I was born the year Margaret Thatcher came to power, 1979, and cast my first vote the year the man she called her “greatest success” scored his first landslide victory. Over my lifetime the contours of respectable politics have been defined by the joint trajectory they set. Now, 25 years after Blair’s landslide victory, it’s clear that his legacy is best understood in conjunction with hers.

Like Thatcher, Blair was animated by a powerful vision. His was also, like hers, a politics of the ideal: of elevating the abstract over the material world. And together, they’ve delivered a politics in which the ruling class has withdrawn en masse from engaging with the world as it is, preferring the world as they think it should be. Today, we live with the monstrous offspring of their combined economic and cultural politics of abstraction. Blending Thatcherite callousness for the politically weak with the providential self-righteousness of Blairism, their legacy has fused in a politico-commercial basilisk that proposes to rule us all: woke capital.

Many of those who, unlike me, remember the Seventies will tell you Britain’s economy wasn’t in a happy place back then. Britain was “the sick man of Europe”, all crumbling public services, sclerotic nationalised industries and rolling strikes. Thatcher’s leadership transformed this Britain, forcing the economy kicking and screaming away from earning a living by making stuff toward earning a living by manipulating ideas.

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New Labour was beyond parody

By Ian Martin

Deindustrialisation was brutally swift: between the second quarter in 1979 and the second quarter in 1981, manufacturing employment fell by 17% and manufacturing output fell by 20%. During her tenure, financial services rose from 15% to 24% of the economy, while manufacturing slumped from 21% to 17%. The impact was, as is now well-documented, not evenly felt. Knowledge-industry hubs such as London, Cambridge and Milton Keynes boomed, while those dependent on manufacturing languished. My childhood in the Home Counties was comfortable; my Liverpool-born husband remembers a graffiti slogan in the Merseyside of “managed decline” that read: “WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS”.

The Old Left served as the political voice of workers in the real economy. But with the unions broken and industries privatised, that Labour Party was permanently crippled as a cultural force. Blair, though, carved out a new role for the Labour Party by transposing the politics of de-materialisation from the economic to the social domain.

Out went unequal power relations grounded in the material dynamics of labour and capital; in came unequal power relations based on abstract identity groups. But Blair’s politics of abstraction went well beyond the newfound emphasis on identities, to suffuse much less obviously political facets of the Nineties and Noughties zeitgeist. Notably, he radically accelerated the transformation Thatcher inaugurated of that quintessential material marker of place and belonging — a home — into an asset class.

When he came to power, the cost of a home was around four times the average salary, where — with a few blips — it had been for the best part of a century. Since then, with only a brief post-crash hiatus, that multiple has rocketed to eight times the average salary and continues to climb. London’s housing stock is now, notoriously, a store of value for the international overclass of oligarchs created by financialisation post-Thatcher, and subsequently courted by Blair.

In this era came, too, a joyful rush to “modernise” all the comforts of home. The ebullient aesthetic of “Cool Britannia” sought to drag everything from food to furniture, interior design and tableware, from the stodgy domains of function and tradition and subject it to the “creative industries”: a sector enthusiastically championed as a core powerhouse for the new, dematerialised, ideas-only Britain.

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The abject failure of Cool Britannia

By Mary Harrington

From the late Nineties through the mid Noughties, an aesthetic tidal wave swept over Britain, replacing anything even faintly suburban or Tory-coded (carpets in pubs, cream leather sofas, anything beige or burgundy for example) with “modern” lines and bright colours. Old things were all very well, but only once they’d been self-consciously “upcycled”: claw-foot bathtubs painted in “quirky” colours, or fish and chips given a Jamie Oliver makeover.

Meanwhile, Old Left rallying terms such as “community” and “solidarity” lost their grounding in physical work or geographies, and became abstractions accessible to all.

Nationhood was yanked free of anything organic, chthonic or — heaven forbid — ethnic, and given a “quirky” makeover so it, too, could serve as an access-all-areas abstraction.

There were Union Jack flags on everything, from cushions to Mini Coopers and Geri Halliwell, while “Britishness” was retooled so its previous connotations were recast as repellently “nativist” and low-status. A new vision of “Britishness” was promulgated in its place: more like a gym membership (or indeed a de-materialised asset class), compatible with free movement in the expanded European Union, and acquired simply by moving to Britain and paying your taxes.

Blair even incubated today’s ideas-only art world. Number 10 saw visits from the Young British Artists, whose controversy-courting works comprised nothing figurative or traditional, but artfully-titled pickled sharks and unmade beds: works of pure idea.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

Thatcher shifted us irrevocably toward rule by abstraction when she broke the unions and permanently disabled the Old Left’s industrial-worker power-base. And Blair, too, made his contributions to the politics of abstraction permanent — by restructuring Britain’s economy again, toward the over-production of knowledge workers.

He did this first by shifting university funding onto a loan model, then replacing the cap on student numbers with a target of 50% of young people attaining a degree. The entirely foreseeable effects of this policy have been much discussed since, and include grade inflation, credentialism, regional “brain drain”, and a proliferation of resentful, underpaid and increasingly radical young progressives, among many others.

On occasion, Tories in the current administration will gesture at fixing one of these problems. But just as Blair had no option but a leftism of abstractions, so the Tory administration that succeeded him is stuck with the machine that overproduces the unreality class. For the student loan machine serves a secondary function, as an off-the-books subsidy to areas devastated by Thatcher’s economic de-materialisation. And this is of such structural importance to the British economy that neither party can afford to turn off the spigot.

A second-order effect of this quandary is to entrench the mass immigration that accompanied Blair’s “gym membership” version of national identity. This policy is so unpopular among Britain’s rump of real-economy workers that it made a significant contribution to perhaps the strongest protest we’ve seen against the politics of abstraction to date: Brexit. But when status, funding, voice and other perks overwhelmingly accrue to the unreality class, who can blame young people from seeking the credentials to join it? And this in turn leaves a slew of vacancies in real-economy work, such as care and agriculture, that must be filled from somewhere.

Meanwhile, few among the elite retain enough of a foothold in the real economy to resist the now well-embedded cross-party domination by denizens of this world of pure idea. So, unsurprisingly, we find all manner of issues now split along the reality/unreality axis.

Lockdowns, for example, were experienced quite differently by those with knowledge-based jobs and those whose daily activities take place in the material world. Elsewhere, it’s hard to reconcile views on transgender rights between those who experience sex dimorphism as materially significant, and those who see it as a set of abstract social constructions.

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Cherie Blair's class war

By Joan Smith

Was Blair the architect of the burgeoning 21st-century elite war on reality, though, or just the avatar for a larger trend? Similar patterns can be seen across many developed economies: across the pond, for example, America had Reaganism and Clintonism. And recent debates in countries such as France and America suggest a similar divergence between a tone-deaf elite bedazzled by abstractions, and a resentfully subaltern class that still inhabits the much-deprecated real economy.

But even if Blair didn’t force this on Britain out of nowhere, so much as steer the country according to prevailing winds, he still made a unique contribution: a distinctively Blairish sense of providential moral certainty that now overlays growing swathes of the economic individualism Thatcher inaugurated.

For if Thatcher believed markets and privatisation would deliver improved services for the British public across the board, it was under Blair that the corporate world embraced the idea that commercial and moral incentives could be aligned, for the benefit of all. The “Third Way” didn’t just involve sweet-talking oligarchs for a bit more tax take, or a slew of costly and ineffective “market” mechanisms in the NHS, but also a full-bore drive to fuse morality and profit via “social enterprise” policy, a move that tilled crucial soil for what we now know as “woke capital”.

And of course what this means in practice is less businesses doing good, than vast corporations hectoring us about abstract things that don’t impact their profits (such as pronouns) while remaining as avaricious as ever about material things that do (such as the housing crisis).

So it was Maggie and Tony together who created the conditions for the 21st-century war on reality we’re all now enjoying — a war now exacerbated by the onrushing digitisation of everything. We can thank him, too, for a set of perverse political incentives that condemn half of Britain’s youth (more, if policymakers are daft enough to listen to him today) to perpetual indebtedness and a credentialist Ponzi scheme, while stranding the other half in a grim and prospectless gig economy.

But if there’s one achievement for which his name must be cursed down the ages, it’s for that air of ineffable smugness that drifts from those getting filthy stinking rich while claiming to make the world a better place. We can thank Tony, above all, for the fusion of self-dealing and self-righteousness that now hovers over the war on reality, and deafens the unreality class to the increasingly mutinous mutterings from below.

The notion that humans are born with an inbuilt collection of social and moral presets, that represent the optimum “natural” way of being human, is deeply influential in our culture. But is it really possible to establish, objectively and scientifically, the best way to ensure a child is raised according to “nature”?

In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) the philosopher John Locke argued that rather than (as medieval wisdom had it) being born sinful, infants were in fact tabula rasa — a blank slate. He believed it was the duty of parents to ensure children developed in ways that habituated them to their environment, for example by regularly bathing their feet in cold water so they would not find wet boots unbearable as adults.

Some seven decades later, in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau went considerably further. Children, he said, are not tabula rasa but bearers of divine virtue that is only corrupted by contact with culture. In Emile, or On Education he argued that “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil”. The purpose of child-rearing and education is thus to do as little damage to natural human goodness as possible.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Are humans blank pages upon which parents should try and write the best possible version of a social being? Or does the introduction of culture corrupt a higher, purer, innate nature? This debate still rages today, across spheres as varied as education and criminal justice, but the most intimate battleground for the ongoing contest between Locke and Rousseau is the so-called “mummy wars”.

On the side of Locke, for example, you see sleep experts such as Richard Ferber or routine advocates such as Gina Ford, who advocate parental authority, structure and boundary-setting to train a child’s habits along lines that will ensure development as flourishing members of their community. On the side of Rousseau, you see William Sears and Sarah Ockwell-Smith, advocates of “gentle” or “attachment” parenting, that “allows the natural, biological attachment-promoting behaviors of the infant and the intuitive, biological, caregiving qualities of the mother to come together”.

This has arisen in tandem with a whole ecosystem of scientific research oriented toward establishing in some definitive way which parenting methods produce the best “outcomes”. As Ellie Lee argues in the 2014 anthology Parenting Culture Studies, since the twentieth century there has been a turn away from the validation of “a mother’s instincts, virtue and affection” toward parenting as a “scientific enterprise”.

It should be noted at this point that the polite euphemism “parenting”, in practice, almost always means “mothering”. I have written previously in these pages about the asymmetric physiological burden of child-rearing; and the main asymmetry, once a child has been gestated and delivered safely, is of course breastfeeding.

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By Matthew Goodwin

Science is unequivocal about the benefits of breastfeeding. But fathers cannot breastfeed, a non-negotiable biological given that throws down the gauntlet to modern ideals of equal parenting. This poses difficult questions for modern families. Is it best to breastfeed even if it conflicts with mothers’ desire — or need — to work? Is it more feminist and “natural” to embrace the unique biological role of a woman’s body in breastfeeding, or to bottle-feed in the interests of equal parenting?

Even public policy gives mixed messages. Should mothers stay close to their babies or hand them over and go back to work? The NHS promotes breastfeeding via poster campaigns even as breastfeeding services remain under-funded. Meanwhile, family policy across all the main parties focuses on subsidising childcare, and the rising cost of living makes stay at home mothering unaffordable for many on lower incomes.

Positioned as it is on the fault-lines between choice and necessity, biology and culture, breastfeeding also creates an ideal battleground for the conflict between Locke and Rousseau over the best way to raise a child. Should we impose a structure on when babies feed, or encourage breastfeeding on demand?

In this light it was refreshing to read  a study, published in January, that stepped outside the usual parameters of the “mummy wars” — that is, the question of absolute benefit to the baby of a given parenting practice — to look at the social meaning of breastfeeding.

