that ‘the social class of Cameron’s crew … rule for their own ruling class’.1
A whole host of activities and institutions are attacked for being ‘too middle class’ – the Church of England, English Heritage, Girl Guides, tennis, BBC sitcoms, the Labour party. Various broadcasters, the Chelsea Flower Show, the Royal Opera House and the entire cabinet are derided for being ‘too posh’; rows over the education system are almost entirely centred around how to ensure more working-class children get better grades and places at university; hands are wrung about how nearly every Bafta winner and top-40 musician went to private school, and why a disproportionate number of white working-class boys end up out of work, out of a job, out of luck.
It’s not just the press which casts so much of what they write about in the molten, malleable language of class – ‘Are your neighbours middle-class cocaine addicts like me?’2 is a recent headline in the Daily Mail. Policy makers too increasingly see class as the cause of so many of Britain’s economic and social woes. The Office for National Statistics, and a dazzling array of think-tanks and research houses, publish almost weekly data to show that social inequality continues to widen in Britain – your health, your wealth, your happiness are all related to the social class you belong to. An astonishing amount of time and money is spent measuring and defining the socio-economic groups that make up modern Britain: C1, D, Class 1, managerial, semi-routine sales occupation, intermediate clerical. These groups are meant to be as objective and statistically robust as possible. And all serve to help the Government and its agencies attempt to improve ‘social mobility’ – the ultimate goal of so many in charge.
But the dry statistics relating to the upper deciles, the long-term economically inactive, the ‘discouraged’ and higher managerial classifications are not a true reflection of class in Britain today. Class has never been simply about whether you were rich or poor, whether you were the boss or the worker, or if you paid for your education or not. It was more than that. Class was always a subjective, loaded term, one that implied judgement. It used to be about a thousand little rules designed to trip up those not in the inner circle – what time you ate your evening meal, phoning for the fish knives, how you pronounced Cholmondeley and Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, which day to wear an old school tie. Much of it was knowledge, wrapped up in a secret language and accent, and was a way that social superiors knew to assert their superiority. It was tricky (though not impossible) to fake, and it was designed, so it seemed to those not in the inner circle, to keep outsiders in their place. When Brian Winterflood started a job at the London Stock Exchange in 1951 he wore brown shoes to work, only to be greeted on his first day with shouts, running around the exchange, of ‘Brown boots, brown boots!’ He quickly scuttled off to find a pair of black shoes. ‘And I’ve always worn black ever since.’ Hardly anyone remembers these rules now. Brown shoes are a common sight in the City, while accents have become blurred, with the public school drawl edging ever closer to the Essex twang. Even Prince Harry’s speech is peppered with glottal stops.
Class has changed, as Britain has changed, and its populace has been faced with an ever wider array of choices. Class used to be about your position in life; now it appears to be increasingly about lifestyle. This is a term that only took hold in the 1950s when there started to be enough money around to furnish a lifestyle with more than a scuttle of coal and a week’s holiday in a boarding house at Blackpool. And it took off in the 1960s with the glossy Sunday newspaper magazines that chronicled the swinging consumerism of the era.
This book is an attempt to map some of those changes and to find out what class means in Britain today. It is about the habits and lifestyles of millions of households and families who grew up on salad cream and ended up using balsamic glaze from Morrisons on their monkfish fillets. Of how holidays hop picking in Kent turned into flights to Disney World and cruises around the Canaries, and how tables bought on tick from the Co-op became adorned with Jo Malone smelly candles and an orchid from M&S.
This makes no claim to being a history book, but it does have a nominal starting point: 1954, a year of British triumph, when the first sub-four-minute mile was run, the year after Everest had been conquered and the structure of DNA established, the early years of the new Elizabethan era when it seemed after two decades of deprivation and war that anything was possible. Importantly, for millions of households, 1954 was the year when meat rationing was lifted, the last of the restrictions to be scrapped and an end to 14 years of continually having to check your pocket book before you calculated what you could buy. Families finally had the freedom to spend their weekly pay packet as they saw fit. It kick-started six decades of conspicuous consumption, which have culminated in people scanning their iPhones for Wagamama discount vouchers and supermarket delivery vans ferrying jars of anchovies and espresso pods at ten o’clock at night around the streets of Britain. An era which now looks under threat from the dramatic and almost unprecedented collapse in disposable income for many families – a phenomenon that did not happen in such a sustained way during the recessions of the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.
It has been six decades of radical change. 1954 also saw the first purpose-built comprehensive school, an attempt to give equal opportunities to the children of Britain, regardless of where or to whom they were born; the release of Bill Haley’s ‘Rock around the Clock’, the first cultural event to give a voice to teenagers; the very first Wimpy bar, bringing the concept of ‘jet-age eating’ to the masses; and the first package holidays to Benidorm, giving ordinary workers a taste of the sun-kissed beaches that only their betters had enjoyed a generation before.
During this second Elizabethan era there have been plenty of seismic changes and many things that have not really moved on at all. Class manages to straddle both camps. In the last 60 years there has been the almost complete destruction of the upper classes, the substantial dismantling of the working classes and the enormous, remorseless rise of the middle classes.
The landed aristocracy who owned Britain and ruled Britain have, save for a few notable exceptions, been forced to either sell off or open up their family homes to the public and vacate their comfortable benches in the House of Lords. Meanwhile, millions of manual workers who were paid decently for a hard day’s work have ended up jobless or in call centres, while the unions and working men’s clubs, organisations that gave so many working communities their backbone, appear to be in terminal decline.
The population of Britain has not got smaller; far from it. Those at the top and the bottom have not disappeared – they have merely moved class. Millions have left the ranks of the working classes and joined the ranks of the middle classes, while hundreds of thousands of those at the top have taken a step down. In the mid-1950s various surveys suggested that about a quarter of the population considered themselves ‘middle class’; that figure now is consistently 70 per cent. The rest say they are working class. No one openly admits to being upper class.
But even if seven in ten people are middle class, that does not mean they all share the same lifestyle. There has certainly been some blurring of once strict boundaries of taste and consumption patterns. The majority of people own their own homes, and some of those a place in the sun too. Even more own a car. Prime ministers wear trainers, royal princesses pop into Topshop to buy skirts, sushi is so commonplace that commuters can pick it up with their pint of milk at the station, and Iceland can sell you frozen chicken Kievs. Sky satellite dishes, formerly a sign of ‘council house culture’, are now found on the side of Belgravia maisonettes. What was once recherché is now quotidian, products and decorations that used to be strictly for the working class are now symbols of distinction. Politicians rush to Greggs to scoff sausage rolls and pasties in an attempt to prove how ‘in touch’ they are with ‘ordinary’ voters, while chipped and rough kitchen utensils that their grandparents would have been thrilled to have thrown out are now snapped up by their wealthier descendants as ‘vintage’.
Despite the severe recession, most of us enjoy a lifestyle of what seems – in comparison with 1954 – unbridled luxury: flights to Thailand, 47-inch televisions, food blenders, bread makers, steak on sale at the local supermarket (open
