Perched on the railings outside Barking station are two skinheads in full regalia: camouflage bomber jackets, tattoos, jeans, Doc Marten boots. I am here on the border between east London and Essex to talk to people about politics and class. I consider accosting the shorn-headed station sentries, but they look busy. One of them is on the phone, the other is ministering to a bull terrier on a chain. All three are scowling.
So instead I talk to Gemma, 20 years old, full head of blonde hair, no scowl. I start by asking who she last voted for. She isn’t registered. I ask about politics generally, what she thinks of the various parties. Gemma shrugs. ‘Sorry, I’m not much good at this, am I?’ On one thing she is certain. I ask if Barking is a working-class area. ‘No. It’s rubbish for jobs here. You can’t get work.’
But the borough of Barking and Dagenham is - or was - a solidly working-class area. It is also Labour territory, but might not be for long. The party is haemorrhaging votes here. Some are going to the Tories. But a substantial minority are going to the far-right British National Party, already the second biggest party on the local council. The BNP targets white working- class voters with the claim that foreigners get all the best local houses and jobs, and commit all the crimes.
Most people I meet in Barking and Dagenham don’t want to talk about politics or class. Dave is an exception. He is waiting for the bus on his way to work, and proud to be working class. He has never voted. ‘It’s always the same, they make the promises and don’t keep them. If I did vote, it would be BNP. It’s not a racial thing. I’ve got nothing against them, it’s just …’ Dave pauses to put his thoughts in order. ‘This used to be a white area, it’s all gone downhill.’
People who were once core Labour voters in Barking and Dagenham feel betrayed. They are disoriented by the social transformation wrought by the long economic boom that is now coming to an end, and they do not believe politicians who said that globalisation benefited Britain as a whole. They did not feel any benefits at home. They were neglected, according to Jon Cruddas, an MP for the area, not just as individuals, but as a class.
‘People find it difficult to navigate through the sheer quantity of change they see around them,’ says Cruddas. ‘When class is removed as a political and economic category, people use race as the template to express their concerns.’
The implication is that the rhetoric of class struggle should be restored to its once-central role in Labour Party doctrine. A year ago that proposition would have seemed absurd. Britain’s economy had been growing since 1992. There was agreement, at least on the front benches at Westminster, that global finance and the free market were the twin engines of wealth creation. Class politics, by contrast, was deemed a kind of atavism: reluctance by the old left to accept intellectual defeat.
But today, global capitalism is humbled. The engine has crunched to a halt and Britain is entering a recession. As a consequence the language of economic policy has been transformed. The state owns two of Britain’s largest banks and plans to take a big stake in more. Nationalisation is no longer an archaism but an expedient, accepted even by Conservatives. Politicians are repatriating economic power from international financial markets.
If the economics of the left are enjoying a renaissance, why not the politics? As recession bites, more people are going to start feeling, like the voters in Barking and Dagenham, that the long boom was a con - a raucous party for a wealthy elite who have now sent the clean-up bill to the taxpayer. And they will be angry. Will they then be amenable to a political message promising redress on the basis of class?
Not according to Dave. I don’t mean Dagenham Dave, but Cameron, the man who, according to every poll, is still the nation’s preferred choice for PM. He expressed his view in a BBC interview last month. ‘I don’t believe this is a class-ridden society,’ he said. ‘I think that’s a load of rubbish.’
Well, as Mandy Rice-Davies - with her intimate grasp of the Establishment - once said: he would, wouldn’t he? Cameron is a direct descendent of King William IV. His father-in-law is a baronet with noble lineage dating back to Charles II. If he wins the next election and goes to the Queen to ask permission to form a government, he will be making that request to his fifth cousin twice removed. When Cameron first applied for a job at Conservative Central Office, his interview was secured by a phone call from a referee in the royal household.
Class is a kind of energy that radiates through British society. We all know it’s there. We have internal instruments that detect it, mental Geiger counters that flicker unconsciously through any social encounter, picking up nuances of tone, manner, dress and accent. It is the situation in our comedy and the costume in our drama. It was a source of power before electricity, the original national grid.
But while most of us, pace Cameron, know that class exists, there has been a political consensus for nearly a generation that it is not useful as an electoral tool. It neither mobilises nor adequately defines voters. That realisation was central to Tony Blair’s reorganisation of the Labour party away from its traditional Marxist social analysis, which he said was ‘out of kilter with the real world’. Blair understood something fundamental about the scale of the Thatcher revolution: by presenting themselves as the party of social advancement, the Tories had made voting Conservative seem less of an ideological statement than voting Labour; more like a cultural aspiration. While old Labour promised social change for the working classes en masse, the Tories offered individuals the chance to opt out of being working class altogether.