The study explored the different relationships of mothers to breastfeeding in developing and developed economies, as well as across time, to conclude that as well as being a means of feeding a baby, breastfeeding also has sociocultural meaning among mothers themselves, functioning as a site for competition and status-seeking.

In poorer societies where formula milk is expensive and clean water hard to come by, the study showed that breastfeeding is perceived a low-status means of feeding your child. In contrast, in developed societies with ready access to clean water but where staying at home with a baby is unaffordable for many, breastfeeding uptake is far higher among middle and upper class women as it serves to signal wealth.

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Who gains from the great university scam?

By Mary Harrington

Breastfeeding, then, is laden with complex meanings that vary across cultural and economic contexts. And here we can see what the “mummy wars” repeatedly miss out, in their hyperfocus on the authority of science: the dimension of social meaning.

Viewed through the social lens, it becomes clear that supposedly scientific debates about optimum mothering are heavily class-inflected. Consider the two principal UK parenting forums: Mumsnet and Netmums. Spend more than a few minutes browsing the discussions there and it is clear (as articulated in this thread) that the culture of Mumsnet skews middle- to upper-middle-class in its aesthetic and register. Netmums, on the other hand, skews more lower-middle or working-class.

Explore further, and it becomes apparent that Netmums is for Locke, while Mumsnet is more Rousseau. Even mentioning Gina Ford on Mumsnet will get you called “brave”. Indeed, so passionate is the consensus against routine and structure in babycare on among Mumsnetters, that in 2007 Ford herself threatened legal action against the website if its forum members did not stop insulting her. On the more working-class Netmums, by contrast, Gina Ford gets a relatively warm write-up.

Thus a suspicion begins to emerge that notionally scientific parenting questions are in truth vehicles for class and cultural debates. In addition, the middle and upper classes skew toward a liberal, “instinct”-oriented “natural” Rousseauesque philosophy of motherhood, while lower and middle-class mothers are more drawn to a structured, authority-based model. Are there broader political parallels to be drawn?

It is tempting to extrapolate from the class-inflected contest between Rousseau and Locke across Mumsnet and Netmums, and the “open” vs “closed” (or alternatively “Anywhere” and “Somewhere”) tussles evident throughout contemporary politics. To put it another way, Mumsnetters are raising Anywheres, while Netmums are raising Somewheres.

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Does any of this matter? Well, a young mother from a poor background who feels guilted and judged by the middle-class mummies she meets at Sure Start for putting her baby into a routine from birth, so granny can care for her while she works shifts, might well think so.

“There is no such thing as an infant,” wrote paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in 1960, “only a nursing couple”. That is to say, very young children are so absolutely dependent on a caregiver that it makes no sense to speak about a baby in the abstract. It follows from this that it makes no sense to conceive of a baby’s wellbeing as distinct from the wellbeing of its mother. And in that light, whatever the science says, sometimes breast may not be best.

Just as newborns cannot meaningfully be abstracted from their caregivers, nor can humans (perhaps especially babies) meaningfully be abstracted from their social and cultural relations. It is not known what happened to the Inchkeith babies, but a 13^th century version of the same experiment, by the ghoulish Empereror Frederick II, resulted not in the emergence of natural language after all. Rather, the poor infants whom Frederick commanded to be raised with food but no other interaction simply died, presumably of lack of love.

Rather than being a corrupting influence on the intrinsic goodness of infant humans, culture and relationship are as essential to the nourishment of babies as milk and regular sleep. With this in mind, we should stop using science as an ideological stick with which to beat mothers into compliance with Locke, Rousseau or whoever. Maybe instead we could accept that childrearing is an intricate dialogue between biological necessity and cultural meaning.

Rather than treating feeding or nap-time as a proxy for ideological arm-wrestling over the nature of human beings, we can leave families to suit their parenting to their circumstances and – perhaps – even trust that in most cases mother really does know best.

As the National Centre for Social Research points out, the average level of support for leaving the EU among degree-holders was just 26%. This compares to 50% among those with A-levels, 61% among those with O-levels or GCSEs, and a striking 78% among those with no qualifications. Almost every study of the Brexit vote since has confirmed that low formal educational attainment is a major predictor of whether or not somebody backs Brexit, just as it is a major predictor of whether or not people vote for populist, nationalist or Eurosceptic parties elsewhere in the world.

These voters have routinely been dismissed as ignorant, or as the ‘losers’ of globalisation. But they actually had very good reason to want to radically shake up the social settlement. Many were keenly aware that both they and their communities were getting a rotten deal. And this is especially true when it comes to the one thing that has a bigger impact on life outcomes than almost everything else: education.

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When we explored the role of educational divides in support for Brexit with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, we found that — often regardless of their own level of education — people were significantly more likely to back Brexit in communities that were ‘low-skilled’, where there were fewer graduates and less opportunities for them to get ahead. It is in these areas where people face what we call a ‘double whammy’: while people find themselves falling behind because of their own lack of formal education, this disadvantage is then compounded by a general lack of educational opportunity in their area.

Indeed, had Britain explored the state of educational inequality before the referendum, then the country might not have been surprised by the result. As the Commission on Inequality in Education has shown, during the 30 years before Britain voted for Brexit, regional inequalities in education were not only strong but had been worsening. Furthermore, these inequalities were often sharper than those seen in many other advanced nations, while poorer countries such as Latvia were actually doing better than Britain at reducing them.

It is areas that ended up voting for Brexit in the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, the Midlands and Wales that were the hardest hit by education inequality. We’ve talked endlessly about how voters in these pro-Brexit regions were ‘misled’ by politicians or ‘manipulated’ by social media while ignoring the fact that they are on the receiving end of an increasingly inegalitarian education system.

Schools in Leave areas are more likely to have larger numbers of low-performing students, to have fewer experienced and qualified teachers, to suffer from high rates of teacher turnover and to lag behind London and the South East on a range of other measures. As the Education Policy Institute notes, in some areas of London – where only 40% of people voted Leave – nearly 70% of available secondary school places are in high-quality schools. The comparable figures in Blackpool, where 68% voted Leave, or Hartlepool, where 70% voted Leave, were zero.

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By Polly Mackenzie

Most reports estimate that these inequalities will get worse not better. David Laws notes that while 16 of the 20 local authorities with the biggest increases in access to high-performing school places were in London, all of the areas that struggled with the biggest declines in access to these coveted schools were outside the capital, in typically pro-Brexit areas such as Barnsley, Blackpool, Hartlepool, Knowsley, Redcar and Middlesbrough. Most of these Brexit towns do not have a university and are usually far removed from one.

But having a university in all these towns should not necessarily be the end goal. Britain needs to be doing a lot more to increase the value and status of non-university forms of education. As one observer recently pointed out, if you combine teaching grants, tuition fee subsidies and research grants, then public spending on higher education is around £17 billion a year,  whereas spending on core adult skills fell by over 40% between 2009 and 2015, and is now only £1.5 billion. It seems obvious that one thing we should have done immediately in the shadow of the referendum was to start spending a lot more money on developing vocational education and training in these areas, as well as developing an apprenticeship scheme that actually works.

But it is also true that when it comes to education many of these areas do not offer much in place of a university. As one analyst notes, towns that saw a strong vote to leave were also “more likely to be home to FE colleges whose public funding has been slashed since 2010”.

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By Matthew Goodwin

Given all this, then, why are we spending £50 billion on a high-speed railway, the effects of which are contested, when we could be investing in improving further technical and vocational training, or the quality of early-years education, in left behind communities, which we know will pay dividends in the long term?

Why not take this money and a greater share of other pots going to London and the South East and use it, instead, to follow the advice of the recent Commission on Inequality in Education by establishing a new fund for schools in disadvantaged areas. Such funding could be used to help teachers buy homes (which means they stick around for longer) or support a national roll-out of after-school family literacy classes in left behind towns. Improving teacher training and retention, and bolstering parental engagement, are two things that are routinely identified by experts as being key to tackling educational inequality.

Another longer-term option would be to learn more from countries like Finland, which is routinely flagged as a model of best practice in the education world. Even though some of the small nation’s metrics have fallen a little in recent years, it remains a top-performer. In sharp contrast to our own system, Finland is philosophically opposed to private schools, has universal pre-school education until the age of seven and subjects children to less standardised testing, putting a stronger emphasis on kids being … um … kids.

Students receive little homework and during the critical early-years period far more effort is focused on personal rather than academic development. There is also a strong focus on developing socially mixed classrooms, by adapting catchment areas to ensure that the intakes are socially diverse — something that will be increasingly key to tackling divides between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. And teaching training is much more rigorous: you can’t teach without a Master’s degree and most teachers train for around six years, including more detailed training in pedagogical research.

Crucially, around eight in 10 teachers then continue to undertake professional development and many are required to complete a residency program, which in theory could be adapted so that more highly-trained teachers in the UK have to complete mandatory work experience roll-outs in more disadvantaged towns.

It surprises me that there haven’t been far louder calls for a debate about how to fix our obviously broken social and economic settlement. The damage was exposed by the referendum back in 2016 and inequality in our education system is a root cause. If one by-product of our never-ending and often tortuous Brexit deliberations is that we all begin to think harder about how to remedy these glaring inequalities then perhaps it was worthwhile after all.

When she was pregnant with her daughter Biddy, and on the run from her abusive former boyfriend, for example, she worked in a seamy Soho peep-show. Numerous clients took a perverse pleasure in ogling her expanding, naked form (the author spares us no gruelling detail: one particularly charmless crack-head barked the instructions: “Turn around and spread. I want to see that baby’s head”.)

Just as the reader is reeling from the crudity of the clientele, Carraway – as ever – complicates things with details of the unexpected. The day before she is due to leave to have her baby, the peep-show boss and other girls unveil a surprise: a baby shower, with a cake and a room crammed with gifts from the ‘regulars’ such as a buggy, sleepsuits, a Moses basket (“one man even gifted me his ex-wife’s breast pump just before he ejaculated into my booth.”)

Poverty is no place for the squeamish. One of the most useful things about money, it appears, is that it buys you some distance from the bodily fluids of strangers. In its absence, they’re everywhere: the traces of urine or bloodstains on old mattresses in rented accommodation; the ancient semen that is simply recirculated with a desultory mop around the peep-show floor; the blocked toilet and the pan of vomit in the women’s refuge that mysteriously appears every morning.

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Carraway herself does not seem very squeamish, particularly as a writer. There’s a lot in Skint Estate which is shocking, sad and scary, as well as funny and painfully honest.

The author exposes herself, knowingly, to the judgement of those in more secure situations, while demonstrating an intimate understanding of how those judgements operate. (At one point she describes herself, having adapted her accent and fallen in with a posh coterie of prosecco-quaffing Maida Vale mums, joining them in tut-tutting at a group of young working-class mums having an impromptu picnic with their babies, Maltesers and cans of beer. Afterwards, she feels ashamed.)

She writes, for example, about fleeing domestic violence with her young daughter. She went to live with a well-off man, Kingsley, who had formerly been imprisoned for assaulting her but to whom she is, in some ways, still close. It is not a wise choice, as her female friends tell her at the time, but then wisdom is sometimes a luxury available only to those with other options. Exhausted by financial precariousness, she takes up Kingsley’s unusual offer of posing as his wife in order to secure an inheritance from his father (Kingsley is now gay, and his father is homophobic).

If that sounds like a 19th century plot, then so is the economic situation in which this single mother finds herself: eking out low-paid jobs as a sex chat-line worker, a ‘secret shopper,’ a ‘web psychic’ and a ‘kiss ’n’ tell girl of misery porn’ supplying real-life stories to women’s magazines, but still not making enough to avoid the trip to the foodbank.

