and the thought of going back to the Middle East or to northern Europe, and dealing with the disapproval there, was too exhausting to entertain. South London is, despite everything, a huge success story in multiracial, multicultural living. It isn’t traditionally middle-class, but that is the way it is going.
The Public Servants They don’t fit the caricature either, but all those frontline professionals – local government managers, charity executives, nurses, teachers, trading standards officers and all the rest – are plainly a large niche in the middle classes, perhaps usually overlooked because they might vote Labour, Liberal Democrat or Green before Conservative. They are less squeezed financially, though their pensions are not quite what they were, but they have been squeezed in other ways – their responsibilities and dignity eroded by the blizzard of targets, standards, guidelines and directives. Also included are the university lecturers, squeezed in their own way by the Research Assessment Exercise which forces them to publish like crazy to prove their worth. And the new charity and social enterprise managers who deliver so many aspects of public services, perhaps more enslaved by targets than all the rest put together.
The Crunchies These are the British equivalent of the American ‘cultural creatives’, doyens of what used to be called the ‘inner-directed’ approach to life.47 They are people who are no longer interested in keeping up with the Joneses over their material possessions, but are overwhelmingly motivated by health, independence and education. They vote across the political spectrum, but they are concerned about the environment, join Friends of the Earth, sign petitions, have food allergies and have often managed to downshift – deliberately earning less for a better lifestyle, increasingly outside London. It is thanks to the Crunchies that the fastest-growing areas in the UK over the past generation have been the Muesli Belt (a term coined by Martin Stott), the counties that circle London beyond the Home Counties, in a huge circle from Dorset to Norfolk.48
Mike Savage and his colleagues are conducting a widespread survey through the BBC about modern class, and he and his colleagues normally now determine class in rather different terms, dividing people according to what aspects of culture they enjoy, into professional classes (hardly ever watch TV), the intermediate class (which would be the professional class except that it shares a much lower life expectancy with the working classes), and the working class (watches four times as much TV as the professional class, but never goes to musicals).49
This nomenclature slightly muddies the water, because 29 per cent of all three classes still go to the pub once a week. It also omits the emergence of the new class, the international One Per Cent that is hoovering up the money from the middle classes (I am self-employed, which should make me officially ‘intermediate class’).50 Then the house prices began to rise, until the point where that keynote of middle-class life – the partner at home doing the housework – became unaffordable, just when housewifing became unacceptable to many women. But through each twist of policy, they adapted.
In short, the middle classes cling on. Reports of their demise are premature and, although the blow may not have been fatal yet, we still need to search for the weapon used to fell them. They cling on also in a variety of forms and versions, highly eclectic and quite impossible to define. The middle classes are like elephants: you know one when you see one.
The key question is whether there is anything any more which holds these disparate identities together. Patrick Hutber’s thrift may have disappeared. Even the sense of deferred gratification which used to define the middle classes is not quite as secure as it was.
The famous experiment by Walter Mischel in the 1960s offered four-year-olds one marshmallow now or two in twenty minutes and found that those who waited went on to enormously outperform the others in the US scholastic aptitude tests. For a moment this seemed to be a justification for all those middle-class efforts at saving for education, a way to glimpse the essence of middle-class life actually there under the microscope. But the revelation that those who are not able to resist the instant marshmallow are often children of single parents, where the father is absent, rather undermined it as a middle-class definition. It isn’t that the instant marshmallow children are psychologically different; they are just more worried about the future. They have learned to grab their chance while they have it.
Even so, there is still something here about a distinctive middle-class approach to thinking ahead and their obsession with education – not always as an ideal but as a way of defining themselves against the other. So many people I talked to about this book began their replies to me: ‘I don’t want to sound snobbish, but …’ As if the very act of defining themselves as middle-class was somehow aggressive and disapproving. As if the heart of middle-class identity, even now, stems from a fear of fecklessness, disorder and ignorance. No wonder people sound apologetic, and no wonder the middle classes feel so embattled – defending themselves against the encroaching tide at the same time as battling with each other for the scarce resource, the edge in education.
‘The middle class family has become both citadel and hothouse,’ wrote Professor Cindi Katz, describing the American documentary Race to Nowhere by the San Francisco lawyer and mother-of-three Vicki Abeles, inspired by the suicide of a local teenager and describing the panic attacks of middle-class children pushed beyond the limit by their competitive parents. She describes the American middle classes ‘cultivating perfectly commodified children for niche marketing in a future that feels increasingly precarious’.51
Cindi Katz urges an ‘unplugging’ to rescue children for a proper childhood, but she doesn’t see how. ‘It seems almost impossible to unplug while others are plugging away (taking advanced placement classes, studying in high achievement school tracks, attending sports clinics, and the prize is university admission).’
This desperate panic is part of the same ‘squeeze’ phenomenon. It is considerably less intense than it is in the USA, but it is happening in the UK too. We have all seen the poor middle-class battery hens in their uniforms, weighed down by satchels of homework and the cares of the world.
Perhaps this begins to explain the embarrassment about claiming middle-class status, the implied disapproval – the failure to celebrate its best values, the inverted snobbery directed at suburban values in so much British culture, even the ad breaks. ‘Never has a section of society so enthusiastically co-operated in its own euthanasia,’ wrote Patrick Hutber back in 1976.52 Still so today, perhaps even more so.
I don’t quite understand this. It is true that the English middle classes can demonstrate a debilitating snobbery and a boneheaded dullness – their failure to understand the changing world about them is at the heart of their current problems. But they also represent enduring values from generation to generation, which I inherited from my parents and grandparents and am proud to have done – about learning and tolerance, a determination to make things happen, about courage and leadership and, yes, even creativity. I have a feeling this double-headed set of values goes to the heart of the problem, as the middle classes maintain their principles in the face of constant self-criticism, in case they are espousing the wrong ones. Are they approving of scholarship or criticizing people who refuse to learn?
The problem is that saying that they are middle-class seems to be admitting to a whole shedload of prejudices, snobberies and pursed-lipped disapprovals. Some of this is clearly caricatured – most middle-class people these days are among the most tolerant people in the world, not just in the UK – but some of it is undoubtedly real. The middle classes may be unfailingly polite in public, but there is definitely an undercurrent of grouchiness, which might explain the apology. It is the impression they give themselves that they are somehow the thin red line that prevents the nation being overwhelmed by fecklessness, brutishness or a branded nightmare of violent computer games, dominated by Tesco, McDonald’s or Virgin.
I have to be honest about myself here. I have looked unflinchingly in the mirror and it is true: I
