against the middle classes and are actively funnelling their wealth out of their reach. They have disguised their fears of the future from themselves with ever greater debts, and their education, cars and holidays – core features of a middle-class life – are more often now funded by increasingly big loans.
There is no doubt that the English middle classes have an extraordinary gift for absorbtion and reinvention. Over the centuries they have integrated Roman Catholics, Jews, Nonconformists and a whole range of other domestic and immigrant groups, and are still doing so today. On the other hand, if the middle classes were really dedicated primarily to thrift – an idea that seems to have been banished by the credit card – you might reasonably wonder whether they still exist at all. In my own generation, in a period of rising prices, those who have done better financially are those who borrowed the most. Whatever that amounts to, it isn’t thrift.
Which brings us to the other objection. Maybe there is no longer any such thing as ‘the middle classes’ anyway. Maybe they have long since been subsumed – along with the working classes – into a large lump of Middle England, with our two children each, our front gardens paved, our wii machines churning out the detritus from American and Japanese culture.
Struggling with this same question in 1949, Angus Maude and Roy Lewis suggested, tongues slightly in their cheeks, that the difference between the middle classes and the rest was that they used napkin rings – on the grounds that the working classes never used them and the upper classes used a clean napkin at every meal.41 It is one definition. I have to admit that, although there may be napkins somewhere in my own house, there is nothing remotely like a napkin ring (though my parents use them). But don’t let’s dismiss this too quickly. This is one of the respondents to a modern version of the wartime survey Mass Observation talking about class in 1990:
I was ill at ease … when invited to the home of a girlfriend who lived in a wealthy quarter of Wolverhampton. I was there for lunch, and while I was quietly confident my table manners would stand scrutiny, I was disconcerted to find a linen table napkin rolled in an ivory ring on my side plate. It was my first encounter with a napkin and while I knew it should be laid on the lap and not tucked into the shirt collar I could not think what to do with it when the meal was finished. It worried me greatly and finally I laid it nonchalantly on my plate in a crumpled heap …42
This was quoted in a study by one of the leading sociologists of class in the UK, Professor Mike Savage of York University, comparing how people talked about class then and in the 1940s, in the original Mass Observation surveys. His conclusion was that class is now not so much a designation as a starting point in a long story about your identity. You can try the experiment yourself. Ask someone what class they come from, preferably someone you know well to avoid a clash, and after some agonies – there is still a huge reluctance among the middle classes about declaring themselves as such – they will tell you the story of their life. Researching this book, I found that to be true over and over again.
Despite people’s reluctance to say they are middle-class, the Future Foundation’s Middle Britain report in 2006 found that 43 per cent identified themselves as middle-class. Another survey concluded that about a quarter of the population were middle-class but preferred not to say so. It is hard to find a lucid definition these days, certainly when we get beyond the napkins. You can’t do it in the way people used to.
White collar versus blue collar? Most of our traditional working-class jobs have long since been outsourced to China or India.
Salary versus wage packet? Who gets a wage packet these days?
Homeowner versus renter? Three-quarters of trade unionists now own their own homes.
Even earnings just confuse the issue. One recent study found that 48 per cent of those calling themselves ‘working-class’ earned more than the average salary and a quarter of them earned more than £50,000 a year. In some cities (Leeds for example) people calling themselves working-class are better off than those who see themselves as middle-class.43 A third of bank managers in one recent survey identified themselves as working-class.44
To confuse things further, those calling themselves ‘upper-class’ seem to have disappeared altogether.45
My own sense, having talked to lots of people while I was writing this, is that there are now many different kinds of middle classes. Sociologists talk about the different wings of the middle class – the conservative and radical wings, the consumerist and the avant-garde middle classes, not to mention the managers and the intellectuals. There is even the London middle class, a different animal again. But it is even more complicated than that. Twenty-first-century middle classes might also include any of these:
The Old Middle Classes These are the old gentry, still the backbone of the community, often with a forces background. They remain understated, modest, and you can tell them immediately because their kitchen units and labour-saving machinery seem to date back decades before anybody else’s – they are immune to marketing – and because they keep their regimental photos, and former ships tossing on the high seas, hung firmly in the downstairs loo (a middle-class word, if ever there was one). The pictures are then prominent enough to inform visitors, but not so much as to imply that life stopped dead when their owners became civilians. Caricatures of the English, they hanker successfully for the countryside.
The Designers These are the London middle classes, and as different from the old middle classes as it is possible to be. They are streetwise (or so they believe), sophisticated, early adopters of technology, and have kitchens done out entirely in matt black. They sneer slightly at provincial life, but they keep their eyes glued to the value of their homes, aware that it is also their escape route to a less stressful life, outside the metropolis, where they no longer have to renew their resident’s parking permits and can abandon the agony of finding acceptable schools for their invariably talented offspring.
The Creatives Look at most newspaper journalists and writers (this doesn’t apply to TV journalists for some reason). Their hair uncombed, their clothes unironed (I speak partly of myself of course), they are not obviously members of the middle classes as we might have understood it in the 1960s, and they often roam widely in and around the class system. They exist as a group because of the huge success of UK export earnings in the creative market, from Shakespeare to Comic Relief via the advertising and film industries, among the biggest export earners for the UK economy. There is an inverted snobbery lurking here that explains why so few films are made about middle-class life. Yet the Creatives are highly educated and are clearly part of the increasingly exotic creature known as the middle class.
The Omnivores This was an aspect of the class system identified by the sociologist Tony Bennett, and it explains some of the hesitancy when you ask people about class these days.46 These are the people who tasted working-class club culture in their youth, and middle-class classical concert culture in their middle age, and have an eclectic music collection of musicals, country and western and drum and bass. They enjoyed working-class drinking holes in their student days, and posh gastropubs in their affluent middle age. They move quite freely across the class system, but are not quite at home anywhere. Most of us these days are omnivores, to some extent, but some of us get stuck there, half in, half out, uneasy with middle-class values yet clinging to them at the same time, our accents uncategorizable and varying with company.
The Multis I live in south London, the capital city of Multi culture. The first two couples we met through the children’s school were a German missionary married to a Ghanaian doctor and a Swedish-speaking Finnish artist married to an Algerian chef. This section of the new middle classes covers those people who live in the UK but were born elsewhere and who find our class nomenclature utterly baffling. Equally, these are often mixed-race couples who have chosen to live in the UK because