For a time such concerns abate, and Carraway temporarily enjoys a fixed roof over her head, and an abundance of branded items which she details with self-mockery mingled with the memory of desire: Boden clothes, a Rangemaster oven, Farrow and Ball paint, Le Creuset pans.

The author argues, accurately, that these are the means by which social acceptability is signalled, albeit a fraudulent kind of acceptability. Then again, it’s easy to dismiss the importance of brands if they’re financially within reach: when they’re not, they mean so much more.

But when Kingsley kicks off again, the safety suggested by the brands is destroyed: “WHORE has been sprayed across my Farrow & Ball No 26 ‘Down Pipe’ bedroom wall in red spray paint.” Even when things are bad, Carraway can’t help spotting little ironies: “He tries to break the Le Creuset pans, but they are very durable. They have a lifetime guarantee.”

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By Fiona Sturges

The intimate details of poverty aren’t discussed much in society, largely because – to generalise – the people who currently tend to write books and articles aren’t regularly exposed to such hardships, and the people who are exposed to such hardships don’t tend to write books and articles.

There is, of course, the noble journalistic tradition of immersing oneself in poverty for the purposes of writing about it, undertaken most successfully by George Orwell in his Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. But whatever insights such books deliver – and Orwell’s delivered many, including the unforgettable image of his landlord’s filthy thumb-print on an approaching slice of bread-and-butter – they cannot fully reflect the central panic of those who are trapped in the poverty cycle: that they will never, ever escape from it.

It is no coincidence that Carraway especially likes the writing of the US author Charles Bukowski, whose books, like his life, are full of financial uncertainty and an existence proudly played out beyond the boundaries of respectability. Like Bukowski, she keeps an authorial eye open even in the midst of howling chaos, mesmerised both by the potential awfulness and warmth of other people.

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Skint Estate, however, is also a sign of a recent phenomenon: that the publishing world is finally cracking open, after a long hiatus, a decisive conversation about class. It arrives just after Lowborn, the novelist Kerry Hudson’s powerful memoir of her peripatetic working-class childhood, being moved from one insecure dwelling to another by her troubled, heavy-drinking mother. Hudson’s book is written from the perspective of someone who has now escaped poverty, beginning: “Shall we start with a happy ending? I made it. I rose.”

Along with the tangible hardships and dangers she left behind – “sink estates, burnt-out houses and ice-cream vans selling drugs at the school gates” – is the weight of communal judgement that still falls upon the poor: “The names still ring in my head everyday: chav, scav, lowlife, NED, underclass, lowborn.” In her new lifestyle as an author, she can afford to eat well, enjoy films and books and can “heat my flat in the winter”. But there remains a sense of psychological dislocation: “I find myself unable to reconcile my ‘now’ with my past.”

Carraway and Hudson are two very different writers, and their experiences and voices are distinctively their own, but a couple of similar points arise from the histories they describe.

Both had ‘difficult’ mothers, although Carraway’s was more cruelly violent, both beating Carraway up and also rewarding her as a child for physically assaulting her own father as he slept. Hudson says of her grandmother – a former beauty who looked like Elizabeth Taylor in her youth – “my grandma was the most terrifying woman I’ve ever known” whose charm could easily turn to ice. Her mother, not ready for motherhood and largely adrift from Hudson’s father, struggled with depression and the erratic hope of fresh starts offered by unpredictable men.

There was love in the mix, too, although complicatedly expressed. For a child, it is the mother – so often harshly judged by society – who is nonetheless the last line of defence against a hostile world. But when the mother proves unreliable, buckling under wider pressures, what is it that keeps a struggling child afloat?

The lifebuoys, ideally, should be offered by wider society: the availability of social housing of decent quality, good state education with after-school provision, caring teachers, free school meals for children on low incomes, free or subsidised leisure activities, libraries that are geared towards welcoming children and encouraging reading. Such things were once imagined as the bedrock of a civilised society, and yet many of them – social housing and library provision in particular – have been steadily eroded, while teachers report trying to do their best for children in increasingly adverse circumstances.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, The Sunday Times carried a report on conditions in London’s Broadwater Farm housing estate, where the admirable headmistress of the estate’s Willow Primary School explained how she and her staff dreaded holidays, as many of their pupils would simply be kept indoors to keep them away from wider dangers of drugs and gangs. An accompanying photograph of accommodation for one family of six, a single cramped room with damp and ragged wallpaper, called to mind a Dickensian slum.

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The relatively modest leisure activities which come so easily to middle-class children – swimming, bowling, trips to the seaside or camping – are frequently unaffordable for families who are barely making ends meet: the parents can spare neither the money nor the time from work, often in jobs which do not provide holiday pay. A crowdfunded appeal will open up more opportunities for the Broadwater Farm children this summer – yet there are similar stories from streets and estates all over Britain.

There are some thoughtful initiatives happening: Hudson goes back to Hetton-le-Hole near Newcastle to revisit one of her old schools – where, unusually, she felt welcomed and not ‘embarrassed about being poor’ – which has just undergone ‘poverty proofing’, a process set up by a charity to help children from poorer backgrounds not feel excluded by details that adults often overlooked.

One significant source of embarrassment was at not having “the latest, expensive water bottle” – something the children were keenly aware of among themselves – which the school solved by introducing a standard, school-branded water bottle instead. Yet the great sweep of government policy, particularly in areas such as housing, has been travelling in the opposite direction: towards the entrenchment of social inequality.

Why is it so? Part of the answer may be that policy begins in culture, the government’s instinctive reading of the public mood. For many years the prevailing cultural attitude towards those on the poverty line has been one of suspicion bordering on contempt, with middle-market tabloid tales of chavs and scroungers milking the system, being amply rewarded with benefits for irresponsibility.

Programmes such as the Jeremy Kyle Show selected the poor and vulnerable and held them up for mass ridicule and moral lectures. Even talent shows such as the X-Factor relied upon a mood of mockery, singling out any ordinary person who dared to believe they were more talented than the panel of judges perceived.

Suggested reading

How Jeremy Kyle undersold humanity

By Giles Fraser

In a world in which branded goods were increasingly used as a signifier of who and what you were – to a much greater degree, say, than when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s – to be unable to afford them took on a measure of stigma. The policies of austerity fell most heavily upon those who could afford it the least. Housing costs soared while affordable housing stock shrank.

At the same time as the cultural and political climate turned chilly for the working-classes, a new development entered the jobs market: the ‘gig economy’ and the ‘zero-hours’ model of employment rendered low-paid incomes more unpredictable, and ate away at many of the old securities, such as paid holiday and sick leave.

Despite high employment, we have seen the re-emergence of the ‘working poor’: according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the in-work poverty rate is now the highest it has been in the past 20 years. For young graduates without family money behind them, the rise of the unpaid internship often barred them from the first step on the middle-class jobs ladder. Money made the world go round, unless you didn’t have it in the first place.

Suggested reading

Warehouse work needn't be worthless

By Polly Mackenzie

The publishing industry, up until very recently, has often seemed keener to discuss inequalities of gender and race than those of income and class (although frequently all such questions are intimately intertwined). That changed somewhat with Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass (the writing of which was crowdfunded), a searing account of growing up in a precarious household in working-class Glasgow which won last year’s Orwell Book Prize.

One of the things that McGarvey noted was how often the middle and upper classes spoke about the poor, and how little the poor talked for themselves. When they did, they were encouraged to emphasise shockingly personal stories rather than put forward any wider political critique (McGarvey’s own mother was an alcoholic and drug addict, who died aged 36). Class, he said, remained the “primary dividing line” in society.

Writing a memoir from the margins of poverty and family dysfunction is a courageous act: while reading Carraway, Hudson and McGarvey you can often sense the authors steeling themselves for criticism, fearing that – by exposing a troubled family history or their own complicated struggles to survive – they are somehow betraying those closest to them while rendering themselves dangerously vulnerable.

Those self-protective reflexes were learned in childhood, and for good reason. Hudson recalls how terrified she was of writing Lowborn, because children in impoverished, tough childhoods quickly learn to cover up abuse or neglect with silence, and it’s a hard habit to break in adulthood: “when I sit down to write it feels like an actual physical force is stopping me”. To speak in your own voice is automatically to invite judgement.

Suggested reading

My social mobility shame

By Darren McGarvey

Carraway is particularly sharp on parodying all the bizarre little nuances of class sneering that stalk her as an adult: “I am a terrible, scrounging, despicable little woman – when I celebrate my birthday at the Harvester, I visit the salad bar an unacceptable amount of times … I’m so disgusting that I’ve never even been to Center Parcs.”

The new writers on class are braced against their work being consumed as “poverty porn” or “misery memoirs” but they clearly hope for something more from it. They are asking to take up space in the public imagination, for their histories to be heard and considered, and perhaps to contribute to a wider movement for social change.

In a broader sense, that ground is also covered by the new anthology Common People, edited by Kit de Waal, in which 33 writers “reclaim and redefine what it means to be working class”. Being working class does not, of course, have to mean a parent with addictions or a childhood facing homelessness – many of these stories are decidedly joyful – but each one investigates a memory or a conversation that is not routinely heard.

One such is Daljit Nagra’s tender story of his academically gifted schoolfriend Steve, and the cultural factors that led to Steve – a white working-class boy – abandoning school at 16 while Nagra carried on to higher education “driven by a migrant psychology to succeed to a status higher than my parents”. They are still friends, and there are more insights in that moving story alone than in many a doorstop policy document.

It is one of the most insidious effects of class snobbery that it has tended to promote an image of working-class people as estranged from cultural expression, as if the arts automatically belong to a sphere that is never fully considered theirs. Yet this latest wave of working-class writers are demanding to be listened to, telling their own stories with freshly compelling, poetic, poignant and sometimes furious voices.

I hope that it is more than just a temporary phenomenon, and that a fundamental cultural shift is underway. Perhaps thereafter a changing culture will finally speak truth to policy, and this time ask the question: “Can things be different now?”

The most feted name in television right now is Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator and star of the television series Fleabag, and the writer of the first series of the equally exalted Killing Eve. Waller-Bridge deserves the praise heaped upon her. That she is a woman is also cause for celebration, given the scores of male writers that have long inhabited TV’s lauded list. But the fact that she is the privately-educated granddaughter of a baronet is hard to ignore. Since Fleabag ended, the protagonist’s poshness, and her “relatability” to non-posh viewers, has been a matter of exhaustive online debate. But more significant, surely, is how Waller-Bridge’s privileged status has helped clear her path to success.

Last year, a report from Create London and the charitable foundation Arts Emergency looked at class and inequality in the cultural industries, and found that only 12.4% of those working across film, TV and radio had “working-class” origins. The figures were even worse for BAME workers, at just 4.2%. A review from the media regulator Ofcom, published last autumn, offered a marginally brighter picture, noting that “diversity and inclusion are an increasingly core focus of the BBC’s agenda”, and that there is a “more nuanced approach to understanding and measuring representation and portrayal”. It did, however, acknowledge that there is more work to be done.

Further reading

The invisibility of disability on screen

By Ian Birrell

The problem of TV’s class ceiling can be found at every level of the food chain, from the commissioning editors whose decisions are influenced by their own biases and experience, to the script editors second-guessing the commissioning editors’ tastes, all the way down to those in graduate schemes and entry-level roles, often working for peanuts with the help of parental support.

Lisa McGee, the Northern Irish writer of Channel 4’s BAFTA-nominated Derry Girls, says that in the early stages of her career she had assumed “you just work hard, and talent will out”. But her attitude changed. “I have had my eyes opened. It’s not just the writers, it’s the people in the room with the writers. I find myself in rooms with script editors who are all lovely, clever people, but a lot have gone to Cambridge and Oxford, and that affects the storytelling. And the accents you’re hearing are pretty revealing. I’m conscious that a lot of people don’t understand what I’m saying.”

