THIS IS AN ATTEMPT AT SOME SORT OF SERIOUS PIECE. IF YOU'VE GOT ANY SUGGESTIONS (not things like "wensleydale cheese and strawberry jam go well together") PLEASE FEEL FREE TO LET ME HAVE THEM
I had a very interesting conversation recently that set me thinking. We were talking about class, and how one could tell whether someone was Working Class, Middle Class or Upper Class.
The upshot of the conversation was that, while class comes down to a great deal of things, it is mostly preordained by parentage and set in stone by education. For example, we were trying to decide whether income was responsible for setting class boundaries when we realised that income was defined by education.
There were other examples: attitude to alcohol - defined by one's parents and, perhaps to a lesser extent, education. Vocabulary - parents and education. Attitude to immigration - parents and education. Literacy - parents and education.
After this conversation was over and we'd all gone back to arguing about whether it was Harrison Ford or Rex Harrison, I sat silently pondering whether the Class Was was over. I decided it must be.
The Class War, I think, was the ultimate war of attrition. Now it seems that the Working Class people who are left are few and poorly represented - the Labour Party can't really be said to represent the workers any more and UKIP and the BNP are one trick ponies that exlude the vast numbers of the Working Classes that aren't insane bigots. Similarly, the Upper Classes (and the Middle Classes) are ill-served by the rapidly-imploding Conservative Party. They appear to have been replaced by a kind of uber-Middle Class that live in gigantic houses, drive expensive cars and think that dado rails, stripy wallpaper and Georgian electrical sockets are marks of high taste.
The Labour Party, curiously, has come to represent the Middle Classes. Which makes sense, really, because now the Middle Classes are the Labourers of this country. It's just that they don't labour in factories on the railways anymore - it's in the Building Society Call Centres and Car Showrooms and Estate Agents. So the Labour Party has become Middle Class.
Which leaves the Middle Class more or less unopposed and embracing more or less the majority of the country. Everyone has to be educated to a certain minimum level, and there's a minimum wage. We have become a nation of middle-managers and sales-reps. Hardly anyone goes down mines or up chimneys any more and what used to be Working Class trades (bricklayers, plumbers) are so scarce that they can afford to adopt a Middle Class lifestyle.
So that's it. Merry Christmas, the war is over.
Victory to the Middle Classes.
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