Class is back

…and the divisions are more bitterly felt than ever

Until recently, the British middle classes felt quite good about themselves. The class war was over, and they had won it. Pretty much everyone wanted to join the middle classes. If they were not already members, the way things were going they very soon would be. ‘Embourgeoisement’ was the sociologists’ word for what was happening. Contrary to Marx’s flight plan, the bourgeoisie was turning out to be the preferred destination of History. No longer was British society shaped like a pyramid, with a steepling summit of idle toffs and an enormous broad base of deprived and discontented proles. It had already become more or less diamond-shaped, tapering sharply in numbers and influence at both the top and the bottom. At this rate, Britain would soon look rather like a cottage loaf, with both its upper and lower crusts nicely rounded into conformity with middle-class values and lifestyles. This was the ideal type of society, the sort that Aristotle had identified 2,500 years ago as the best possible, a society in which people of the middling sort formed the dominant class, ran the politics and grew the culture. For a century and more, that had been a glimmer on the horizon. Now it was here.

As a result, class was no longer a live subject of discussion. Its noxious effects had been eradicated by progress, just as TB and rickets had been. Bright young TV producers would not think of making programmes about it. Only fogeys were still noticing whether people said toilet or loo or put Esquire when addressing envelopes to other fogeys. Racism, gender, gay rights — these were hot topics, but class? Forget it, and we did our best to.

Yet as we crawled into the new millennium, class began to seep back on to the agenda, like the smell of an old drain you never knew was there.