At the heart of the debate is authenticity: Shane Meadows, the son of a fish-and-chip-shop-worker mother and a lorry-driving father, doubtless knows of what he speaks when writing about working-class lives on housing estates in his This is England series. At the other end of the social strata, you sense that Lord Fellowes of West Stafford knew a thing or two about the early 20^th-century aristocracy before he sat down to write Downton Abbey. While no one’s suggesting you have to be a space traveller to write a sci-fi drama, an emotional connection to your subject is broadly seen as good thing.

Further reading

Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

There is an increasing number of initiatives aimed at opening the door to less privileged young writers – last year the BBC launched two schemes, one offering training to 50 school students to help them secure BBC roles, and another, based in Cardiff, offering ten traineeships to “high potential raw talent”. Meanwhile the Edinburgh TV Festival has launched the 2019 New Voice Award designed to make the industry accessible to marginalised writers.

But as well-intentioned as these schemes are, the broader impact is negligible. As Lisa Holdsworth, writer of Midsomer Murders and Call the Midwife, and the deputy chair of Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, explains:

“The things that get in the way of diversity, gender equality and multiple voices on television from different social backgrounds are all down the same thing: it’s people getting commissioned on a nod and a wink, and the sense that people who are not white, cis-gendered, and middle-class are a risk.”

Holdsworth says that the Guild has spoken to scores of commissioners who “genuinely think they have open doors. They think it doesn’t matter whose name is on the front of the script just as long as it’s a good story”.

What they are not doing, however, is looking at how the scripts land on their desks. “You’ve got to get through lots of gatekeepers before you’re even close to the door,” Holdsworth explains. “They need to look at the people who are bringing the work to them. That’s production companies, development producers and in-house editors, all of whom are looking for lower risk stuff. So that’s a narrowing of the field right there.”

Further reading

Why don't we talk about television anymore?

By Peter Franklin

A further narrowing of the field occurs in the actors who make it to the screen. It pays to be privileged. In a recent interview, the actor Vicky McClure, currently on our screens as DI Kate Fleming in Line of Duty, spoke of the advantages enjoyed by actors who have never faced financial hardship. “I have friends who are millionaires. I have friends who are piss-poor. I know that at the end of the day you can’t help what you are born into, that it doesn’t make you less talented… But I just find it frustrating that if you haven’t got funds, you haven’t got the same opportunities.”

For young actors and writers attending state school, the doors begin to close during secondary education, with subjects such as drama, music and theatre studies the first to be squeezed as budgets come under pressure. Small wonder our actors and TV executives are still disproportionately privately educated.

Once you’ve overcome those barriers, there is also the problem of typecasting. In 2016, the actress Maxine Peake complained: “If you’re a northerner, you only play one character and that’s northern… Nobody says, ‘Oh, Judi Dench is doing it posh again’.” Eyebrows were raised when the Eton-educated actor Dominic West was asked to adopt a Yorkshire accent for his role as Valjean in Les Misérables. It would, said the director, help audiences understand the social divisions in Victor Hugo’s novel and the character’s earthy, peasant roots. Because, while TV viewers may not be au fait with the literary classics, we all know that anyone north of Peterborough lives in a bog and subsists on a diet of raw turnip.

Further reading

Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

There is a distinction, too, in how plots vary according to the backgrounds of the protagonists. The storylines of working-class characters and are invariably issue-led, and involve trauma or deprivation – recent examples include Three Girls, about the Rochdale child sex abuse ring, starring Lesley Sharp and Maxine Peake; and Happy Valley, with Sarah Lancashire. In both dramas the protagonists’ class is integral to their identity.

“I would love us to be able to tell the stories that anyone can tell, only with working-class characters,” explains McGee. “But it’s as if being working-class has become a genre of its own.”

Inequality off-screen is actively reinforced by the stereotyping on-screen, an endless cycle of marginalisation and ghettoisation – and misunderstanding. This seems especially galling in what is, we are forever being told, a golden era of television.

But as arts budgets shrink and risk-averse TV networks look for guaranteed hits, it’s always the supposedly niche or challenging work that is first to go. If the aim of art is truly to imitate life, though, then the networks need to do more to dismantle the barriers encountered by those unable to rely on benevolent parents or a fallback job in the City. A lot of white middle-class types working behind the scenes making key decisions inevitably leads to a lot of stories about the white middle-class – or, worse still, stories of other cultures and classes told through the same old middle-class lens. And TV is the poorer for it.

It’s far trickier, however, to touch the topic when you’ve made a few quid. When you’re no longer scraping to get by, questions are asked as to how authentically you can represent working-class experiences. In fact, aren’t you going to have to turn that righteous fist on yourself?

Having spent my life railing against middle-class people and the wealthy, certain that their affluence was in some way linked to my hardship, I now find myself at an uncomfortable crossroads. In the past year, I’ve been given a taste of how the other half live, as the material circumstances of my life changed dramatically. While I still feel like the same person, I feel that my claim to being working-class grows more tenuous by the day.

Further reading

Does class still count?

By James Bloodworth

The pivotal moment came when my first book, Poverty Safari, won the Orwell Prize last year. The first thing I asked was: “Can anybody take this away from me?” That question revealed a lot – mainly how I felt the opposite of entitled to win or to even be considered.

That year still feels like a dream. I am now often introduced not only as an Orwell Prize-winner, but also as the writer of a book that George Orwell himself would have commended. This strange association with one of history’s most celebrated authors is flattering but, as I feel it, undeserved. And yet it has quite simply altered the course of my life forever.

The accolade parted the choppy sea of circumstance that for so long had obstructed my progress. Those invisible barriers that impeded my social mobility disappeared and the glimpse of a previously alien life, one without constant financial anxiety, came suddenly and surprisingly into view.

Some people seem bred for success. When people of a higher social caste become successful it is unremarkable and rarely something they must justify. When you grow up in poverty and become successful, you are never allowed to forget it. “Where did you learn to speak so well, Darren?”, is the innocent but rather offensive question I am routinely asked by people who haven’t won an Orwell prize. There’s a reason why some find my ability to articulate coherent sentences so surprising. Few would ask privately-schooled Glaswegian historian Niall Ferguson where he learned “all the big words” he uses.

Further reading

Why middle England became middle class

By Peter Franklin

That’s not the worst of it. The real boot in the balls comes when, having been deemed successful by society, you are repeatedly held up not simply as an example of a ‘diamond in the rough’, but as poster-child for the system itself. The system you succeeded in spite of. Having made your name railing aggressively against the status-quo, you are suddenly celebrated as living-proof of its enduring utility.

But one mustn’t complain. One must be grateful to have ascended the slippery snakes-and-ladders board of British society, right? Mustn’t rock the boat too much, for what is given can also be taken away and I (hubris alert) worked hard for my seat at the table. The fear of losing that seat now plays an intrusive role in my thinking, so utterly bowled over by my luck that I dare not protest too much in case the seat is abruptly revoked.

Rather than success, prestige or wealth giving me more freedom to tell society some hard-truths, it has become a rein which, when politely tugged, brings me reluctantly into line. Being granted a seat at the table, rather than unleashing my inner-revolutionary, has had an immediate, moderating effect.

Some of you know what I mean, don’t you? Those of you who can still recall the moment you were offered a seat. You recall the sudden tension between concerns about your community and concerns about yourself; your earnings, your social-standing, your legacy and your next move up the board. When you began to see yourself as your colleagues, contemporaries or an audience might see you, and your incorruptible principles developed a sudden and convenient elasticity which, rather than a lack of moral fibre, became evidence of your fair-minded maturity.

Further reading

Why 'separate but equal' is a fraud

By Polly Mackenzie

The previously strident views you once held and regularly espoused got easier to laugh off as naïve and idealistic. The jobs you called other people hacks for doing gradually gained your respect. Those expense accounts you once criticised as excessive were suddenly justifiable and fair. You changed. You adjusted not only to a certain quality of life, but also became intuitive to what it simply would not do to say, should you wish your run of luck to continue.

It’s amazing how quickly you attune to the prevailing sensibility in this lucrative domain of legitimacy. How grateful you are for the exacting dimensions of the professional sandbox you have been permitted to play in.

I’m now the guy who talks about poverty. My seat at the table is contingent on my willingness to regurgitate ‘personal experiences’ of class, addiction and trauma because that is the reheated vomit that guarantees my social mobility.

I still harbour radical beliefs. I’m still angry. But every seat at the table comes with its own unique restraint. Mine is no different.

Further reading

Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

I can still recall vividly the struggles I faced prior to moving up in the world, but that visceral sense of poverty’s all-consuming immediacy is impossible to retain. I am already beginning to forget what it felt like to struggle on a daily basis.

The impact of political decisions on me is now negligible. That’s why many in my tax-bracket can afford to lecture others about being ‘civil’ and ‘polite’. Affluence pampers you to the extent that you can no longer relate to those whose lives are routinely thrown into chaos because of ill-considered (or downright malign) political decisions.

Twelve months of living comfortably has partially numbed me to the reality millions face in the UK, so what hope is there for those with real power and influence, who rarely contend with reality at all, to bring about meaningful change? In the absence of enough seats at the table for everyone, I fear they will have to be rudely upturned at some point. After all, nothing captures the attention of the ruling class like poor table-manners.

From the moment I booked my first ever First-Class train ticket – the morning after the Orwell ceremony – I was different. The rules of the game changed the second I had something to lose. The moment I realised there is something worth conserving.

Perhaps some of you other ‘diamonds in the rough’, ascending the ladder, will identify with this description of bitter class-conflict? Not the class-conflict curdling public discourse in Britain, but the one quietly raging within your own heart. This is not to say that I don’t still have an appetite for radical change or am unprepared to make sacrifices in pursuit of social justice. But if revolutionary mischief is imminent, it is now highly unlikely that I’ll be firing the starting-gun.

So, why do the details of a person’s college education loom so large in how we perceive ourselves and others? Why should these three or four years influence the next 30 or 40? Why have we gone to so much trouble to expand the university system and burden the young with debt when they should be saving? Why have we turned jobs that were once open to teenage school leavers into graduate-only professions? Why does a country like the UK score so highly on the quality of its universities and yet do so badly on skills and training?

Further reading

Why middle England became middle class

By Peter Franklin

One could argue that in a knowledge economy, the university system is how employers identify knowledge workers. However, A levels can do that – and across a wider range of subjects. Some people might add that university is about character as well as qualifications – but in my experience, most graduates leave university not only with a piece of paper, but also with a lot of growing up still to do (I certainly did).

Oh, and please don’t tell me this is all to do with instilling a love of learning. In this anti-intellectual, sub-literate age that just won’t wash.

No, I’m afraid the university boom is more to do with the re-establishment of hierarchy. In the 20th century we smashed up the old symbols of status; being innately hierarchical creatures, we’ve found sly ways of creating new ones. The university system provides an ideal medium.

First of all, it is ostensibly meritocratic – while you are sent to school by your parents, you go to university as your own person. Furthermore, which university you are admitted to is supposedly determined by ability rather than by what your family can afford to pay for (more about that later). So unlike any signifiers of status conferred during childhood, any status based on one’s higher education passes the smell test.

The university system is now big enough to include a large and diverse proportion of the population. But at the same time the range of institutions contained within the system is wide enough to produce gradations of status. Best of all, that status once acquired cannot be lost or superseded by one’s less-favoured rivals. The university you went to is a permanent mark upon your CV, it cannot altered by how big or how little an effort you make later in life. Those who get into the ‘right’ university aged 18, will carry that advantage with them throughout their careers (at least among people and organisations that care about such things).

What should be supremely meritocratic often isn’t – especially when the wealthy and well-connected parents go to absurd lengths to get their children into elite institutions. The recent college bribery scandal in the US was a prime example.

