Unmaking the English Working Class - script

The Unmaking of the English Working Class (presenter's script)

Broadcast BBC Radio 4, 9 June @ 8pm.

Presenter Jon Lawrence, Producer Tim Dee.

Participants:
Danny Dorling, Dept of Geography, University of Oxford LINK
Jon Lawrence, Emmanuel College, Cambridge LINK
Mike Savage, London School of Economics LINK
Jil Mathieson, National Statistician, Chief Executive, UK Statistics Authority LINK
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Clare College, Cambridge LINK
Selina Todd, St Hilda's College, Oxford LINK

Useful Links:
Danny Dorling, All That is Solid (2014)
Selina Todd, The People (2014)
The Great British Class Survey results

By Jon Lawrence:
'Blue Labour, One Nation Labour and the Lessons of History,' Renewal 21, 2/3 (2013) 
'Back to Work: The Making and Unmaking of the English Working Class,' Juncture [IPPR] 20, 1 (2013)
'Social-Science Encounters and the Negotiation of Difference in early-1960s England,' History Workshop Journal (2014)

Presenter's script: 

1.     Introduction 

<< Jon Lawrence re-visiting 125 Two Mile Hill for the first time since 1978>>

This is the first time I’ve been back to my childhood home in East Bristol for more than 30 years. I wanted to spark memories of how I understood social difference in the 1960s and 1970s – why, despite being a shopkeeper’s son, I came to think of myself as ‘working-class’ and later, to use a cliché of the time: as ‘working-class and proud’.  It was an identity that helped me to make sense of, and survive, the social dislocation of first grammar school and then Cambridge University.  It also provided the backbone of my commitment to Left politics, though from the start I was convinced that most of the Left failed to understand the working class I knew. But does class still matter today? Is there still scope for a distinctive politics of the working class; or has all this vanished along with the bulk of heavy industry that once dominated working-class life in many parts of the country?

Fifty years ago, just before my parents bought their shop in East Bristol, E.P. Thompson published his ground-breaking study: The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson’s book offers a brilliantly vivid account of the half century of rapid social and economic change which marked Britain’s emergence as the world’s first industrial nation in the late 18^th and early 19^th century.  As Britain industrialised, Thompson argued, a politically conscious working class was born – created from below by the men and women at the sharp end of industrial transformation.

<<Selina Todd (Oxford) on the significance of Thompson’s approach to class>>

When I was a student in the 1980s the Pelican paperback edition of The Making of the English Working Class seemed to be the one book on every Labour activist’s bookshelf. Who knows how many had actually read its 900+ pages, but they knew it was about the necessity, and nobility, of working-class political struggle – that was what mattered. And that was what had dominated my adolescence in the 1970s.

We have seen 50 years of equally rapid change since the book was published – Britain has de-industrialised, trade unions have become much weaker, and the politics of class have been pushed to the margins.  Indeed, change has been so rapid that I am now in the middle of a research project about the last 50 years which I have called ‘UNMAKING the English working class’

But just as Thompson was not interested in the making of a THING called the ‘working class’, but rather in the idea of a working-class POLITICS, so I too am primarily interested in the apparent collapse of a coherent political sense of class in modern Britain.

Has this happened because the working class has dwindled to a tiny minority, or does it reflect quite separate political and cultural changes? And have we, in the process, become deaf to the call for social justice that Thompson’s working class first raised in the early nineteenth century?  By any measure Britain has become more unequal in the last 50 years; how come it has also become less aware of class inequality?

2.     Class as Occupation

Let us turn first to the question of class as occupation - what can the recent, 2011, population census tell us?  Has the working class really disappeared ‘as a thing’? Well, perhaps inevitably, it all depends on how we define class, and that is something which sociologists have changed their minds on in recent years.