The key was that other national obsession of ours: houses. ‘Whether or not you think it was a good idea, the Thatcher policy of allowing people to buy their council houses made the greatest contribution to fragmentation,’ says Professor Richard Webber, a demographer at Experian, a market research company.
It was Professor Webber who designed Mosaic, a database that divides Britain up into social categories according to postcode. The product was devised to help companies target the right consumers more efficiently, but it is also used by all of the major political parties to predict voter preferences. According to Professor Webber, the single greatest social change in the last 30 years has been the breaking up of what used to be ‘working-class’ areas. ‘Within individual council estates there will now be more stratification even than between council estates within cities,’ he says.
Mosaic sorts people into 11 categories, sub-divided into 61 types. Each is defined according to shopping preferences, age range, family structure and values. I am curious to see where I fit in, so Professor Webber punches in my postcode. ‘E30: New Urban Colonist - Younger, high-achieving professionals, enjoying a cosmopolitan lifestyle in a gentrified urban environment.’
Professor Webber winces. He didn’t come up with the names, he explains, and would have preferred not to use a metaphor of colonisation. I can see why. It makes me sound like a yuppie conquistador, setting sail for the inner city and decimating the indigenous population with my imported gastro-pub virus. The actual categorisation is more prosaic, and precise. The computer guesses that I shop at Waitrose, where I buy organic vegetables. I am likely to be white and 25-34 years old. I probably read The Observer. New Urban Colonists make up 1.36 per cent of the population.
This is a quintessentially New Labour way of looking at social division: not as a story of competing classes, but as a patchwork of consumer segments. The Mosaic headings are reminiscent of those emblematic voters - ‘Worcester Woman’ and ‘Mondeo Man’ - who were explicitly wooed and won over by Tony Blair in the run-up to the 1997 election.
It was in the mid-Nineties that we started to hear a lot about that mythological place ‘Middle England’, a belt of constituencies in the south, thought to be fundamentally Conservative by inclination, and without whose support no party can win a majority in parliament.
The closest thing to Middle England in Mosaic terms is ‘C18: Sprawling Subtopia - middle-income owner-occupiers in repetitive, semi-detached housing.’ They read the Mail and the Express, shop at Asda, enjoy gardening, are individualistic in outlook and value ‘common sense’. In statistical class notation, they are mostly C1 and C2 - lower-tier managers or skilled manual workers. They earn £25,000-£50,000 per year. They used to be called the petit-bourgeoisie. You don’t hear that phrase so much any more.
The class system, as it was perceived for most of the 20th century, relied on a stable relationship between job description, social status and income. At the bottom were manual labourers, then clerical workers, then professionals and, naturally, at the top, the aristocrats. People’s workplace correlated reliably to a position in a social and cultural hierarchy.
Of course, the left always rejected that hierarchy on principle. In the Marxist account of history, intrinsic virtue lay in the proletariat. But for all the revolutionary agitation of the political left, change to the job-based class structure has been most profound in the long anti-Marxist, Conservative era that started in 1979.
Margaret Thatcher despised the very notion of class as ‘a Communist concept’ that ‘groups people in bundles and sets them one against another’. She saw Marxism as an intellectual con to limit the aspirations of working people, deterring them from taking personal responsibility for their own advancement. She wanted the ‘self-made man’ to replace ‘the workers’ as the agent of progress.
In its purest form, Thatcher’s free market ideology was meritocratic. It was as hostile, in theory, to the closed shop of Old Boy networks as to the Trade Union closed shop on the factory floor. In October 1986, the Conservatives unleashed ‘Big Bang’ on the City of London, a massive deregulation of financial markets that was aimed, in part, at breaking up the cartels of chummy public school-educated bankers who had traditionally monopolised finance. The yuppie culture of the late-Eighties boom was derided by old-fashioned Tories for its arriviste vulgarity, just as it was despised by the left for its carnivorous capitalism. Peregrine Worsthorne spitefully and astutely described the ethic of Thatcher’s generation as ‘petit-bourgeois triumphalism’.
As a guide to the morality of wealth distribution, that triumphalism was incorporated wholesale into Labour ideology under Tony Blair. Peter Mandelson famously said in 1998 that New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’.
In 2006-2007 alone the number of billionaires in Britain grew from 54 to 68. Since 1997 the wealth of the richest 1,000 people in the UK has increased by 260 per cent, as compared with a national average of 120 per cent. One per cent of the population now controls 23 per cent of national wealth, while the bottom half of society controls six per cent. Even that figure understates the gulf between the super-rich and the rest, because ‘wealth’ includes the value of assets - in other words, house prices. But most people fund their home purchases with hefty mortgages. The super-rich own their wealth; the rest of us have just borrowed it.
