[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Cash and the class system

[Bill Totten]

The old social markers are all redundant. British society is now a money
nation shaped exclusively by wealth - airs and graces no longer matter

by Danny Dorling

New Statesman (July 24 2008)


There was once an age when class came with breeding. One's parents gave
one one's position. One might stray a little above or below - a perfect
marital match is never possible - but one knew one's place.

Then, for much of the past century, class was about occupation. You had
only to ask someone his or her job and you felt you knew almost
everything about them. In 2008 that is no longer true. The fifty per
cent of the British people who can just about pay the bills, but who
cannot even imagine paying inheritance tax, have a huge range of
occupations. Just as those above and below them do. These families,
which we still call middle-class, usually have two jobs (the British
norm), two or more cars (the norm), a small semi-detached or large
terraced house, and a combined income that pays for the mortgage, food,
fuel and a couple of holidays a year (one of them somewhere warm).
Nowadays, class is all about money.

In the late 19th century, accent, clothing, title and behaviour
reflected our origins. There were schools for all classes: the Great
Schools for those destined for greatness, and a multitude of
not-so-great schools, mostly created or expanded under Victoria's reign,
catering for the children of different strata of the new middle classes.
You could tell whether a family was upper-middle, middle-middle, or
lower-middle-class from the school its children attended. The working
classes had their day schools, Sunday schools, church schools and
elementary schools, or didn't go to school. You could also tell their
class from the street they inhabited. Charles Booth, the philanthropist
and social researcher, had maps of London beautifully coloured, street
by street. You could see the subtle differentiation between the areas
not shaded yellow, the colour of the servant-keeping classes. You could
also see those areas shaded black and labelled "vicious, semi-criminal,
poor".

Mrs Beeton wrote a book on household management that sold well in those
days. It turns out she had only one servant, but she did a good job of
pretending to have more. Her book was so successful because of a popular
demand for information on how to act up to the class you wished to be.
Just like Nigella Lawson today, she provided the fantasy that you, too,
could appear to come from a stable above, be of better stock and be more
respectable.

We used to have many popular guides to the British class system that
told you how to appear just a slight cut above. But in 2008 those at the
top have to try to appear like the rest: chummy and normal. This year
women had to be told to wear knickers to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.
How did we get here from there?

The change happened slowly throughout the 20th century. The decimation
of the sons of the Great Schools in the 1914-18 war, the "gifting" of
stately homes to what is now the National Trust, the collapse of the
financial might of the upper class through the 1920s and 1930s, and a
progressive tax regime that lasted from the end of the Second World War
until the beginning of Thatcherism - all these things changed what class
meant. Whereas under Queen Victoria secondary schools had been designed
to segregate the middle class, the Education Act 1944 split up the
working class. It had the side effect of creating a one-off generation,
selected at eleven by what was called an ability test, a few of whom
later got good jobs in universities and mused about class. Boys were in
the majority, as the eleven-plus tests had been made easier for them.
(They had to be made easier as there were far more grammar school places
for boys than for girls, yet boys did worse in the tests.)

Not surprisingly, these grammar school boys, with occupations their
fathers had often not heard of, came to think of occupation and job
title as very important. As civil servants, university dons and market
researchers, they designed class classification systems based on men's
occupations. Occupation was seen as a proxy for behaviour, for leisure
pursuits, for taste, for class. Under this system, the university
lecturer from humble origins was equal to the don who did not need to
draw his salary. Women fitted awkwardly into such schema.

Unfortunately, classification based on occupation came to predict
certain behaviour less well over time. Almost from the moment when the
occupations were grouped, people started voting less and less reliably
by occupational class. They took longer to stop behaving so predictably
in lifestyle, partly because health outcomes have long antecedents, but
premature mortality, too, has become a little less predictable by class.

So, are we a more classless society? It doesn't feel quite like that.
What I think has shifted is how we know what class we are in.

