Britain’s class system has always been a load of self-defeating, nonsensical garbage with no obvious purpose. But, remarkably enough, it has just become even more ludicrous. This month, we learned not only that Civil Service internships will be restricted to those from ‘working class’ backgrounds, but that the children of train drivers earning £80,000 a year will qualify, whereas the children of police and prison officers, who earn far less but are apparently ‘middle class’, will not.
We seem to have voted in the most class-obsessed yet confused government in history
Where that leaves someone whose father is a train driver, but whose mother is a police officer, I have no idea. And I reckon the government doesn’t either. Because the class system is a mass of silly contradictions that make it utterly useless. After all, those supposedly working-class young men and women who gain an internship next year will presumably become middle class as soon as they become established in their careers, which means their own children will automatically be privileged and therefore disqualified from following in their footsteps. No wonder more than half of the British public, including a GP I know, say they are working class.
Well, perhaps it makes sense to the Prime Minister, who confusingly says that he was working class as a child (Dad was a toolmaker, blah blah) but became middle class as an adult. Yet he also describes his former deputy, Angela Rayner, as working class (unlike him, she never graduated to middle class, it seems) despite her previously living in a grace-and-favour apartment in Admiralty Arch and earning well into six figures. If you can make sense of it all, you’re way ahead of me.
We seem to have voted in the most class-obsessed yet confused government in history. Yet, it’s not just that the class system makes no sense, it’s also positively damaging. It’s one more way in our already fractured, siloed society of dividing us still further, and inevitably means that people of different classes feel they don’t belong or wouldn’t be welcome in certain social or work situations. Worse, we still hear of families that reckon their son or daughter has ‘married beneath them’ (i.e. to someone of a supposedly lower class).
Unlike sex and skin colour, class is a purely human construct. It exists only in our minds, and is based not only on such silliness as what your father (rarely your mother, it seems) does or did for a living, but on ludicrous notions such as how you hold your knife and fork and how you say the word bath. It is these bizarre criteria, not money, that we use to classify someone as working, middle or, occasionally, upper class. Some obsessives then divide each of these three basic categories into lower, upper and middle, and will learnedly lecture you on who fits where, like it’s all some sort of scientifically provable fact. You know the sort of thing – he’s lower middle, whereas she’s middle middle, and that guy going to the dole office covered in tattoos is lower working. No, wait, I got that wrong, his father’s a Lord so he’s actually upper.
So, why don’t we just get rid of this damaging and farcical system, which we could easily achieve by just collectively agreeing to stop thinking and talking about it? That question has always obsessed me, ever since someone at university in the late 80s asked me out of nowhere, ‘What class are you?’ as though it might be stamped on my passport. In fact, when I argue the toss about this with intelligent, politically engaged people, they accuse me of refusing to accept the ‘advantages of being middle class’. In other words, my attempt to eradicate class advantage founders on my class advantage.
Well, after debating with a friend recently, I now know the answer. The very fact that the class system is so damaging means we must keep talking about it, she told me. And try as I might to mansplain to her that this surely meant we’d therefore keep the damage in perpetuity, she wouldn’t budge. Perhaps Keir Starmer would understand.
It’s now three decades since John Major said we must become a classless society. I wholeheartedly agreed with him then and still do. Yet I’m clearly in a minority. Most people wouldn’t be able to name a single benefit of the class system. Most people agree that it’s profoundly harmful. Yet they remain utterly wedded to it. It’s therefore hopeless and we must give up.
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