in 1999 that we were “all middle class now” he might have been articulating his ambition more than our reality. Yet as the English gather in their gastropubs later today to drink imported lager and watch the rugby, the country can never have looked less working class.” (Well it probably depends on where you drink, Decca)
It is an undeniable fact of life that all three main political parties now focus their energy and rhetoric primarily on the interests of the middle class, but despite this lavish attention, it remains a statistical minority. Nonetheless the sense of entitlement this fawning has engendered has inevitably leaked into cultural life as well.
Again Decca notes approvingly: “Hit shows in the 70s and 80s used to ridicule middle-class pretensions – not just in ‘Keeping Up Appearances’ or ‘The Good Life’, but in most factual television too. Paul Watson’s famous documentary, ‘The Dinner Party’, was a pitiless exposé of privileged arrogance.
But TV’s victims today tend more often to be the poor and disadvantaged, shamed on ‘You Are What You Eat’ for being fat, taunted as social inadequates by Jeremy Kyle, or cast – like ‘Wife Swap’s’ feckless Lizzie Barnsley – as a public moral disgrace.”
Back in 1937, George Orwell predicted that the middle class was doomed to “sink without further struggles into the working class”. Thirty years later, from the other end of the political spectrum, the Sunday Telegraph City editor Patrick Hutber published ‘The Decline and Fall of The Middle Class’, in which he warned: “It is a time of crisis for the middle classes, who are subjected to unprecedented pressures and unprecedented denigration.” In the 70s, as Lawrence James notes in ‘The Middle Class: A History’, more than three quarters of British people believed class conflict was inevitable, and half even thought it desirable.
And even if the death of the middle classes was greatly exaggerated at the time, an equally profound belief in the class’s infinite ascendancy may well have peaked. According to the survey the younger the respondent, the less likely they are to consider themselves middle class. Half of all 55- to 64-year-olds claim to be middle class, with just less than half – 48% – identifying as working class.
But with each drop in age, however, the middle class shrinks, while the working class steadily grows. When you get down to 25- to 34-year-olds only just over a third consider themselves middle class, compared with 56% claiming to be working class.
Meanwhile less than a quarter of over-65-year-olds said their parents had been middle class, compared with 73% who said they’d been working class. But as you work down through the age groups, the proportion again steadily shifts, and among 18- to 24-year-olds, half say their parents had been middle class, and only 40% working class. In other words, social mobility among young people today is not rising at all, but actually declining. This reversal of social mobility has been supported by a number of other studies.
There is a huge irony here. Ever since 1979 the primary purpose of government has seemingly been to keep ‘Middle England’ happy and inflate its numbers when ever possible, invariably at the direct expense of those just beneath them on the social ladder. Home ownership, selection in schools, the emphasis on ‘choice’ in health care are all important manifestations of this bias. (MRSA, a burgeoning underclass of nihilists, staggering rates of illiteracy, and bulging prisons are flip sides.)
But for the neo-liberal policy makers this investment in a policy of social bigotry, (laughingly presented as ‘a meritocracy’) and with it the entrenchment of privilege has just revealed a catastrophic down side. Even if through the management of politics, media and culture they manage to convince the vast majority that ‘the middle class dream’ is actually desirable, it can only ever be attainable for a minority; and a self-serving minority at that who are always quick to pull up the ladder behind them.
The upshot of a policy of ‘jobs for the boys and girls’ will sooner or later affect society in a variety of ways, as increasingly the dull-witted are over-promoted, while the naturally talented, denied the prospect of conventional advancement, seethe with resentment on the rungs below. Historically this resentment has always found a political outlet. In short, neo-liberalism is busy creating its own gravediggers.