Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?. David Boyle
collar versus blue collar? Most of our traditional working-class jobs have long since been outsourced to China or India.
Salary versus wage packet? Who gets a wage packet these days?
Homeowner versus renter? Three-quarters of trade unionists now own their own homes.
Even earnings just confuse the issue. One recent study found that 48 per cent of those calling themselves ‘working-class’ earned more than the average salary and a quarter of them earned more than £50,000 a year. In some cities (Leeds for example) people calling themselves working-class are better off than those who see themselves as middle-class.43 A third of bank managers in one recent survey identified themselves as working-class.44
To confuse things further, those calling themselves ‘upper-class’ seem to have disappeared altogether.45
My own sense, having talked to lots of people while I was writing this, is that there are now many different kinds of middle classes. Sociologists talk about the different wings of the middle class – the conservative and radical wings, the consumerist and the avant-garde middle classes, not to mention the managers and the intellectuals. There is even the London middle class, a different animal again. But it is even more complicated than that. Twenty-first-century middle classes might also include any of these:
The Old Middle Classes These are the old gentry, still the backbone of the community, often with a forces background. They remain understated, modest, and you can tell them immediately because their kitchen units and labour-saving machinery seem to date back decades before anybody else’s – they are immune to marketing – and because they keep their regimental photos, and former ships tossing on the high seas, hung firmly in the downstairs loo (a middle-class word, if ever there was one). The pictures are then prominent enough to inform visitors, but not so much as to imply that life stopped dead when their owners became civilians. Caricatures of the English, they hanker successfully for the countryside.
The Designers These are the London middle classes, and as different from the old middle classes as it is possible to be. They are streetwise (or so they believe), sophisticated, early adopters of technology, and have kitchens done out entirely in matt black. They sneer slightly at provincial life, but they keep their eyes glued to the value of their homes, aware that it is also their escape route to a less stressful life, outside the metropolis, where they no longer have to renew their resident’s parking permits and can abandon the agony of finding acceptable schools for their invariably talented offspring.
The Creatives Look at most newspaper journalists and writers (this doesn’t apply to TV journalists for some reason). Their hair uncombed, their clothes unironed (I speak partly of myself of course), they are not obviously members of the middle classes as we might have understood it in the 1960s, and they often roam widely in and around the class system. They exist as a group because of the huge success of UK export earnings in the creative market, from Shakespeare to Comic Relief via the advertising and film industries, among the biggest export earners for the UK economy. There is an inverted snobbery lurking here that explains why so few films are made about middle-class life. Yet the Creatives are highly educated and are clearly part of the increasingly exotic creature known as the middle class.
The Omnivores This was an aspect of the class system identified by the sociologist Tony Bennett, and it explains some of the hesitancy when you ask people about class these days.46 These are the people who tasted working-class club culture in their youth, and middle-class classical concert culture in their middle age, and have an eclectic music collection of musicals, country and western and drum and bass. They enjoyed working-class drinking holes in their student days, and posh gastropubs in their affluent middle age. They move quite freely across the class system, but are not quite at home anywhere. Most of us these days are omnivores, to some extent, but some of us get stuck there, half in, half out, uneasy with middle-class values yet clinging to them at the same time, our accents uncategorizable and varying with company.
The Multis I live in south London, the capital city of Multi culture. The first two couples we met through the children’s school were a German missionary married to a Ghanaian doctor and a Swedish-speaking Finnish artist married to an Algerian chef. This section of the new middle classes covers those people who live in the UK but were born elsewhere and who find our class nomenclature utterly baffling. Equally, these are often mixed-race couples who have chosen to live in the UK because it is relatively tolerant – and because they met somewhere in the UK melting pot, 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