A better measure of inequality is income. The minimum wage is £5.73 per hour. The median household disposable income in Britain is £362 per week, meaning that half of households are bringing in less than that. The mean annual wage is around £24,000 (a figure that overstates how much most people earn because the average is skewed upwards by a small number of exorbitant sums at the top of the range). Anyone who earns more than £40,000 per year is in the top 10 per cent in the country; more than £500,000 puts you in the top 0.1 per cent. The bonus pool that was shared among bankers in the City earlier this year was around £7bn.
There is some dispute about whether Labour has presided over a general increase in inequality. Earlier this month, a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development reported that the gap between rich and poor shrank between 2000 and 2005. But overall it is still wider than in most other developed countries, and 20 per cent wider than in 1985. Incomes at the top and bottom of the social spectrum have been on a divergent trend since records began in 1961.
But is an unequal society necessarily a class-ridden society? Not quite. Class judgments tend to form around social protocols and etiquettes. They are a marker of culture more than wealth. It so happens that for most of British history the arbiters of cultural value happened also to be the richest people. The aristocracy saw their wealth as an expression of moral rectitude - they were ‘the quality’, or ‘betters’.
But market forces do not respect cultural hierarchy. ‘Big Bang’ might not have scattered money evenly, but it did shuffle people around. Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher’s industrial policy drastically reduced the number of people in traditional proletarian jobs, such as coal mining.
So society became less equal while the vocabulary of class became less meaningful in describing social strata. Instead it became a kind of nostalgia for old, more stable cultural identity.
‘Social status is now much more complicated than how much money you’ve got,’ says Christophe Jouan, director of the Future Foundation. ‘Lots of people feel pride in identifying themselves as working class, when on every measure of income they are clearly middle class.’
The idea of class as an expression of wealth was always a misconception. Our modern obsession with its outward manifestations was entrenched at a time when wealth was at its most even level of distribution in Britain, in the immediate post-Second World War era. It was people’s relative proximity in money terms that led them to find alternative ways of distinguishing themselves from their neighbours. Before the war, most people knew their place (and outside the political left, accepted it). But an acceleration of social mobility in the Forties and Fifties led to a boom in petty snobbery. It was the era of the ‘u’ and ‘non-u’ distinctions notoriously codified by Nancy Mitford. As the solidarity of the war years receded, but austerity kept people’s incomes relatively homogenous, it became almost existentially important whether you said ‘napkin’ or ‘serviette’; ‘toilet’ or ‘loo’; ‘how d’you do?’ or ‘pleased to meet you.’
‘It takes a more equal society for those nuances to matter,’ says Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield. According to Professor Dorling, the old ways of describing class are barely relevant to the actual distribution of power in 21st century Britain. The main change is the rise of the super-rich, who have bypassed the traditional mechanisms of social climbing and bought themselves places at the very top.
‘The idea of class as defined in the last century is changing,’ says Professor Dorling. ‘Now it is much more about wealth.’
Professor Dorling has a graph that shows what a purely wealth-based class structure looks like. There is a big chunk in the middle - 50 per cent of the population who qualify as ‘normal’. Beneath them is a 15 per cent chunk of ‘poor’ people, and another 10 per cent who are ‘very poor’. There is a sizeable chunk - 20 per cent - near the top who are rich. But the remaining five per cent are stratified into ever smaller distinctions of extreme wealth. These are people who, in Dorling’s phrase, ‘exclude themselves from the norms of society’ - the footballers, pop stars, Russian oligarchs, oil sheikhs, hedge-fund managers. ‘The top-level people all meet each other,’ says Dorling, ‘and the thing they have in common is money.’
Think of the recent scandal around politicians quaffing champagne on a yacht in Corfu: Peter Mandelson, son of an advertising manager; George Osborne, whose parents made their fortune selling expensive wallpaper; Oleg Deripaska, owner of the yacht, an aluminium magnate who got super-rich in a chaotic Siberian asset-grab; Nat Rothschild, scion of a family of global financiers. This may be a kind of aristocracy, but if so it is completely dislocated from the hereditary feudal structures that define the old British upper class.
For the less well-off, social aspiration used to mean imitating the mores and lifestyle of the landed gentry. To an extent, it still does. But since status has floated more freely in the open market, a new edifice of aspiration has been erected alongside the old scaffolding of bloodline caste. It is the cult of conspicuous wealth.
