Where there’s muck there’s class

9:47am Tuesday 11th March 2008

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THEY say we British are obsessed with all things related to class. From social climbing and what's U or non-U through to the joys of reverse snobbery, we can't get enough of it.

To prove the point, the BBC has launched a series looking at the fate of the white working class in 21st-century Britain, a move clearly intended, among other things, to generate debate about class divisions today.

From what I've seen so far, by "the working class" the BBC effectively means "the deprived class" - people at or near the bottom of the pile, whose lives are impoverished in a variety of ways, and who are marginalised by the social system.

But that's not, by a long way, what everyone means when they talk about the working class, because our social system is nothing if not complicated. For many, the term has political, economic and social implications which go way beyond poverty and deprivation indicators.

Predominantly an urban phenomenon, some question the relevance of the phrase in a Britain shorn of the industry which gave birth to it.

But questions were raised about what it actually meant even when Britain was still the workshop of the world. Some late Victorian social researchers identified several layers within the working class. At the top were skilled workers and artisans, who often earned more than the least well-off of the middle classes, and were active in unions and the growth of the labour movement.

The researchers identified a series of layers below that, ending up with what some would now call the "underclass", people subject to the worst ravages of poverty - the same people who most worried their Victorian betters, who feared they were liable to be depraved, as well as deprived. Arguably, those same fears surface today in debates about "yobs" and "sink estates".

Just as the Victorians spotted there were working-class folk who were relatively prosperous, so today the term is used to describe all manner of well-heeled individuals - only nowadays it's usually a self-description.

I was once somewhat surprised when a builder assured me he was working-class, while we were standing in his big (and I mean big - it was later converted into two well-sized homes) farmhouse in the Dales.

His logic was that he came originally from one of the poorer parts of Bradford (one of the places the BBC focused on in its series on the white poor), and worked with his hands. I wasn't entirely convinced. I come from the country, and the rural equivalent of the working class, the peasantry, disappeared a long time ago.

My relatives were mainly tenant farmers and, by all sorts of definitions, not working-class. But they certainly worked with their hands, from muck-shovelling through animal health treatments to dry stone wall-building.

The aforementioned builder had also moved out of Bradford, and into running his own business. But I'm sure he, and others like him, would say their self-definition was based on growing up with shared attitudes, on coming from a particular community. Well, I won't argue with that, or with people acknowledging and taking pride in their roots.

But I do have an issue with those people who shove their class consciousness in your face as though you owe them a living because of it. These aren't the people at the bottom of the ladder. The worst offenders are usually white-collar workers who grew up in an industrial town, though probably not on the poverty line.

I recall encountering one such specimen in a York pub, full of vitriol over the perceived injustice of his upbringing - despite the fact he had a lovely house in the suburbs, and had scarcely ever soiled his lily-white hands with physical work.

People like that aren't connecting with their roots. They're having an ego trip, either excusing their failures or claiming they're better than everyone else because they had such a "tough" start. A spell coping with real work or real poverty would do them good.