However, as Kevin Carey points out in the New York Times, in many cases, ma and pa needn’t have bothered:

“In 2014, the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger published an analysis of the benefits of attending a highly selective college. They found that, after statistically controlling for students’ SAT scores, economic background and college ambitions, the long-term financial returns are ‘generally indistinguishable from zero.’ Students who are poised to succeed tend to do so even if they don’t get into the Ivy League.”

That said, the same study found that “students who come from less privileged backgrounds benefit greatly from selective colleges”.

Further reading

How small bureaucratic hurdles can be big barriers for the poor

By Peter Franklin

A separate study found that “while many kinds of colleges can help students move to the top 20% of the income distribution from the bottom 20%, moving to the top 1% from the bottom 20% almost always requires a highly selective institution.”

But is this explained by the quality of the education that these students receive or by the status of an exclusive label and the social networks they can plug into? If it’s more the latter, then we’ve invented a very expensive way of helping a few students, while painting a meritocratic gloss on a system that still serves the interests of the privileged.

Is there not a more productive (and less Faustian) way of helping a greater number of people? Carey cites another study which found that “students who majored in high-demand fields such as engineering at less selective public universities earned more than similar students who chose other majors at more selective universities.”

It’s hard not to conclude that the higher education system is now driving a major misallocation of both public and private resources.

In the UK, a recent study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that “[student] loan write-offs now account for 90% of government spending on HE”. Furthermore, this subsidy is being driven “mechanically” to those subjects and institutions that make the least contribution to students’ future job prospects.

Further reading

How to stop the mis-selling of education

By Peter Franklin

The tuition fee and loan system was supposed to increase the independence of the HE sector and expand opportunity for students – and all in the name of meritocracy, of course. The reality is that a system in which “government can expect to write off around half of loans issued” is still deeply dependent on the state. What has changed, however, is that “the government is much less able to target the money it spends on HE”.

On both sides of the Atlantic, we need politicians willing to admit that the funding of the higher education sector is a mess – not least because our attitude to the status conferred by higher education is messed-up.

If we’re more interested in the reality than the mere appearance of meritocracy, then we need a root-and-branch rethink of the entire system.

The British working class were the subject of intense study for much of the 20th century – before being ignored altogether by the end of it. They went from “salt of the earth” to “scum of the earth” as the Guardian columnist Owen Jones would later write in his book Chavs.

By the 1990s, politicians were proclaiming the abolition of the working class entirely. John Major (Tory; working class) entered Downing Street in 1990 promising to create a “classless society”. He must have made good progress, because shortly before the 1997 General Election, Labour’s deputy leader, John Prescott, proclaimed confidently: “We are all middle class now”. Two years later, prime minister Tony Blair declared the “class war is over”.

The reality, of course, is very different. Class has never disappeared, even if the boundaries between the working and middle classes are more fluid.

Mike Savage, in his 2015 analysis of the British Class Survey, Social Class in the 21st Century, argues that the economic changes that have taken place over recent decades have brought “the end of old-fashioned class politics based on the fundamental cleavage between the working and middle classes which had dominated political mobilisation during the twentieth century”.

Working-class children attend university in far greater numbers than at any time previously. Cultural life too has changed. In books such as Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), a sociological look at working class life in Britain between the wars, there existed a distinctive proletarian culture, separate from the middle classes.

Nowadays, on the surface at least, there is a more common culture that spans all social groups. The middle classes listen to popular music while, as Savage notes, through widening university participation, “…forms of culture which used to be restricted to the educated middle classes actually filter down to wider sections of the population” (like ballet, theatre or classical music).

But the seeming fluidity of class boundaries in the 21st century masks more subtle forms of inequality. The chances of going to university – as well as of getting a good degree – closely correlate with family background. The bottom fifth of the population are still 40% less likely to go to university than those from the top fifth. And in recent years, while the proportion of students from poorer backgrounds going to university has risen, the proportion attending one of the Russel Group universities – an elite group of 24, including Oxford and Cambridge – has fallen.

Yet it is these few educational institutions which provide a conveyor belt for the elite. A media studies degree from a former polytechnic college does not carry anything like the same cachet, nor open the same doors as a degree in PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) from Oxford.

Contemporary political discourse is also shaping new class inequalities. Turning Britain into a meritocracy is a modern political obsession. This can result in a situation where “privilege is misread as ‘merit’”, as Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison discuss in their new book The Class Ceiling. “We do not dispute that conventional measures of ‘merit’ – skills, qualifications, expertise, effort, experience – are important to career progression in Britain’s elite occupations,” the authors write. “But what our analysis indicates is that people do not necessarily have an equal capacity to ‘cash in’ their ‘merit’ or ‘realise’ their talent.”

Despite popular usage by politicians, the word meritocracy was coined to denote something sinister. In his dystopian novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy, Michael Young imagined what a fully ‘meritocratic’ society would look like in practice, and it wasn’t pretty. Whereas the old aristocratic order had felt a twinge of responsibility toward the poor, the meritocratic elite felt no such compunction: they had risen based on merit and innate ability; their privileges – as well as the lowly status of those beneath them – were therefore legitimate.

Class is, of course, about much more than occupation – it is deeply personal. As the fashionable identity politics parlance goes, it is a question of ‘lived experience’.

I was born into in the lower middle classes, or the petit bourgeoisie in Marxist terminology. I was the first member of my family to go to university, yet I did not do so until I was 23 years old. Going to university was outside of my reality until one of my friends, from a similar background, went to the University of Bristol as a mature student, at around the same time.

It was only once I started making my way through higher education that the prospect of a professional job – in this case journalism – became something tangible, something within reach. Previously it had not even occurred to me. When I was a child, we didn’t own books, I had to go to the local library to find anything to read. The outlook of those I was with as I grew up might have best been described as parochial, materialistic and conservative. Those in the local community who went to art galleries and the theatre at the weekend were deemed ‘posh’. Once I was at university, though, my prospects changed.

This is a form of what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has termed cultural capital: the things you acquire through being a member of a particular social class; from behaviours and tastes, to skills and material belongings. In my own case, it was the understanding that university was a viable career route.

Humour is something I have noticed too: the middle-class people who predominate in politics and the media have a very different sense of humour to the people I grew up with. Hating the television show Mrs Brown’s Boys is considered a mark of sophistication among the commentariat, with Hugo Rifkind writing in the Times in 2017 that he could not be friends with someone who found the show funny. I suspect this sentiment is widespread among journalists and newspaper columnists: the Independent called it the “worst comedy ever made”. According to YouGov, C2DE Britons make up 52% of those who say they like the programme, while two thirds (67%) of people who don’t like it coming from the ABC1 social demographic. Class expert Sam Friedman evidenced this “comic cultural capital” in a 2011 study.

This all presents an obvious challenge to the Left, but also helps explain why class politics is increasingly fought on the cultural front. At the 2017 General Election, the Conservatives increased their share of C2DE (working class) voters by 12 points. Meanwhile, middle class votes swung to Labour. Cultural concerns – about immigration, Europe and terrorism– took precedence over economic questions.

Economics has always been intertwined with these issues, but as class identity has shifted away from the productive sphere, cultural divisions have become more pertinent. In many of the working-class communities I visited in 2016 for my book, Hired, work was viewed as a means to an end. Their true identity, as they saw it, was derived more from patterns of consumption: from the clothes they wore and the things they did recreationally.

Just how little relevance an individual’s economic position appears to have in defining their class is surprising. The economic disadvantages faced by the young and working class in Britain today are well-documented. Work has become increasingly precarious and property ownership has plummeted. Yet this has not translated into increased levels of class consciousness.

As Mike Savage notes in his book, “those at the bottom of the pile are the least likely to think of themselves as belonging to a class, whilst those with the most advantages are considerably more likely to do so”. Younger respondents are also more resistant to traditional class identities than their older counterparts.

In other words, Marx’s prediction that class consciousness would intensify among the working class has been turned on its head. But even though our perceptions have changed, those ‘working-class’ concerns persist – economic as well as cultural. Indeed, they are contributing to the backlash against mainstream politics. And were we to have an electoral system in Britain that wasn’t so resistant to change, and politicians who listened more closely, we would probably be undergoing a broader political realignment right now to match that ongoing evolution.

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?

Marx saw class as an economic category: your class was determined by your place in the system of production. But Marx also believed that there is more to class than your economic role. He distinguished the class ‘in itself’ from the class ‘for itself’, and this ‘for itself’ makes its own special addition to the ‘class struggle’. The proletarian who builds identity, culture, politics and relationships around a working-class status becomes an additional, and decisive, danger to the ruling bourgeoisie.

Just such a class-conscious proletarian was my father, who, having been brought up in great hardship in the Manchester slums, never lost his deep attachment to the community into which he had been born. But it was not a community that could include him. He hated his drunken father, who forced him to leave Manchester High School at the minimum age (then 14) lest he get above himself; he lost his one beloved sibling (Jenny, who died from TB aged 16), and he did nothing to sign up to the kind of job that his family expected. He had only one ambition, which was to get out.

He achieved this, aged 16, by joining the RAF, moving south in the war with Bomber Command, and eventually becoming a primary school teacher, having been hastily educated in the post-war teacher shortage. His life illustrated a feature that has characterised English society since the Middle Ages, which is radical social mobility. No sooner had he reached for a life of his own than he had left the working class. Within a few years he was respectably married, with a semi-detached house and a mortgage, and three children at local grammar schools. He had joined the middle class, even if only the lower echelons, a long way from the demonised bourgeoisie of the Marxist narrative.

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But that’s not how he saw himself. He retained the class-consciousness into which he had been born. As far as he was concerned, he was working class through and through. He spoke with a Manchester accent, supported Manchester United, was a paid-up member of the Labour Party, and also secretary of his local branch of the National Union of Teachers. In all political conflicts, he was on the side of the Trades Union Congress, whatever it decided.

He believed that his country was ruled by a conspiracy of public school boys, and that there would not be social justice in Britain until the privileges that enabled such undeserving and treacherous characters to advance were finally abolished. He saw in the House of Lords, in the established Church and in the Monarchy, branches of this long-standing conspiracy and he understood all of our history in terms of it – as a never-ending confiscation of England from its rightful owners by a class of privileged usurpers. Normans against Saxons, Anglicans against Puritans, Cavaliers against Roundheads, Factory owners against the industrial working class – all such conflicts, for my father, illustrated the one great truth about England, which is that it has been, is and will always be a society riven by the great division between upper and lower class.

Interestingly, he did not subscribe to the Marxist worldview. Indeed, he was, in his special way, a patriot, who believed (rightly as it happened) that Marxism was nothing but a conspiracy to betray our country to Stalin. For him class was a moral rather than an economic category. It was the ‘class for itself’ that contained the true story of people like himself, who carried the flickering light of the oppressed proletariat in the catacombs to which the upper class had banished them.

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Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

And the members of the upper class – although, of course, they owned everything and stole everything – were not, primarily, defined by their economic status. Far more important were accent, dress, manners and sociolect. They said ‘lunch’ when we said ‘dinner’, and ‘dinner’ when we said ‘tea’. They had salaries while we earned wages; they went out to dinner in restaurants, while we stood rounds of drinks in the pub (but only on Friday, after the wage packet). They watched rugby and cricket rather than football, and – most important of all – they voted Conservative, while we voted Labour.

The great divide between them and us showed itself in everything that mattered: taste in art, literature and music, ways of getting about (car versus bus), religion (Church versus Chapel), recreation (hunting and shooting versus picnics and zoos) and of course education (Oxford and Cambridge versus whatever else you could scrape).

This conception of class, as a moral rather than an economic category, has survived the very many changes that have wiped away the England of those days. We still live in a society in which class resentment is a major social and political force, and in which people strive to make sense of all that happens to them in terms of the great ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide.

