Class Dismissed: Why Britain Should Stop Keeping Score
Arthur Scargill once boasted that he had never betrayed his class. It was meant as a badge of honour. It should have been read as a warning. We understand loyalty to family. We understand loyalty to village, county and country. These are places and people we belong to and most would not wish to leave.
Class is different. It is a condition, not a community. And for most of British history the working-class condition meant hard labour, low pay and narrow horizons. To pledge loyalty to that is to pledge loyalty to the very thing a sensible person would want to escape. It turns the miner's son who becomes a surgeon into a deserter. It makes ambition look like apostasy. That is the first problem with class. It is a cage that congratulates you for staying inside.
The old economic meaning of class has largely dissolved. Marx divided people into those who owned the means of production and those who worked them. Today the factory is owned by pension funds, which are owned by the workers. Millions hold shares, own homes, run small businesses or sell their skills freelance. The electrician out-earns the curate. The barista may be a graduate with a mortgage. The categories no longer describe anything real.
Yet the labels linger. Surveys have long found a majority of Britons calling themselves working class, a proportion that barely budged even as manual jobs melted away. Class has become less a matter of circumstance than of self-image. People inherit it like a surname or a football team. They wear it as a scarf.
What survives is mostly social. Britain remains a nation of silent sorters. Napkin or serviette. Lavatory or toilet. Sofa or settee. Supper, dinner or tea. Nancy Mitford made a parlour game of it seventy years ago, and the game is still being played. These markers tell you nothing about a person's talent, honesty or intelligence. That is precisely their purpose. They allow people to feel superior on grounds that have nothing to do with merit.
The snobbery runs both ways. There is the old snobbery that winces at a regional vowel. And there is the inverted snobbery that sneers at the ‘posh,treats a love of learning as putting on airs, and regards the grammar-school scholarship boy as a class traitor. Both are forms of prejudice. Both judge the wrapping rather than the gift.
Does any of this hold people back? The popular answer is that poorer children suffer from a ‘poverty of aspiration.’ The evidence suggests otherwise. Ask young people from modest backgrounds what they want to be and they aim high. What they often lack is not ambition but a map. They do not know which subjects open which doors, how to find an internship, whom to ask, or how to handle the unwritten rules of an interview. The gap is in navigation, not motivation.
Where class still bites is at the top. The privately educated make up around 7 per cent of the population yet fill a remarkable share of senior posts in the judiciary, the Lords, the diplomatic service and the press. Researchers have found that people from working-class homes who make it into the professions still tend to earn less than colleagues from comfortable backgrounds doing the same jobs. Part of the reason is ‘fit,’ the polish, the confidence, the easy familiarity with the codes of the room.
Owen Jones is right that this matters. He is wrong about why. He treats class as a fixed structure of oppression, to be fought with collective consciousness and political struggle. But the barriers he describes are not proof that the market is rigged. They are specific, stubborn and fixable. Poor schools in poor places, recruitment that rewards connections, and unpaid internships that only the well-off can afford. Interview panels that mistake accent for ability. None of these requires a revolution. All of them require reform.
And the cost of failing to reform them is not merely unfairness. It is waste. Talent is scattered at random across the population. Opportunity is not. Every gifted child who never finds the road to engineering, medicine, science or enterprise is a loss not only to that child but to all of us.
Studies in America have suggested that better matching of people to jobs, as barriers based on race and sex fell away, accounted for a significant slice of economic growth. There is no reason to think class is any different. A country that leaves brains unused is a country that grows more slowly than it should. Snobbery is not just rude. It is expensive.
The answer is not to cultivate class consciousness, as the left prescribes, nor to pretend class has vanished, as the complacent claim. It is to cultivate class indifference. We should judge people by what they can do, not by where they started or how they speak. We should prize schools that raise the ceiling, employers who hire the ablest rather than the most familiar, and a culture that celebrates the person who rises rather than accusing them of betrayal.
Scargill was proud of never leaving his class. The better ambition is a Britain where nobody has to think about which class they are in at all. Except, of course, when deciding how to pronounce ‘scone.’
Madsen Pirie