Class of 2012... how the social classes are meeting in the middle

The TOWIE lot at the polo; heiresses dating rappers; Downton aficionados watching The X Factor. Yesterday’s notions of upper and lower class are obsolete — these days, everyone’s desperate to meet in the middle, says Hannah Betts

Marc Arundale

Hannah Betts

7 September 2012

If Vogue can be taken as a reflection of the zeitgeist, then during the past few years it has revealed something of a social shift. In 2008, there was a collective raising of eyebrows when Posh Spice graced the journal’s cover — and was deemed not posh enough to do so. But VB was merely the (extremely) thin end of the wedge. This former bastion of patrician pulchritude has since celebrated popstrel and lavatory brawler Cheryl Cole, potty-mouthed Adele, sundry WAGs, Katie Price and, latterly, Essex’s own Amy Childs.

Moreover, at Childs’ appearance, barely anyone batted an eyelid. For we now occupy an age in which the middling Middletons go shooting with their in-laws, Jordan brandishes a polo mallet, and the pages of glossy magazines are less likely to be filled with debs than so many Debbies — or rather, Kates — from Croydon.

The sort of chaps and chapesses who were wont to be members of clubs now recognise only one class: some sort of homogenised middle that we all claim to occupy, from the hoi polloi to those tagged HRH. Society, in the Tatler sense, has become a cultivated melee in which rapper Professor Green squires Made in Chelsea’s confectionery heiress Millie Mackintosh, Essex cavorts at the polo, Prince Charles parties with Tinie Tempah, and Prince Harry parties with anyone.

Television is geared towards a judgemental, yet trash-gorging, middle-class audience. Gypsy weddings and wife swaps provide underclass kicks. Meanwhile, the ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ ranks are reinvented by way of pastiche, represented by the twin reality TV simulacra that are Made in Chelsea and TOWIE. In reality, these are merely versions of the same thing: tits, tans, big hair and even bigger wallets.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, class segregations were more obvious. In my own case, as a provincial doctor’s daughter and grammar-school girl, I was textbook middle-middle. By my teens it was clear that this was by far the least interesting option. In the age of Thatcherism, a working-class hero was something to be, and, while Hoorays wallowed in 1980s excess, the rest went pretend prole and Trot trendy à la Rick from The Young Ones.

Flash forward 40 years and being middle class has evolved from an embarrassingly pedestrian position to the place where everyone wants to be, from society’s loftiest to its lowest — a resolutely overstuffed ‘squeezed middle’, in which anybody who is anybody seeks to be everyman. For this period has witnessed the ongoing expansion of middling Middle Britain. In 2006, a report from the Future Foundation revealed that, in the past 40 years, the proportion of Britons who regarded themselves as middle class had risen from 30 to 43 per cent, including 36 per cent of builders. And according to the Class UK 2011 study carried out by BritainThinks, 71 per cent of us now declare ourselves to be middle class, 24 per cent working class — and no one but no one upper class.

Obviously, there remain vast and troubling divides between Britain’s poorest and most affluent. In particular, the UK health charity the King’s Fund recently identified a stark and widening class divide in public health. As the middle classes increasingly eschew damaging habits such as smoking and bad eating, so poorer, underqualified citizens remain stuck in a cycle of risky behaviour. And stuck they are likely to stay. In May, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility concluded that our mobility rates are among the lowest in Western Europe.

Nevertheless, society has seen a great — and, in its own way, rather radical — levelling over the past few years, as the masses huddle towards a new, ostentatiously ‘classless’ middle ground. Even at an anecdotal level, everyone I asked, from baristas to barristers, cleaning ladies to lords, defined themselves in such terms.

Middle class and ‘normal’ have been elided. At the last election, both main parties declared themselves to be chasing the votes of ‘normal, middle-class families’; what Old Etonian ‘Dave’ Cameron has described (regarding his own situation) as the ‘sharp-elbowed middle classes’. In the past, parties sought the scalps of ‘Worcester Woman’ and ‘Mondeo Man’. Now they aim to be them. So stalwart is the Cameron Cabinet’s desire to embody the middle-class norm, that the only surprise is that writer Frances Osborne, wife of George, is allowed to pen tales of upper-echelon adventure.

