I’m looking forward to Polly Toynbee’s Radio 4 series, The Class Ceiling about the decline of social mobility in the UK. Expect it will spark the usual awkward cycle of outrage, relief, and then guilt that is the stuff of middle-class, quite well-off, liberal parenthood . It is the standard reaction when faced with something that you know isn’t right, but may well be of benefit to your own children.
Regardless of that – I found this fact in her column in the Guardian about the series quite startling.
Only 24% call themselves working class now. Where once the label was a badge of pride (67% claimed it in 1988) now those self-defining as working class say despondently that it only means “poor” and “low-paid” these days.
That amounts to a drop of nearly 44 per centage points – or 65% less people – calling themselves working class. In 20 years time will the very concept of the ‘working class’ be resigned to the history books, the stuff of Orwell, coal mines and cotton mills – and we’ll just talk about middle class and the ‘underclass’?
via Money busts the convenient myth that social class is dead | Polly Toynbee | Comment is free | The Guardian.
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