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They’ve done another one of those surveys about class. And they’ve followed the rule of these surveys, that each one has to be more stupid than the last. The results have been on every news channel and in every newspaper, that there are seven classes now apparently.
And one of the ways they worked out
which one people might be in, is to ask whether or not they listen to jazz,
which makes you “established middle class”. This makes sense, as the first
prominent jazz musician was Louis Armstrong, grandson of slaves and son of a
New Orleans prostitute, the la-di-da established middle-class trumpeting ponce.
Listening to classical music also makes you
established middle class. So if you hear the postman humming a bit of Mozart
off a car advert, it’s probably Stephen Fry roughing it for the morning. And if
Jane Austen were to write a novel now about someone trying to climb the social
ladder, instead of all that mucking about with gowns and fans, they’d just have
to turn on Classic FM for 10 minutes a day and half the village would be
desperate to marry them.
The survey might show that Roman Abramovich, on the other hand, would come out as traditional working class as he likes football, sitting on his £500m yacht muttering to Frank Lampard: “The thing is, Frank, with my background I never stood a chance.”
One question the survey didn’t seem to
bother asking was what job you did, although it does ask for the jobs of your
friends. So if you’re a cleaner who knows some teachers, that makes you middle
class for having teacher friends, but those teachers will be working class for
having a friend who’s a cleaner. If you’re the Queen’s cleaner, she’s likely to
say, “It’s all right for you, with your upper-class lifestyle knowing the
Queen. I’ve had to put down that I know a cleaner. And the way things are
going, that won’t even entitle me to housing benefit.”
Going to museums is middle class, using
Facebook makes you an emergent service worker, and so on. So the survey doesn’t
so much measure class, as measure things people like doing.
The survey would be more useful if it had
concluded that the 19 per cent who go to museums are in the category of people
who go to museums. Otherwise they might as well have written: “There are now
four social classes in place of the traditional three. People who like being on
top during sex are a ‘Professional and Appreciative of Altitude’ class. People
who prefer being underneath are ‘Manually Horizontal’. Those who favour being
behind are ‘Intermediate’, and there is also an ‘Experimental and
Contortionist’ class, which consists mostly of younger and more agile members
of the community.”
Some people have dismissed this survey on
the grounds that it proves class no longer exists at all. Jill Kirby, a
Conservative adviser from the Centre For Policy Studies, says that “class has
eroded almost completely”. That’s why it’s just coincidence that the Prime
Minister, Chancellor and Mayor of London are sons of millionaires who went to
public schools, two of them to the same one, and it’s just as likely that soon
half the Cabinet will all have gone to the same comprehensive in Ipswich.
But for class to have any meaning, it must
represent more than which music you listen to, or even whether you went to
Eton. It only makes sense if it refers to your relationship with the way
society is owned and controlled, and have a common interest.
For example, in the 18th century, the
aristocracy of Europe was a class of people which owned and controlled the
land, and which had a common interest in preserving rules such as hunting
wherever they liked, and only being allowed a senior position in the army if
you were born into a noble family. For those privileges, this class was
prepared to engulf Europe in a war, whereas it’s unlikely there will ever be a
war waged by people who enjoy going to a museum as part of their weekend break.
Similarly now, if you’re on the board of a
bank, your relationship to society is different to the person who works in a
call centre for the bank, or cleans the bank, or dreads getting letters from
the bank. For most people, that dividing line, as to whether you have any real
control over society is still clear.
A different
survey, which came out two months ago, revealed that more people now define themselves as working
class than at any point for 30 years. That may be because even in
professions such as lecturing, sales or trades that once seemed middle class,
there’s now insecurity, and fears over pensions, and over tuition fees for the
kids that make them feel more working class. Or it could be that they’ve made a
cultural choice, and said: “Away with such frippery as John Coltrane. From now
on, I’m going to whistle, and eat tinned carrots and shout, ‘Wahooor, I
wouldn’t go in there for a while’ whenever I come out of the toilet.”
Or maybe that’s wrong, and some of the
staff who’ve just been made redundant from HMV are still established middle
class, even though they’re now unemployed, because they worked in the jazz or
classical sections, and can still remember some of the tunes.
The Independent Saturday 06 April 2013
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