ARE you sitting on a sofa or a settee as you read this? Have you just enjoyed your lunch or dinner? And after scrutinising every word in your favourite daily paper, will you be vacuuming the sitting room or the front room?

If you are sitting on a settee after dinner in the front room, you are probably working class. If you are perched prettily on a sofa after lunch in the sitting room, you are probably desperate to be working class.

If only our parents and grandparents had known how fashionable it was going to be to be working class in the 21st century, they wouldn't have slogged their guts out in the 20th to bring us out of the back-to-back streets and provide us with Gameboys, decking and mobile phones that play techno versions of 'On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at'.

Research by Mori shows 68 per cent of Britons believe they are working class, compared with 52 per cent just three years ago.

Twenty years ago no one wanted to be regarded as anything less than lower-middle and increasing prosperity indicated that the working class would be a dying breed by the turn of the new century. But now the tide has turned once again and the working class is working its way back - and it's bigger and better than ever.

Why? Because now you don't actually have to work for a living to be working class. I don't regard being a TV chef who nips down to Sainsburys for the odd pot of foix gras, being a film director with a stately home in every county or being a footballer who earns more than the gross national product of your average African nation as working class pursuits.

The likes of Jamie Oliver, Guy Ritchie and David Beckham may claim to be working class, but I bet if you stuck them in a room full of Nestl Rowntree chocolate box checkers you would spot them a mile off.

Perhaps Jamie's Oswald Boateng suit would give the game away, or David's diamond earrings. Whatever it was, however small and seemingly insignificant the bauble or trinket, something would make them stand out from the crowd.

This is because they are blatantly not in the same boat as factory workers, brickies, bus drivers or barmaids. Jamie, Guy and David would be floating majestically in a craft the size of the QE2, packed to the poop deck with bikini-clad babes and on constant cruise control around the Caribbean; while the KitKat production line workers would be left puffing and panting their way round Filey boating lake in a leaky, plastic pedalo.

All would undoubtedly say they were proud to be working class. It's just that for some it is a reality, while for others it is a fashion accessory.

The same Mori poll found 55 per cent of people who saw themselves as middle class said they had "working class feelings". In other words, they knew they couldn't realistically claim to be working class, but they wanted to make it clear that in their hearts they were racing whippets with the best of them.

According to sociology professor Richard Scase of Kent University, more and more middle class professionals are becoming disillusioned with their jobs, regarding themselves as wage slaves with little or no real prestige. They feel insecure, anxious and under pressure to perform and see working class life as a less precarious option.

I think this so-called rebirth in working class consciousness is nothing more than a fleeting fashion. Just you watch, if Cuba is hip next year Jamie, Guy and David will probably roll themselves a big, fat cigar and grow matching Fidel Castro face hair.

In the meantime, let them regard themselves as working class heroes if they want to, let them say everything is "pukka with the missus" and let them drop every aitch they can lay their hands on. But I bet at the end of the day - a day in which they have probably earned more than the rest of us earn in a year - they won't be tucking into their tea on the settee in the front room. Not unless The Front Room is a new hip working class club next to The Ivy.

Updated: 08:21 Tuesday, August 27, 2002