Give someone a fancy job title today and it may not mean quite as much
as it did a few decades ago. You know what "general manager for the
horizontal arrangement of goods" means, and what is being stacked where.
Yet it is also possible for two jobs to have the same title but be
completely different. Different members of parliament, for instance,
have very different lifestyles and differing levels of income and
wealth. In the past they did, too - but you could predict their class
from knowing their political party label. That is much less the case
today. Now there are better ways to gauge class. Tell me where you went
to school, what your father's job was then, and your home postcode, and
I'll quite happily put you in a pigeonhole. It still helps to know your
job title, but I'm not that bothered about it. I'd be much more
interested in your financial situation and that of your wider family.
Your class is your wealth - and your family wealth.

The new definitions

In Britain in 2008, if you cannot save ten GBP a month and pay for an
annual holiday, you are most probably Poor. This month, the Joseph
Rowntree Foundation published a survey, A Minimum Income Standard for
Britain: What People Think, which suggested that GBP 13,400 a year was
the minimum for a single adult, and GBP 26,800 for a couple with two
children. Roughly a quarter of households live on less than the
equivalent amounts in Britain today. Most are in debt. A holiday would
be taking the kids to their grandparents over the summer. If they are
pensioners, they spend over a tenth of their income to stay warm. The
Poor are the new "lower class".

The Poor are now so numerous that sociologists subclassify them. The
poorest of the poor - the Very Poor - have an income of GBP 8,600 or
less, and have no savings or wider family network to call on (so no
annual visits to Grandma's). If you are in the poorest tenth of
households in Britain, and your child asks for three GBP for the coach
fare for a school trip, you have to go without something else to pay for
it. When asked, the Very Poor describe themselves as living in poverty.

Above the quarter who are poor is a group that has been squeezed in
number in recent years: those who are neither wealthy nor poor. They are
Normal. If you are Normal you can pay for school trips, and a holiday
(but not in Mauritius). You are getting by, but not comfortably. You are
in a shrinking middle group. A single adult living in the middle will
have an annual income of between GBP 13,400 and about GBP 29,600. Being
at the top of that band entails working for fiftee GBP an hour for a
38-hour week. Live on your own and earn more than that, and you are not
Normal - you are in the best-off quarter. Have two kids and a joint
income of GBP 60,000-plus, and you are not Normal.

Those in the middle (single income: GBP 13,400 to GBP 29,600) are not
the old middle class, but what was the old lower middle class and upper
working class. Those who once tottered on that crucial boundary now find
they are all jumbled up in a new middle where acquired airs, or evidence
of a more humble background, count for much less. Today, the middle
makes up almost exactly fifty per cent of UK households. Across Britain,
outside of London, most people are still Normal, but that normality
ranges from living a whisker above poverty to living a whisker below the
wealthy.

The Wealthy are the 25 per cent of the population who are living on an
income of more than GBP 60,000 for a couple with kids, or on GBP 30,000
or over for a single adult. (Having high savings and low outgoings can
also make you wealthy at annual incomes below this level.) You are in
the Wealthy group if, should you and your spouse simultaneously drop
dead today, your estate would be liable for inheritance tax (the
single-person inheritance tax threshold is now GBP 312,000). But don't
worry: most people like you will manage to spend your wealth in old age
long before you have a chance to pass much of it on. If you are wealthy,
you are partaking in most of the norms of society. Most people in this
group, however, choose not to use private health and education
provision. If they did, other luxuries would have to be forgone.

Above the Wealthy is a group that does exclude itself from the norms of
society, and for which the choices are less problematic: we'll call it
the Exclusively Wealthy. They make up about five per cent of us. For
them, the question is not where to go on holiday, but where is best to
go in each season. What sets the Exclusively Wealthy apart from the rest
is not their reliance on private provision, which they use routinely,
but their large properties, multiple foreign holidays, and outright
purchase of new luxury cars. You need to be doing about two out of three
of those things, while preferably having a six-figure household income,
to be up with these Joneses.

There is a national fixation with this group, and enough written on them
to sell a month of Sunday newspapers. Suffice to say here that they are
fractal in nature. Within the best-off five per cent, the top half are
so much better off than the rest that they make the other half feel
poor. Within that better-off half, half are so much better off that ...
and so on. It's a recursive definition. It ends with the 0.01 per cent
at the very top who worry about being kidnapped, and know that their
children and lovers lie to them for their wealth.