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By Matthew Goodwin

Tell educated Americans that the question of whether or not to ban hunting with hounds occupied 240 hours of Parliamentary time, while the decision to go to war in Iraq took only 18 hours, and they will be entirely non-plussed – especially when you add that virtually nothing else was discussed by the ruling Labour Party during the two or three years that it devoted to this topic. But when you explain that the aim was not to protect foxes but to punish the upper class, a light will dawn. For they will know, as we all know, that class in this country is not only a matter of moral status, but a matter of highly developed and inexhaustible social drama.

This theatrical side retains its appeal, and its comic possibilities – exploited so brilliantly by Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh – have made an unforgettable contribution to our knowledge of, and I would also say compassion for, the human condition. But it was not the theatrical side of the class war that obsessed my father. For him it was a matter, not of life or death exactly, but of faith versus betrayal.

I longed to breathe some other air than the ‘for itself’ that made such a fug in our living room (not drawing room, note, since that was what they said). I gathered around myself arty friends and exotic drop-outs. My father began to react with intense and vigilant hostility. He had been deeply opposed to grammar school, though I had no choice but to attend it. He strongly suspected (and rightly) that our school wanted to make us all into Etonians. He hoped against hope that I would not get into Cambridge, and was never reconciled to the fact that I did so – though to be honest it was unavoidable at the time. All in all I passed through adolescence bearing the stigmata of a class traitor, even though all I was doing was what my father had done, in escaping from the tyranny of Capel Street, Ancoats, into the meadows of Old England.

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Having embarked on this path it is very hard to turn back. Our grammar schools – mine for boys and the one for girls that my sisters attended – imparted a kind of bland, proper, middle England accent which identified us with no specific class. We found ourselves advancing in whatever sphere was open to us, not because we were particularly adept or ambitious but because that is the nature of life: lean against a door and it opens, unless someone is pushing from the other side.

At Cambridge I advanced as far as an ordinary lower-class heterosexual can manage – which in those days was not very far. But, as the years have gone by, I have made up for the social disabilities of those days (though not the one mentioned), and managed to make an independent life in which class plays no significant role. Social mobility, for me, was the escape route from resentment and the way of looking on the world with acceptance and love. And that is how it should be.

But this very social mobility, which ought to undermine the distinctions between classes, as it does in America, is here in Britain dismissed as a fiction. The great us/them divide remains untouched by it, as it was untouched for my father.

Something about class resentment appeals to us – we cling to it, sustain it with fictions and dramas, and allow it to colour our social contacts and our political beliefs. Why is this? Perhaps, in the end, there is a kind of consolation contained in it. Perhaps, by self-identifying as working class, we join the heroic story of the English people, whose rightful inheritance was once stolen, we don’t quite know how, by people from elsewhere. Maybe some vestige of this narrative can be perceived in the drama of our country now.

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?

George Orwell was wrong.

About class, that is.

His most important book on the subject is The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937. The first half is an eye-witness account of working class life in the industrial North and Midlands. Unflinching in his descriptions, he left his readership in no doubt about the misery he saw.

And yet it was the second half of the book that proved the more controversial – not because he saw socialism as the answer, but because of who he identified as one of the great obstacles to the achievement of socialism: his fellow socialists.

The doctrinaire, priggish, pretentious cranks of the Left-wing intelligentsia were turning potential allies into opponents, Orwell said. He argued that the “humbug” of “bourgeois-baiters who are bourgeois themselves” was making enemies out of people who were economically working class, but culturally middle class:

“The very last person in whom you can hope to find revolutionary opinions is a clerk or a commercial traveller. Why? Very largely, I think, because of the ‘proletarian’ cant with which Socialist propaganda is mixed up. In order to symbolize the class war, there has been set up the more or less mythical figure of a ‘proletarian’, a muscular but downtrodden man in greasy overalls, in contradistinction to a ‘capitalist’, a fat, wicked man in a top hat and fur coat. It is tacitly assumed that there is no one in between; the truth being, of course, that in a country like England about a quarter of the population is in between.”

By cutting the proletarian cant and including this quarter of the population among the oppressed, the fight against the oppressor and for socialism could be won, he believed.

And that’s where he was wrong. He portrayed this group as the “sinking middle class” – composed of people like the “the half-starved free-lance journalist, the colonel’s spinster daughter with £75 a year, the jobless Cambridge graduate, the ship’s officer without a ship, the clerks, the civil servants, the commercial travellers, and the thrice-bankrupt drapers in the country towns”. Counting himself among their number, he invited them to let go and “sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong… we have nothing to lose but our aitches.”

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The alternative to Orwell’s inclusive socialism was a dreadful one:

“It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party.”

The middle class, however, had other ideas. It would sink neither into socialism nor fascism, thank you very much. Instead, it would rise ever higher on a flood tide of prosperity. Furthermore, and as if to prove Orwell completely wrong, great swathes of the working class would breakaway to join them.

This is the history of millions of British families – including my own.

*

George Orwell was born in 1903; my paternal grandfather was born two years later. The former was born in India – the son of a British civil servant; the latter in the East End of London – the son of a cabinet maker.

The Orwell family was therefore middle class; my family working class. But we can refine those categories. Orwell’s grandfather was a clergyman and his great-grandfather was landed gentry. So, not just middle class, but upper-middle class. At the same time, we can see a story of wealth diminishing down the generations, which is why Orwell described himself as “lower-upper-middle class” – “the correct and elegant thing, I felt, was to be of gentle birth but to have no money.”

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I’m afraid the Franklins cannot trace their ancestors as far back as the Orwells. People born in the poorest part of Victorian London didn’t have family trees. Presumably at some point in the 19th century, or perhaps before that, an ancestor left the countryside to find work in the Great Wen. But there’s no memory of it, and so the story begins with my great-grandfather. Being a skilled craftsman, he wasn’t just working class, but upper-working class – not that he’d have described himself that way.

His son, my grandfather, left school at 14 to follow his father’s trade. That would have meant a long apprenticeship in the same workshop, ensuring the skills necessary to making furniture were deeply ingrained by doing the same tasks over-and-over again. As an apprentice he would have been paid a pittance, but by the end of it he could cut a dovetail joint with his eyes closed. Thus as a young man he’d have earned a half-decent wage, enough to save a few shillings each week. By the 1930s, he’d saved enough not only to get married, but to realise two previously inconceivable ambitions – to own his own home and to get out of the East End.

An opportunity presented itself: about half-an-hour’s train ride away, in Essex, farm land was being auctioned off in small plots to the highest bidder. My grandfather bought four of them at £5 each. And then he built a house – in his spare time (he was still working his day job in the East End). It took him two years of early mornings, late nights and weekends, but he did it – he had a home, fresh air and a family.

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But before this turns into the Essex version of The Darling Buds of May, I should point out the less-than-idyllic realities. Firstly, the strain of building a house while holding down a job took a toll on my grandfather’s health. Sawing through sheets of asbestos roofing material wouldn’t have helped either.

As for the rural setting, the plotlands were never fully serviced – and later plans to change this were interrupted by the war. My dad and his sisters therefore grew up in a house with no electricity and no running water (there were standpipes further down the unsurfaced road). That said, they were luckier than a lot of their neighbours. Before the war, most of the plots were used as weekend getaways – and contained caravans and shacks as opposed to anything that could be called a house. But once the Blitz started, these filled up with families living there full-time in all seasons.

These days we’d call it a shanty town, but to those who made their new lives there it meant safety, freedom and a stake in the future.

Nothing much remains of the plotlands: what hasn’t been swallowed up by suburbia is now a park.  A single house – ‘The Haven’ – is preserved as a testament to a vanished way of life. 

In the post-war period, the rest were cleared away, with people moving out to new towns like nearby Laindon and Basildon. That’s where my father went to school – and where he went to work, aged 16, in a council drawing office. His employers trained him up as a land surveyor – both on the job and at evening classes in a local college. This led to other jobs, with increasing managerial responsibility, until he and my mother started their own business and bought their own home. By the time my brother and I came along, it was simply assumed that we’d do A-levels and go to university, which duly we did.

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Things that were simply unimaginable to my great-grandfather became run-of-the-mill to my generation.

*

I don’t tell this story because it’s exceptional, but because, details aside, it’s the story of middle England.

At the beginning of the 20th century only 10% of homes were owner occupied; by the Millennium, it was 70%. As recently as the 1960s, fewer than 5% of school leavers went to university; the figure now stands at nearly 50%. As for what proportion of people call themselves middle class, that depends on the survey and how it phrases the question. But if one looks at occupation, the non-manual professions accounted for only a third of households in the late 1960s, but more than half after 2000.

Despite two World Wars and the Cold War, the 20th century was a time of expanding opportunities for ordinary working Britons. Writing from the perspective of the 1930s, the industrial North and his own straitened circumstances, Orwell can be forgiven for missing the trend, but he was unquestionably wrong: the middle class wasn’t sinking, it was recruiting.

In the post-war period, the cultural elites couldn’t deny what was happening – so they tragedised and satirised it instead. In America, there was Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s 1949 play about the shattering of middle class delusions. In his autobiography, Miller wrote that his purpose had been to condemn a “pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.”

In Britain, there was John Brain’s 1957 novel Room at the Top, in which the working class protagonist plots his social ascent by impregnating the daughter of a well-to-do family and casting aside his true love. By the 1970s, the collision of the classes was being played for laughs – Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh being a classic of the genre.

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Well, fair enough – social pretension provides a worthy target for the social critic. But for the most part, social mobility is not ridiculous, it is glorious. For the first time in history, it wasn’t just the fortunate few who could dare to dream – and work hard to make those dreams come true – but the great mass of the people. So, never mind the drama and the comedy, where’s the celebration?

*

What we gained in the 20th century, we risk losing in the 21st – perhaps because we’ve placed so little value upon it.

These are not optimistic times. The young no longer expect to be richer than their parents. In part, that’s due to economic stagnation. Growth rates are slower now than they were in the post-war decades and wealth is more unequally distributed. Room at the top is not being created the way it used to be.

But we’re also making it harder for people to make their way up. The grips and footholds that allowed my family to better their lot have been chipped away. The land my grandfather built his house on cost £20 – about 10% of his annual earnings. What would it cost to get a building plot in the commuter belt in 2019? A multiple, not a fraction, of a half-decent salary – and that’s assuming you could get planning permission.

Then there’s the training my father got to become a land surveyor – which didn’t cost him anything. In fact he was being paid and, in the latter stages, given time off for formal instruction. Today, you have to go to university to become a land surveyor – or to undertake a whole range of once non-graduate professions. At least when I went to university there were no tuition fees, unlike the present era when you can expect to be charged the best part of £30,000 – whether you go to Oxbridge or an ex-poly.

*

My grandfather left school a hundred years ago. Over that time, the nature of work has changed beyond recognition for millions of people. In the space of just three generations, my family went from building things, to making accurate drawings of them, to writing about them for websites. As a society, we have dematerialised production, disembodied knowledge and placed value in the abstract.

And yet economic inclusion still depends on the same fundamentals – learning how to do something useful and finding a place to call your own. These are the twin paths to prosperity, but after a century of progress, we’ve placed tollbooths across both of them.

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?

Not so long ago I was chatting to an urbane young businessman at a London party: after a few minutes he raised his eyebrows and asked: “And… you went to school?” It took a second before I realised he wasn’t questioning whether I had had any formal education, but using the old code Etonians employ when referring to their College.

It is a masonic handshake, but so very much more exclusive. It is a nod to understood values along with a wry acknowledgement of the self-regarding uniqueness of the place. These codes, the jokes and their understanding are a small but not insignificant part of the package for which my parents, and my grandparents, and several generations before them, paid all that money.

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For a long time I told myself that a few years at Eton hadn’t meant very much to my life. After all, it was not a long stint – as I made clear to that smooth OE (old Etonian) and do to anyone else who brings it up – I was ejected after less than three years, at 16 (for smoking, drinking and suspected homosexual tendencies beyond the norm).

