Britain’s furious social churn

An account of becoming middle class is too pious but worth arguing with, says David Goodhart

by David Goodhart / May 19, 2016 / Leave a comment

Published in June 2016 issue of Prospect Magazine

Many jobs such as cleaning and retail are now regarded as being “for failures or foreigners” ©Photofusion/Rex/Shutterstock

A few months ago, the comedian David Baddiel gave a newspaper interview in which he described himself as lower middle class. As he went to the north London private school Haberdashers’ Aske’s (albeit on a scholarship) and Cambridge University, I thought that was stretching a point and tweeted something about it.

He was unhappy about being accused of inverted snobbery and I got a clobbering from his many fans on Twitter. But I thought his self-description said something interesting about the increasing fluidity and subjectivity of social class.

Lynsey Hanley tussles with the idea that her individual advance is a betrayal of her class ©Photographed by David Yeo./www.davidyeo.co.uk

Lynsey Hanley might also be described as lower middle class. Her father had a white-collar job and her family owned their own home. They had expectations of upward mobility for their precocious only child. The fact that she chooses to describe herself as re…

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Comments

Andrew A.
June 4, 2016 at 09:38
What's the evidence for this statement?: "Moreover the famous “relative deprivation” thesis—the idea that people compare their incomes and status only with those one or two rungs up or down the ladder from them—has also had its day thanks to the transparency of the media society, and the idea that every schoolchild can be whatever he or she wants to be." There's plenty of evidence that schoolchildren vary enormously in their ambitions. What Goodhart is thinking about isn't essentially different from the "media society" of the 1950s, when people went in their millions to watch film stars, but didn't go home anxiously comparing their own material status with Rita Hayworth's. Nor do they today when many pay lots of money to go to a Rolling Stones concert. The problem is that the "media society" is far from transparent, operating instead through distorting filters and on the other side of barred access. That some people are under the illusion that they have a personal relationship with billionaires they've never met is no aid to social mobility, and, so far from undermining the class system, reinforces it.
huge working class
June 6, 2016 at 13:21
Precisely the working class is now larger tan ever, since it has absorbed all those falling off the squeezed middle class because of the relentlessness of voracious capitalism, which sends all the money, power and influence flowing upwards.

David Goodhart is Director of the Integration Hub at the Policy Exchange think tank and editor at large, Prospect Magazine