This is our wealth-based British class system today. It is a 25-50-25
division, the edges of which can be shaved off to almost infinite layers
of abstraction. It may sound crude, but money is. Airs and graces no
longer matter. In fact, it is crucial to try to avoid them regardless of
which end of the scale you are from. Dress down if you might otherwise
look like a "toff": take off that tie, unclip that accent. Dress up if
you come from more dour stock: sensible suits, a neat haircut, and hold
your knife and fork correctly. Most of the old markers of class fade as,
for men, a ubiquitous "bloke" is created and women look "smart". Where
the signs remain - those brown leather shoes that only men from certain
schools still wear, that fake handbag that only women not quite au fait
would carry - they matter less and less.

Knowing the shape we're in

The comedian Roseanne Barr once said that Americans were all
middle-class until the man came to turn the electricity off.

In the United States, those from the worst-off fifth of families work
for eight days or more to earn what those in the best-off fifth are paid
in a day. In Britain, that ratio is seven days' work for one day's pay,
in Ireland six days, in France just over five days, in Sweden four days
and in Iceland three and a half days. Class systems within the rich
countries of the world increasingly reflect their income-inequality ratios.

The very least we should do, if we ever want to understand our changed
social world, is to learn about its basic shape. In Britain, as in many
other countries, we best know our place through a mechanism even older
than the Victorian class system: we take a census.

In the past, British censuses have responded to the way society was
changing. When people started to get hot running water, the census asked
if they had it. When almost everyone did have it, the census stopped
asking (similarly over inside toilets, over cars and over occupations).
It took a riot or two before the census asked about ethnicity. It took
parliament to insist that in 2001 we ask about religion. Yet a campaign
in the same year to insert a question about household income failed.

In the US, the census asks about income. In Scandinavia, it is recorded
on national population registers. The next UK census in 2011, however,
will still not ask about citizens' income or wealth. (Not, at least in
England and Wales; Scotland may be the exception.) It will mean, in
effect, that we will not be asking about class.

Perhaps we are afraid of what we would be told, and what kind of a
segregated country we would see.

_____

This article is published in the summer edition of the Fabian Review as
part of the Fabian Society's work on class and inequality, and on the
Fabian website (www.fabians.org.uk). Danny Dorling works with the Social
and Spatial Inequalities Research Group in the department of geography,
University of Sheffield. With Bethan Thomas, he is the author of
Identity in Britain: a Cradle-to-Grave Atlas (Policy Press). He is also
an author, with colleagues, of The Atlas of the Real World (Thames &
Hudson) and The Grim Reaper's Road Map (Policy Press), both to be
published in October.


"When I was growing up, class was clearly defined. You knew where you
were in the pecking order. You knew your place. Mine was lowly. Now we
have a disparity between people, and no social movement. Footballers and
pop stars have got rich through talent and energy and bravado, but
haven't taken the working class with them. People do feel they are at
the bottom of the pile."
-- Joan Bakewell, Broadcaster

"It's always been the same - those who do the work versus those who own
the wealth. The slave owners had their land, and the slaves tilled it.
In the end, I think Marx had it right."
-- Tony Benn

"Does money now mean more than class? Ask yourself what is the first
thing new money does. It puts its sons down for Eton and buys a stately
home. Money has not killed off the old class system: it is fuelling its
survival into a new century."
-- Meredith Etherington-Smith, Author and etiquette expert

"Class has always been about money. Breeding has now been exposed; it is
now just a commodity itself. Where I live, even 'the middle class' is a
redundant term. Whether you can afford access to leisure activities or
pay your bills defines your class."
-- Soweto Kinch, Jazz musician and rapper

"It's rather discouraging that people give a degree of respect for grand
fortunes and not grand titles. People like Roman Abramovich get enormous
amounts of respect and dukes don't."
-- Max Hastings, Former editor

http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2008/07/middle-class-british-income


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