<<Jil Mathieson (National Statistician, ONS) on changes to social structure since 1911 and how these have been reflected in the categories used for the national census>>

<<Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (Cambridge) on the fall in manual employment and in manufacturing 1961-2011>>

Perhaps we are all too wedded to images of a working class dominated by the hard physical labour of the foundry and the pit to see call centre workers or junior office staff as ‘working class’. But manufacturing itself has also changed. Today a foundry can be as high-tech and spot-less as any corporate headquarters.

If our ideas about what’s ‘working class’ struggle to accommodate new types of occupation perhaps that’s because other things matter just as much as what we do for a living – like where we live and how we live.

3.     Housing & Place

Given our tendency to live alongside people much like ourselves, place is often a convenient short-hand for class; think Mayfair and the Old Kent Road on the original British Monopoly board.  As a child I lived the geography of class before I had the vocabulary to make sense of it intellectually.  And it was this that came back to me most strongly when I revisited my childhood home.

<< Jon Lawrence outside shop in Two Mile Hill and on Brandon Hill, Bristol discussing the social geography of class in Britain as he experienced it in childhood.>>

As Lynsey Hanley has movingly described in her book Estates: An Intimate History, Britain’s inter-war and post-war municipal housing estates have come to be uniquely stigmatised places in recent decades, as gentrification has gradually transformed the character of the old, inner-city districts once labelled ‘slums’.  

<<Danny Dorling (Oxford) on Barton roundabout discussing housing as a class issue & his take on the class politics of place as seen in the East Oxford he knew as a child.>>

4.     Class as Lifestyle

How we live – our tastes and our lifestyle - are also frequently taken as markers of social class.  In 2013 a team of sociologists headed by Mike Savage from the LSE worked with the BBC to develop a new survey of class which gave equal weight to cultural, social and economic factors.  Their descriptive model of social class identified seven distinct groupings: elite, established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, emergent service workers and a disadvantaged group, representing 15 per cent of the population, which they labelled the ‘precariat’. 

<<Mike Savage (London School of Economics) on the Great British Class Survey, including the massive public response, and on why Britons still identify as working class in greater numbers than elsewhere.>>

5.     Identity and Class

Certainly asking people what class they are tends to generate notoriously slippery results. Ask British people to choose between labelling themselves ‘working class’ or ‘middle class’ and close to two-thirds generally opt to be ‘working class’. Give them the intermediate option of being ‘lower middle class’ and those choosing to be ‘working class’ shrinks to barely a third; add the fourth option of ‘upper working class’ and ‘working classness’ once again becomes the choice of the majority. 

Arguably what this tells us is not that class means nothing, but rather that in many ways it means too much. Our instinct is to see class as a fixed, ontological category – that is a statement about who we are – but that’s not how people generally use class in everyday life – as the polling evidence demonstrates. Perhaps we should learn to see class more as a cultural resource – something people use to help them navigate social differences, and especially inequalities of power.

But why should class – and particularly the idea of the working class - be so slippery and unstable? To understand this we need to go back to Thompson and the ‘Making’ of the Working Class as a political idea in the nineteenth century.

Pre-industrial English society was organised around fine gradations of status and rank that were meant to be recognised by all – this is the world Jane Austen conveys to us in novels such as Mansfield Park and Pride and Prejudice. But by the 1830s industrial society was coming to recognise a starker differentiation – the three-class system of ‘Lower’, ‘Middle’ and ‘Upper’ lampooned by Ronnie Corbett, Ronnie Barker and John Cleese in the famous 1966 ‘Class Sketch’ where Corbett was the put upon working man looked down on by the others.

But Thompson’s heroes – the trade union leaders and their allies – never accepted this stigmatising view of the new industrial workers. They talked, not of the ‘lower’ classes, but of the working classes. Mixing socialism and Protestantism they emphasised the nobility of labour and insisted that all wealth was derived from the hard work of the so-called ‘lower’ classes.

In radical argument the opposite of the ‘working’ classes were the ‘idle’ classes, but in everyday usage the term often remained just a synonym for ‘lower class’. Hence much of the ambiguity and uncertainty which continues to surround the claim to be ‘working class’ – and why people tend to be happier claiming to be ‘working class’ than being labelled working-class by others.   