I was quite proud then that Eton’s quality control system had found me wanting; I was pretty sure I didn’t want any more of what the school offered and I was not unaware of the hallowed line of Eton rejects and rebels for whom life turned out interestingly. In the time of The Jam’s ‘Eton Rifles’ being expelled from Eton was pretty cool.

But I realise now that I am indelibly marked by the place, as I am by the values and rules of the class that used it. It’s like a tattoo you got on a drunken night long ago and which peeks out from your sleeve to embarrass. It’s not that it helped fast-track me to university, or into a top job. I spent my 20s and 30s working in Left-wing theatre and then centre-Leftish journalism, and while hardly meritocratic, being an old or ex-Etonian wasn’t an obvious advantage in those fields. Not as much as was being white, male and privileged.

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Privilege is a difficult concept – a word thrown around to the extent of losing much usefulness. But it is of enormous importance when you weigh up class and Britain today. It means more than entitlement: it is the ownership of a range of tools that, as any self-help book will tell you, are useful for a traditionally successful life. Self-confidence, self-belief, persuasiveness, and what used to be called ‘clubbability’.

I know an old Etonian who makes part of his living touring private schools giving lectures to the pupils on “charm” and how it gets you everything – headmasters’ wives love him.

Privilege gets many unquantifiable things that can turn out to be of enormous value: an understanding of how clubs and networks function, connections, a stamp of acceptability based on unspoken shared beliefs.

It is a freemasonry, and membership translates into jobs, wealth and power: it’s no wonder that the proportions of judges and senior lawyers, of armed forces top brass, of politicians and senior business leaders who were privately educated today is pretty much what it was 50 years ago. It works – a place at Eton for your son is not a bad bet, if you can afford it. The prizes are huge, and the odds on getting them still pretty favourable.

Politicians, both Left and Right, have attempted to address the gross inequality the system clearly perpetuates ever since Churchill encouraged Rab Butler to democratise the public schools during the war (see David Kynaston and Francis Green’s recent Engines of Privilege: the British Private School Problem for a fascinating history of this political failure).

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Yet while the products of public schools have always been among the institutions’ worst enemies, the institutions themselves have proved remarkably resilient. It is born of an inherent flexibility, the quality that has kept my class in power in Britain for so many centuries. You can come in, if you’ve got the money, or the brains, or the looks. It worked and still does: if it did not, the British would surely have risen and torn down those spires long ago.

There are two things around today that might challenge this long-fossilised situation. The first is financial. Eton – and everywhere like it – is very, very expensive today. It always was: 70 years ago the annual fee was “about the same as a Rolls-Royce, or keeping a mistress in Maida Vale,” as an old joke has it. But when my parents sent me there in 1974 the basic charge was £861, the equivalent of £9000 today. In 2019, a year at the school costs nearer £42,000, before extras.

Even at a private day school, the average is £15,000. Across the boarding sector fees are up 50% in 10 years. Sums like these can only hurt the traditional public-school customer base, the squirearchy and the professions. Can Etons populated solely by the children of the super-rich and a few scholarship-holders survive the political clamour to remove the tax-breaks and the schools’ (indefensible) status as charities?

My other thought is more speculative. I wonder if the Eton brand is now gravely tarnished. Many charges are commonly laid against Etonians and their class – arrogance, greed, callousness, and that’s just to start – but I think their fatal flaw might be an inherent lack of seriousness. “We are often told that they taught us nothing at Eton. That may be so, but I think they taught it very well.” said General Herbert Plumer – one of the “donkey” leaders of the first world war – when addressing an Old Etonians’ dinner in 1916.

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I think of Plumer when I read Boris Johnson at his bombastic heights. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t really mean it. Etonian humour is a lovely thing – there’s a strong tendency to self-deprecation that seems very healthy – but it may also cover up many failings. Particularly when coupled with the abiding sense that the destiny, by right, of a young man leaving the school is to go out and make the world a better place.

The system seems – dangerously – to produce people who look like leaders, talk like leaders, but don’t lead very well at all. It is an old charge, but the list of failed Etonians is long today. At its top is David Cameron, the amiable schoolboy who liked a game of poker, and went on to take unforgivable gambles with Britain’s future, the price of which we are all now paying.

Your reaction to all this may well depend on where you went to school, or indeed if you went to “school”. But let me leave you this, from Alec Waugh. His account of Sherborne, The Loom of Youth, was published in 1919, to outrage at what now seem the tamest scenes of homosexual yearning. But it is the teenage Waugh’s savage assault on the public-school class and its hypocrisies that is more interesting. And yet, like most ex-public school boys, Waugh is, ultimately, ironic and ambivalent:

“He is selfish, easy-going, pleasure-loving, absolutely without a conscience. But he is a jolly good companion and the Freemasonry of a Public School is amazing. No man who has been through a good Public School is an outsider. He may hang around the Empire bar, he may cheat at business; but you may be certain of one thing, he will never let you down. Very few Public School men ever do a mean thing to their friends. And for a system which produces such a spirit as this there is much to be said after all.”

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?

Passing a group of Westminster sixth-formers on the street recently sent me on a journey into memory that reminded me of an unspoken truth of political debate around education and opportunity. Though politicians all say they want more social mobility, they don’t really mean it. Or at least, they wouldn’t mean it if they stopped to think about what that actually means.

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The boys in question could have come from central casting. All tall, all thin, all floppy hair and loud good humour. One wore the sort of overcoat politicians wear to the Cenotaph, another a Tweed shooting jacket. Both fit perfectly. As did the uniforms that look more like lounge suits. The loafers and brogues were scuffed, of course, but not so much as to conceal how expensive they were.

From 50 yards off, I’d initially clocked them for a group of Tory researchers, either from Conservative party HQ or the Commons, heading back to the office after lunch. It was only when they drew closer that I even realised not one of them was old enough to vote.

The Proustian thing was that seeing those boys – young men, more accurately – strolling through Dean’s Yard took me back to a trip I made to Oxford University 25-odd years ago for an interview.

There were a lot of reasons that I didn’t, in the end, take up a place at Oxford, but one was that it just didn’t feel like a place for someone like me. Too many of the other candidates were cut from the same cloth as those Westminster boys: charming, confident, self-assured and comfortable. They knew they belonged there.

(Some things don’t change. A headteacher in the Northumberland town where I was born recently told me about a boy from his school who is a truly gifted mathematician, the sort of brain that wins prizes and makes millions. So keen was the head to ensure that his pupil ended up at a college with a quad that he personally accompanied the boy to open days and interviews – his parents were too poor and too scared. And when it all paid off and Oxbridge opened its door to that boy? He said No. It just wasn’t a place for him.)

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What’s this got to do with social mobility policy? Think again about what social mobility means. It’s a measure of how much someone’s final economic status moves independently of their background: real social mobility means where you end up is determined by your talent, character, effort and actions, not the family you happened to grow up in.

Naturally, politicians talk about upward mobility, focusing on how easily (or not) children from poorer homes can “climb the ladder”, get more education and income than their parents and generally, to use an out-of-fashion phrase, better themselves. Who doesn’t like a story of upward mobility, of people working their way to the top? Of course we want more of that, so of course that’s what politicians like to sell us.

But political conversation on social mobility rarely dwells on downward mobility, where someone ends up with less money and status than their parents. This isn’t a theoretical thing. It happens, though generally only to people who start out in the lower half of the income distribution. If you grow up rich, you’ll almost certainly stay rich in later life; your chances of experiencing downward social mobility are really quite small.

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Why? A lot of people — especially ones who went to private schools and write for Right-wing newspapers – like to explain everything through education: richer kids go to better schools and get better grades, so of course they get better jobs, it’s said. That’s the way of the world, folks. If you want to change it, provide better schools for poor kids.

And of course, poor kids need and deserve better schools; Matthew Goodwin set out that case brilliantly on UnHerd last week. But guess what? Better schools for poor kids will not be enough.

Ask just about any politician about social mobility and they’ll immediately talk about the need to improve state education. They probably won’t talk about the work of Abigail McKnight of the London School of Economics.

In 2015, she produced a report for the Government showing that differences in education aren’t the only reason the British jobs market is tilted in favour of the privileged.

Analysing data from the British Cohort Study — which tracks the lives of 17,000 people born in the same week in 1970 – McKnight reached the following conclusion:

“Children from more advantaged family backgrounds are more likely to have high earnings in later adult life and are more likely to be in a ‘top job’. This is not simply due to different levels of cognitive ability as it holds within attainment groups as well as over the complete distribution.”

In other words, a clever rich kid will grow up to earn more than an equally clever poor one.

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Indeed, this effect is so strong that some not-so-clever rich kids will grow up to out-earn much smarter poor kids. Their relative failure in education won’t cause them to slide down the ladder.

McKnight sees a “glass floor” under their outcomes, a level below which they cannot fall. She might as well have called it a ‘class floor’ because class plays a huge part in explaining why some people really can’t fail in life, no matter how little they try.

This is what Richard Reeves, a former adviser to Nick Clegg, has called “dream hoarding”. Sometimes life really is a zero-sum game: one person’s success means another cannot succeed. A job taken by an averagely-bright middle class applicant can’t be won by a bright poor one. McKnight speaks of “lower-skilled advantaged children blocking the success of higher-skilled disadvantaged children through the hoarding of opportunities.”

How does this happen? Another 2015 study by the Social Mobility Commission conducted numerous interviews with recruiters from “top” firms in law, accountancy and banking, exploring why their recruitment is skewed in favour of applicants from better-off backgrounds.

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While richer people do tend to get higher exam grades and degrees from “better” universities, that wasn’t the only reason they got the best jobs. The study found that “elite firms define ‘talent’ according to a number of factors such as drive, resilience, strong communication skills and above all confidence and ‘polish’, which participants in the research acknowledged can be mapped on to middle-class status and socialisation.”

In other words, people handing out top jobs aren’t recruiting purely on the basis of brainpower and talent. They’re also hiring the soft skills, demeanour and habits that a privileged upbringing gives you – regardless of your talents or industry.

So those Westminster lads strolling through the yard are right to exhibit such comfort and confidence. They are the holders of what amounts to an insurance policy against failure in life. Even if they do relatively poorly in their exams or at university, they will still, in statistical probability, do OK in life. Indeed, it’s quite possible that their “polish” will see them through to a high-earning career regardless – possibly even beating smarter, poorer kids seeking the same jobs.

A bad outcome for them would be to end up about as wealthy and successful as their parents; falling down the ladder to end up poorer would most likely require either conscious choice or significant, and thus unlikely, misfortune or malfeasance. Botching some exams or even – whisper it – just being a bit thick wouldn’t be enough to put them on the breadline.

Anyone who went to one of our “better” universities will grasp this on an anecdotal level, familiar with stories of contemporaries from affluent homes who drank, toked and dozed their way to a 2:2, or even a third, yet still somehow ended up with a job in the City and a nice house in Fulham. Medicine, the law and politics are generously staffed with people who succeeded at least in part because their parents insulated them from the risk of failure.

But this goes beyond anecdote. McKnight’s data shows that children from high income backgrounds who show signs of low academic ability at age 5 are 35% more likely to be high earners as adults than children from poorer families who show early signs of high ability. Tim Nice But Dim has long vanished from TV, but he lives on in that data and the UK economy.

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That study on “polish” and the McKnight paper were both published in 2015. Just as the Coalition government was winding down, the Social Mobility Commission, under Alan Milburn and Gillian Shephard, was just starting to dig into the neglected, uncomfortable but vital aspects of the social mobility challenge.

Four years is a long time in British politics, and the last four especially so. Precious few politicians wanted to engage with that research at the time, and those that did sadly aren’t in a position to build on it. Justine Greening was keen to tackle this issue when she was Education Secretary, but is now wasted on the backbenches. Milburn and Shephard ended up quitting in frustration at Theresa May’s timidity and lack of commitment to social mobility.