As the social commentator and Sloane Ranger sociologist Peter York has remarked: ‘If David Cameron is middle class… who exactly does he think the upper classes are now? There are two official (ie, covertly upper-class) answers to this: first, the upper classes do not exist, they have been abolished, we’re all middle class now, so there; second, the upper classes are somebody quite else — often foreign and not 100 per cent nice.’

The old idea of social mobility has been replaced by a sort of protean social flexibility hovering somewhere about the middle. Not only do ‘chavs’ and ‘toffs’ linger here, but young and old, highbrow and lowbrow. Politicians’ assertion ‘we’re all middle class now’, rapidly devolves into ‘we’re all middlebrow’. Hence ‘everybody’ reading the excremental Fifty Shades trilogy, or relishing the platitudinous X Factor. Downton fits the bill because it is the crassest soap opera dressed up as history: a cosy, middle-class world view of nice nobs and salt-of-the-earth commoners, both parties just waiting to spring into middle-class being.

In terms of values, any residual members of a rioting underclass or roving upper class are expected to espouse ‘MC’ ideals. Thus rioters are condemned not for craving consumer goods, but for refusing to plunder them via credit like ‘normal’ people, while the frozen-pizza-purchasing Prince William looks to Mike and Carole as ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’.

Going to festivals and watching football are ‘good’; packages to Magaluf, hunting and opera are ‘bad’. The Olympics Opening Ceremony represented the epitome of the middle-class, middlebrow world view, with Britain reduced to film, pop, children’s books, the NHS and a token acknowledgment of Shakespeare. Meanwhile, in place of old-school intellectuals, we get the likes of Alain de Botton on porn (a conjunction that many of us will find less than arousing, mentally or otherwise).

Obviously, there are upsides to society’s shuttle toward the centre. Where 71 per cent of us consider ourselves middle class, we can infer that — even in recession and global economic crisis — there are fewer people in the straits of the sort associated with traditional working-class poverty. Going without the latest Xbox game is not the same as going hungry.

That said, being middle class ain’t what it used to be. Anxieties about jobs, housing and education are generating unprecedented fears that middle-class children’s futures may be a good deal bleaker than their parents’. The opening up of the professions to market forces, chipping away at the State, and the advent of industries without the need for middle managers have seen many of the certainties of middle-class existence fall away. The more people who occupy the centre, the more competitive and stratified it becomes.

Most disturbing is the element of groupthink — the psychological tendency towards fostering group harmony in decision-making at the cost of assessing alternatives — that middle-class massing engenders. In politics, the drag towards consensus comes at the expense of engaging with alternative ideas. The focus becomes not on politicians with policies, but politicians’ personalities. The question is less whether we like what they do, more whether they are like us and we thus like them. Not only does this lead to an intellectual laziness, it may account for the collective inertia preventing us from being lured into polling stations. Why bother voting for them when they aim to be all the same?

Moreover, the cost of groupthink involves a wider sacrifice of individuality, uniqueness and independent thought. It leads to a certain mediocrity, a sameness, an aiming for ease. Effort, whether the old notion of ‘bettering’ oneself or, more immediately, say, a book being difficult but worth the challenge, is frowned upon. A sense of self-identity becomes eccentricity; deviance from the middle-class norm suspected; difference feared; thinking for oneself — thinking per se — not the done thing.

In 1993, John Major prophesied that: ‘Fifty years from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers.’ Twenty years later, it is a nation of lottery-ticket-purchasing, leisurewear-clad, back-garden BBQ-ers watching plasma tele-vision football while downing ‘very decent’ supermarket rosé. All of which would be fine, were members of these ever-swelling ranks not looking down — and askance — at anybody who deigns to do anything else.

Class of 2012... how the social classes are meeting in the middle

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