<<Mike Savage (LSE) on what people mean when they say they are ‘working class’>>

But sociologist Beverley Skeggs has explored how young women in particular often actively reject the idea that they might be ‘working class’ - seeing it as a negative, stigmatising category almost completely stripped of the overtones of dignity and worth that Thompson’s radicals sought to give it. In Skegg’s classic 1997 book Formations of Class and Gender Sam, a young care worker, explains that,

“To me if you are working class it basically means that you are poor. That you have nothing. You know nothing.”

Skeggs talks of the women’s ‘dis-identification’ with being working class, and is clear that fear of being looked down on by others largely explains their outlook. True, we still hear a great deal of talk about ‘hard-working people’ from the mouths of Oxbridge-educated politicians – but its toil more than nobility that this phrase tends to conjure up, and the imagined opposite is no longer the idle rich, but rather the non-working poor.  And alongside this pious language of hard work, we now have a public culture which routinely and viciously denigrates the poor and disadvantaged in the name of entertainment, something that was all but unimaginable fifty years ago (in the 1966 class sketch the punch line involved each man saying what they got out of the class system - Corbett, the diminutive working man, got a ‘pain in the neck’.)

In his widely acclaimed 2011 book Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class, Owen Jones sought to expose the pernicious influence of a new hate-speech of class across the mainstream media. He wrote that ‘In the current climate of chav-hate the class warriors of Fleet Street can finally get away with it, openly and flagrantly: caricaturing working-class people as stupid, idle, racist, sexually promiscuous, dirty, and fond of vulgar clothes. Nothing of worth is seen to emanate from working-class Britain.’

How has this happened, and happened so quickly? Three years after Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class appeared in paperback John Lennon was telling the world: ‘A Working Class Hero is something to be’ - I, for one, believed him, and it became something of a personal anthem as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the early 1980s.  Now we live in a world of 'Chav' jokes and Vicky Pollard imitations. Time and again the media tell us that being poor is somehow a lifestyle choice, and that our own advantages are hard-earned. We tell ourselves Britain is a ‘meritocracy’, forgetting the continued importance of inherited wealth and privilege, and forgetting that the term itself was coined to describe a dystopic future in which a despised and denigrated underclass finally rose up to overthrow a self-perpetuating elite.

The new hate-speech of class has emerged from the collapse of the political idea of the working class in the fifty years since Thompson wrote The Making. And though it may seem harmless fun to many, we should be mindful of the serious injuries it inflicts not just on the poor and disadvantaged, but on the fabric of our society.

But there are, at last, some signs that the tide is turning. The fall-out from the 2007-8 crash has encouraged a widespread questioning of where we are heading. The general benefits of living in a more equal society have been widely championed, most notably by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s influential book The Spirit Level. Owen Jones has challenged the denigration of working-class people, and most recently, Selina Todd has written a sweeping history of the working class across the last century which demonstrates how much we can learn from the lives and values of working people, past and present.

<<Selina Todd (Oxford) on the continued personal relevance of class to explain the injustice done to loved ones and why politicians should still seek to mobilise around the idea of the ‘working class’>>

6.     Conclusions

So what conclusions should we draw from all this? 

Firstly, that Britain is unusual for the large number of people who continue to identify as ‘working class’ – it is still a term that carries positive connotations for many people.

However, public culture no longer celebrates working-class life, as it did in the 1960s, instead we have seen the emergence of a new hate-speech of class which feeds off the neo-liberal lie that we all get what we deserve in life.

People with power and privilege tell us that class no longer matters, even that we are all classless now. Superficially their arguments are attractive – no one likes to be labelled in class terms – but we should be wary of relinquishing the language of class. It is the most powerful tool we possess for challenging inequality and privilege - it is also the one resource that the unprivileged possess to label their experiences as unfair and, most importantly, as changeable. Class still matters because without it the top 1 per cent really will be untouchable.