The juxtaposition of several reviews in today's newspapers set me thinking about the familiar issue of class in Britain. In the Financial Times, John Lloyd has a thoughtful books essay on social inequality, mobility and class. One of the books he reviews, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class,
by Owen Jones, is also reviewed by Lynsey Hanley in The Guardian. (She herself wrote a terrific book on working class Britain, Estates.)
Lloyd concludes that the books he reviews greatly overdo the miseries. In many ways working class life has improved. Hanley makes a similar observation about the lack of texture in Chavs – she finds that it refuses to admit that working class people are not mere helpless victims: class hatred is a “collusive, often subtle, process which demeans everyone. In fact, a
great deal of chav-bashing goes on within working-class
neighbourhoods, partly because of the age-old divide between those who
aim for “respectability” and those who disdain it.” But again, as Lloyd writes: “[T]he
dangers are real enough. Even if neo-fascist explosions fail to
materialise – and it is not idle to warn of the possibility – still the
waste of lives and the harm that the underclasses do to themselves and
to surrounding society deserves a passionate advocate.”
The salience of these new books is the context of great income inequality and a more static society than we have had for decades (see the recent review here of The Labour Market in Winter). Just recently, I was discussing the word 'chavs' with a friend who says he uses it specifically to mean people from low-income backgrounds who do not work, have never worked, and are benefit-dependent – rather than as a general term of class hatred or snobbery. That is a large and intractable social problem which has appeared in the past generation. It's a sign of the times that a Conservative columnist, Max Hastings, argues in an article elsewhere in today's Financial Times that British society will not tolerate for much longer the large and rapidly-rising paypackets of bankers and executives, when low and also middle income earners are suffering a lengthy decline in living standards.
So it's all the more paradoxical that Britain's obsession with the aristocracy and stately homes continues too. In the Guardian Review Blake Morrison looks at their role in our literature, from Brideshead Revisited on. The salience of the stately home in the countryside of southern England is a marker of the degree of tension in Britain's class system. And in our national identity too. Hilary Mantel once wrote a brilliant essay noting that the construction of national identity around this narrow class and geography made it difficult for others – in her case a northern English, Catholic, working class female – to know in what way they belonged to their country. With the greatest income inequality since the 1920s and the forces for devolution on the rise again, it's no surprise that social alienation is a question of huge interest once again.
As I write this, my husband is picking out 'Jerusalem' on the piano downstairs…..very apt!