Victoria Beckham is not ‘posh’ in any sense of the word that would have been recognised 50 years ago. But she is still at the apex of a social pyramid - not just financially, but in popular culture. She, and her fellow celebrities, are the focus of people’s aspirations entirely independent of the old etiquette-based class codes. The recent OECD report on inequality described this phenomenon as the ‘Hello! magazine effect’. People evaluate their own position not in relation to their bank balance, their peers, or to ancient notions of class, but in comparison with media representations of lifestyles of the rich and famous. As a result, they tend to feel poorer than they are. That doesn’t mean the old snobbery is dead. People who think their neighbours consume their wealth too conspicuously, and who would once have denounced them as ‘common’, now deride them as ‘chavs’.
But there is no agreement on where the boundaries of ‘chavdom’ begin and end. It is an extraordinarily polyvalent word, which can be used as a slur against the urban poor and the suburban rich. It is a weapon in a petty civil war waged almost entirely within the swollen ranks of the middle class, often between people of equivalent incomes, in houses of equal value.
One opinion poll showed 62 per cent of people describe themselves as middle class. A total of 33 per cent said they were working class and the rest didn’t know. No one admits to being upper class. The aristocracy are invisible, even to the mechanical brain of Mosaic. They don’t show up in housing analysis because, whether in country piles or pied-à-terres in London, they are spread too diffusely. Besides, they share postcodes with their live-in staff.
The top Mosaic segment is ‘A01: Global connections - very affluent, cosmopolitan sophisticates in extremely expensive housing’. They are a creation of the Thatcher-Blair years - the winners of a competitive tender for power; rich far beyond the aspirations of most British people, but still thinking of themselves as middle class, if they think about class at all.
In an attempt to find someone who might own up to being upper class, I meet Hugh Peskett ‘of the Winchester Pesketts’. The family got its Coat of Arms in 1575. Peskett is editor-in-chief of Burke’s Peerage and Gentry. I start by asking what ‘upper class’ means. ‘The most important thing is gentility. The true upper classes never throw their weight around,’ he says.
Peskett is also a genealogist, with a special line in investigating claims to ancient titles. This forensic foraging around the roots of the nation’s posh set has taught him that Britain’s top tier is surprisingly permeable. It has been infiltrated over time by mill-owners up north and bourgeois financiers down south. The same will happen with the new super-rich. Some will lose their fortunes as stock markets crash. Some have already lost millions. But most will have sufficient cash stores to buy up cheap assets and consolidate their position at the top. Given enough time the new money will, as it always has done, marry the old.
And Hugh himself, with five centuries of British pedigree - where does he fit into the picture? A pause, a modest laugh, like a cough on tiptoes. ‘I think I’m probably middle class.’
In September 1999, Tony Blair declared that ‘the class war is over.’ He meant that Margaret Thatcher had successfully undermined the idea of ‘working-class solidarity’; and that resentment of hereditary privilege was not sufficient inducement to get people to vote Labour.
That was six years into an economic boom that lasted until now. It was 13 years after the Big Bang that is now collapsing in the Big Crunch. What political capital could there be for Labour in claiming once again to represent the workers against the ravages of capitalism?
Planet New Labour was born in the Big Bang. It embraced the idea of class as a privatised, tradable commodity. It bought into Mosaic Britain, with its minuscule consumer tribes, its ‘sprawling subtopias’, its ‘new urban colonists’ and its ‘global connections’. If that universe is now going to implode, the anger that will follow cannot be channelled along class lines. There is no point attacking Cameron just because he is related to the Queen. That definition of class belongs to a different epoch.
Britain is fragmented, divided, segmented. So much so that the language of class isn’t adequate to describe it. We are so used to thinking of class in terms of conflict, we forget that the concept itself also depends on unity. For there to be meaningful divisions between classes, there must be solidarity within them. That has gone. And yet the cultural resonance is still there. Our social antennae still twitch. The language is obsolete, but the feeling won’t die.
Radios tuned away from a clear signal pick up traces of microwaves resonating through time from the explosion at the birth of the universe. We are at a moment now when the political signal is shifting. For a generation we were tuned to the Thatcherism channel. The presenters changed, but the message - the idea of how society should be ordered - was crisp and clear. It was the market. On the Thatcherism channel, class did not exist. Meanwhile, on a rival broadcast, the old Marxist analysis prevailed. Class, meaning rigid economic categories, was everything. But turn the dial between them and all you hear is the hush-hush roar of white noise.
That is the meaning of class today: a distant echo of the Big Bang; always out there, indecipherable, static.