Their replacements are serious, well-meaning people; Damian Hinds, the current education secretary, knows the social mobility debate as well as just about any politician. But – in part, no doubt, because of the vast distraction of Brexit – neither he nor the Prime Minister has yet shown the boldness to acknowledge that true social mobility is a sword that cuts both ways; let alone to swing that blade at the armour with which middle-class parents equip their kids.

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To be fair, there are some positive signs. Sam Friedman, an LSE sociologist and the co-author of an excellent recent book (The Class Ceiling – Why it Pays to be Privileged) is now a member of the new Social Mobility Commission. But he’s one of many commissioners, and the worry is that this SMC lacks the focus and clout Alan Milburn’s body had.

The US debate about downward mobility has been illuminated by the work of Reeves, now at the Brookings Institute in Washington; as a country with a clearer story about the importance of mobility, America is perhaps more receptive to new arguments here. But so far, British politicians haven’t quite caught up with these issues.

I can’t think of a politician who doesn’t say Britain should be more socially mobile, that we should have more social mobility. Would quite so many of them be so quick to use those words if ‘more social mobility’ was understood to mean ‘more mediocre middle-class kids ending up poor’?

Breaking the class floor won’t be quick or easy. CV-blind recruitment and ‘contextual’ data on applicants’ backgrounds would be a start. A bigger goal would be challenging the value that is still attached to that polished debating-points style that has its apotheosis in a certain sort of Oxford PPE graduate.

If politicians are serious about social mobility, they should acknowledge and embrace its implications, even if they are uncomfortable on behalf of people for whom comfort is not an aspiration but the norm.

What Gore Vidal said of friendship is true of social mobility too: “It is not enough to succeed. Others have to fail.”

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?

Education. It’s one of the most significant dividing lines in politics. And Britain’s vote for Brexit threw full light on the worsening education divide that cleaves our society. Not every Leaver is poorly-educated, of course. About one in four of Britain’s university graduates opted to leave the EU, although curiously we haven’t heard much about them since the referendum. But, statistically speaking, if you have a lower level of formal education, then you were far more likely than your better-educated counterparts to have voted to radically shake up the existing settlement.

As the National Centre for Social Research points out, the average level of support for leaving the EU among degree-holders was just 26%. This compares to 50% among those with A-levels, 61% among those with O-levels or GCSEs, and a striking 78% among those with no qualifications. Almost every study of the Brexit vote since has confirmed that low formal educational attainment is a major predictor of whether or not somebody backs Brexit, just as it is a major predictor of whether or not people vote for populist, nationalist or Eurosceptic parties elsewhere in the world.

These voters have routinely been dismissed as ignorant, or as the ‘losers’ of globalisation. But they actually had very good reason to want to radically shake up the social settlement. Many were keenly aware that both they and their communities were getting a rotten deal. And this is especially true when it comes to the one thing that has a bigger impact on life outcomes than almost everything else: education.

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When we explored the role of educational divides in support for Brexit with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, we found that – often regardless of their own level of education – people were significantly more likely to back Brexit in communities that were ‘low-skilled’, where there were fewer graduates and less opportunities for them to get ahead. It is in these areas where people face what we call a ‘double whammy’: while people find themselves falling behind because of their own lack of formal education, this disadvantage is then compounded by a general lack of educational opportunity in their area.

Indeed, had Britain explored the state of educational inequality before the referendum, then the country might not have been surprised by the result. As the Commission on Inequality in Education has shown, during the 30 years before Britain voted for Brexit, regional inequalities in education were not only strong but had been worsening. Furthermore, these inequalities were often sharper than those seen in many other advanced nations, while poorer countries such as Latvia were actually doing better than Britain at reducing them.

It is areas that ended up voting for Brexit in the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, the Midlands and Wales that were the hardest hit by education inequality. We’ve talked endlessly about how voters in these pro-Brexit regions were ‘misled’ by politicians or ‘manipulated’ by social media while ignoring the fact that they are on the receiving end of an increasingly inegalitarian education system.

Schools in Leave areas are more likely to have larger numbers of low-performing students, to have fewer experienced and qualified teachers, to suffer from high rates of teacher turnover and to lag behind London and the South East on a range of other measures. As the Education Policy Institute notes, in some areas of London – where only 40% of people voted Leave – nearly 70% of available secondary school places are in high-quality schools. The comparable figures in Blackpool, where 68% voted Leave, or Hartlepool, where 70% voted Leave, were zero.

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Most reports estimate that these inequalities will get worse not better. David Laws notes that while 16 of the 20 local authorities with the biggest increases in access to high-performing school places were in London, all of the areas that struggled with the biggest declines in access to these coveted schools were outside the capital, in typically pro-Brexit areas such as Barnsley, Blackpool, Hartlepool, Knowsley, Redcar and Middlesbrough. Most of these Brexit towns do not have a university and are usually far removed from one.

But having a university in all these towns should not necessarily be the end goal. Britain needs to be doing a lot more to increase the value and status of non-university forms of education. As one observer recently pointed out, if you combine teaching grants, tuition fee subsidies and research grants, then public spending on higher education is around £17 billion a year,  whereas spending on core adult skills fell by over 40% between 2009 and 2015, and is now only £1.5 billion. It seems obvious that one thing we should have done immediately in the shadow of the referendum was to start spending a lot more money on developing vocational education and training in these areas, as well as developing an apprenticeship scheme that actually works.

But it is also true that when it comes to education many of these areas do not offer much in place of a university. As one analyst notes, towns that saw a strong vote to leave were also “more likely to be home to FE colleges whose public funding has been slashed since 2010”.

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Given all this, then, why are we spending £50 billion on a high-speed railway, the effects of which are contested, when we could be investing in improving further technical and vocational training, or the quality of early-years education, in left behind communities, which we know will pay dividends in the long term?

Why not take this money and a greater share of other pots going to London and the South East and use it, instead, to follow the advice of the recent Commission on Inequality in Education by establishing a new fund for schools in disadvantaged areas. Such funding could be used to help teachers buy homes (which means they stick around for longer) or support a national roll-out of after-school family literacy classes in left behind towns. Improving teacher training and retention, and bolstering parental engagement, are two things that are routinely identified by experts as being key to tackling educational inequality.

Another longer-term option would be to learn more from countries like Finland, which is routinely flagged as a model of best practice in the education world. Even though some of the small nation’s metrics have fallen a little in recent years, it remains a top-performer. In sharp contrast to our own system, Finland is philosophically opposed to private schools, has universal pre-school education until the age of seven and subjects children to less standardised testing, putting a stronger emphasis on kids being … um … kids.

Students receive little homework and during the critical early-years period far more effort is focused on personal rather than academic development. There is also a strong focus on developing socially mixed classrooms, by adapting catchment areas to ensure that the intakes are socially diverse – something that will be increasingly key to tackling divides between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. And teaching training is much more rigorous: you can’t teach without a Master’s degree and most teachers train for around six years, including more detailed training in pedagogical research.

Crucially, around eight in 10 teachers then continue to undertake professional development and many are required to complete a residency program, which in theory could be adapted so that more highly-trained teachers in the UK have to complete mandatory work experience roll-outs in more disadvantaged towns.

It surprises me that there haven’t been far louder calls for a debate about how to fix our obviously broken social and economic settlement. The damage was exposed by the referendum back in 2016 and inequality in our education system is a root cause. If one by-product of our never-ending and often tortuous Brexit deliberations is that we all begin to think harder about how to remedy these glaring inequalities then perhaps it was worthwhile after all.

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That is why I simply cannot understand why well-meaning, normally intelligent, people on the Left keep coming back to ‘separate but equal’ as if it were anything but a fraud. The latest proposal is from Lord Adonis, who has proposed tackling the dominance of private-school pupils at Oxbridge by setting up new separate colleges for children from poor backgrounds and state schools. He tells us, in his Guardian article headlined “Oxford and Cambridge must launch new colleges for disadvantaged young people”, that this will be just like previous access efforts for women and “persecuted religious minorities” for whom separate colleges were set up in the past.

Let’s not even try to celebrate how progressive these universities were to set up special colleges for persecuted religious minorities. Until 1854, Oxford kept out anyone who wouldn’t sign the 39 articles of the Protestant faith – and the first Catholic halls were not set up until the 1890s. Those who weren’t members of the Church of England were simply not welcome in our universities for generations, and allowing Catholics to set up a college was a simple way to prevent integration.

The case for women is more complex, because women still have their own colleges at Cambridge, though no longer at Oxford. As it happens, I studied at one – New Hall, now known as Murray Edwards. I know exactly what it’s like to be in a separate but equal institution. These separate institutions are always second class, however noble their founders’ dreams.

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For starters, there isn’t any money. Unlike the old colleges, the new ones don’t have land and investments dating back centuries to fund the costs of today. Book grants, subsidised food, cheap rent: forget about it. I was student union president and there was student demand for a rent strike over our high bills. The bursar showed me the books. There was no point. The place was permanently cash-strapped.

And no money means the academics are overstretched. They are often underpaid, too, and however dedicated they may be to the cause of women’s education, most have their eye on a more comfortable gig, down the hill, in the town centre, in a nice old building with a quiet courtyard and a little slice of history.

A good friend of mine used to invite girls back to the Trinity College library to see the manuscript copy of Winnie the Pooh held there. He tells me it was a great way to seal the deal; every girl loved it. At New Hall we didn’t have any rare books, and our most famous alumna was either Mel or Sue from Bake Off – I can’t remember which.

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Lord Adonis has a predecessor in his fool’s errand. In the 1870s, educational reformer and clergyman Joseph Paul Brereton tried to set up a college in Oxford for poor children from the county school system. When that failed, he set it up in Cambridge, to be known as Cavendish college. It was a mile out of town. The accommodation was bad. The schools didn’t want to send their pupils to this inferior Cambridge college – they wanted to send their pupils to the proper ones. Cavendish college lasted less than 20 years.

So we already know what would happen if we did as Lord Adonis recommends. He’d take the poorest group of students, with the lowest family resources, and put them into the poorest college, least able to afford book grants or hardship funds, forced to charge market rent to pay the cost of the buildings in which people are housed. These students would be far out of town, the only place cheap enough to buy land for these new colleges, so they’d have commuting costs those town-centre elites could only imagine. They’d probably have to work to make ends meet, putting them at an academic disadvantage against those with low bills, low costs, and independent funding.

The new students would have the same potential but they wouldn’t live it out.

But the most insidious effect would be to take the pressure off the old colleges to reform. Establishing women’s colleges allowed women into Cambridge without the old colleges having to open their doors. It was several more decades before the first colleges went co-educational, and decades again until the last men’s-only college reformed.

When I matriculated at New Hall in 1999, the senior tutor told us to believe – above all – that our college wasn’t second-class, and we were not second-class students. The old colleges, she said, just don’t know what clever women look like. And the sad truth is that the existence of New Hall – and Murray Edwards – means they still don’t need to learn.

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There are probably plenty of fusty old dons in Oxford and Cambridge colleges who would like Lord Adonis’ idea. It would keep the plebs out of their old traditions. It would give them a guilt-free excuse to stop worrying about access for poor children, because someone else (out of sight and out of mind) is worrying about that. In fact, they are the ones who must leave.

The funny thing is, when I first saw the headline for Lord Adonis’ article, I thought the idea was for Oxford and Cambridge to set up new sixth-form colleges, which is a brilliant idea. Hot-house kids with great potential and poor family backgrounds, either for their A-levels, or for a gap-year in between, and you have the best chance to level the playing field with those educated in our most expensive private schools.

So let’s do that instead, and leave the idea of separate-but-equal colleges where it belongs: on the scrap heap.