Class in Britain

It is alleged that the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie classified his professional colleagues, neither in hierarchical nor triadic terms, but as forming two distinct categories of scholar: the parachutists, who survey the broad landscape of the past from a great height; and the truffle hunters who immerse themselves in the dense morass of evidential detail. Both approaches have their advantages and their dangers: the parachutists seek to comprehend the overall picture, but at the price of a certain unavoidable superficiality; the truffle hunters know the facts, but lack the wider conceptual framework in which to place them.¹ Ideally, and as Leopold von Ranke pointed out well over a century earlier, historians need to move back and forth between the universal and the particular, the telescope and the microscope, and this book has tried to adopt just such an approach, blending general argument with specific detail.² But on balance, it is more about generalities than it is about specifics: it has surveyed a large, complex, much disputed and massively researched historical problem, and drawn extensively on the detailed writings of other scholars, even as it has developed an argument to which most of the authors cited and thanked would probably not themselves subscribe.

I. Long-Term Retrospective

The arguments advanced in this book may be easily summarised. During the last three hundred years, British society has been observed and imagined, envisaged and understood, by most of its inhabitants in only three basic ways. Nor should this occasion any surprise, since these models have been in use at least since the medieval period. The first was hierarchical, which described society individualistically as an interlinked, finely layered and elaborately graded procession; the second was triadic, which divided it into three collective constituencies, usually upper, middle and lower; and the third was the dichotomous, which saw society as polarised between the two extremes of ‘patricians and plebs’ or ‘them and us’. Across the centuries, these three models have been astonishingly resonant and appealing, not only at a popular level, but also among intellectuals and commentators, from Burke and Paine to Marx and Mallock and beyond. One indication of this is that when A.H. Halsey recently set out to revise his justly famous book on social structures and social change in twentieth-century Britain, he felt obliged to choose between what he described as ‘the vulgar Marxist theory of two classes at war’, ‘the simplification of three social strata of social classes’, and ‘the vulgar liberal conception of a continuous hierarchy of prestige or status’.⁴

It is also clear that at all levels of society, and across the centuries surveyed here, Britons have moved back and forth from one of these models to another. Many examples have been given in these pages. Edmund Burke was a defender of organic, traditional, individualist hierarchy, but he also regretted the rise of a middle class between those above and below, and on other occasions he divided society into a virtuous élite confronted by the ‘swinish multitude’. Disraeli and Mallock (and Winston Churchill) idealised hierarchy; but they also feared Britain was divided into ‘two nations’. As a son of Liverpool, Gladstone saw society triadically; as an ‘out and out inequalitarian’, he envisaged it hierarchically; when backing ‘the masses’ against ‘the classes’, he viewed it adversarially. And from Robert Roberts via George Orwell to Jilly Cooper, many twentieth-century commentators have had recourse to all three models. As such, these visions of British social structure and social identities have co-existed, not just within the same society, but within people's minds. Small wonder that in 1988, the sociologist Gordon Marshall concluded, in words that merit quoting again, and at greater length: ‘the “class consciousness” of the majority of people is characterised by its complexity, ambivalence and occasional contradictions. It does not reflect a rigorously consistent interpretation of the world.’⁵

Indeed, it is in part the very vagueness and superficiality of these three models of society which has enabled Britons to live with them for so long, and to move so easily from one to the other. For they were and are essentially ideal types, not wholly divorced from social reality, but very much simplifying it. British society has never been a single, unitary, integrated hierarchy; it has never been divided into three hermetically sealed and homogeneous collectivities; and for all the exhortations of revolutionaries from Paine to Marx, Orwell to Scargill, it has never been so deeply divided that the masses were likely to rise up and overthrow their betters. All these versions of society were (and are) simplified imaginings or rhetorical constructs. They are not ‘real social knowledge’ so much as ‘imagined constructions’ or ‘rhetorical devices’ – what George Eliot once memorably called ‘picture-writing of the mind’.⁶ In their purest forms, they were clearly incompatible. But in practice, most Britons have easily moved from one model to another: from individualist, integrated hierarchy to adversarial, collective ‘us’ and ‘them’; or from a three-stage to a two-stage model, by dividing the middle class into patricians or plebs; or from a three-stage model to hierarchy by assigning people individual status rankings. When thinking about society, and when thinking about ourselves, this is what most Britons are constantly doing: silently and easily shifting from one social vision to another.

The simplicity and the enduringness of these three descriptions of British society have been insufficiently appreciated and inadequately studied, and the same may be said of the facility and frequency with which Britons have always been able to move from one version to another. But this is not just because the models can be easily moulded and melded and merged: it has also been because the same language has often been used to describe all of them. To be sure, there were (and are) vocabularies which are specific to hierarchy or to the three- and two-stage models, and many instances have been given in this book. But there is also language which applies with equal appropriateness to all of them. The vocabulary of rank, station, order and degree, which is often associated exclusively with hierarchy, turns out on closer inspection to have been used frequently in describing three- or two-layer societies, and that practice is with us still. The same applies to the language of class, which has been exclusively associated by historians and sociologists with collective categories and identities, but which has always been commonly applied to all three models of society – as it continues to be today.

This in turn means that the models of British society are more important in the constitution of our social understandings and the construction of our social identities than the language in which they are expressed and articulated. For the language of ranks or of class cannot by itself create social descriptions or social identities, since it might be referring to any one of the three available models of society, and the language itself does not make clear which. Perhaps this was what Paul Fussell meant when he observed that ‘nobody knows for sure what the word class means’.⁷ Here are two examples by way of illustration. When Britons talk, as they regularly do, of ‘the class system’ which they believe prevails, they might be referring to class as hierarchy, to class as upper, middle and lower, or to class as ‘us’ and ‘them’. From the language itself, it is impossible to tell. And when John Major spoke of wanting to create a ‘classless society’, did he mean the abolition of hierarchy, or of the distinctions upper/middle/lower, or of the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’? Once again, the words cannot tell us.⁸ As these examples suggest, the connection between social vocabularies and social identities is more complex and contingent than is generally recognised. The ‘language of class’ is not the real issue: the real issue is the models of society which that and other languages articulate, make real and bring to life.⁹

It is, then, mistaken to suppose that the so-called ‘rise’ of the language of class in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries happened because new collective classes were coming into being, perhaps three, perhaps two, which overturned and superseded the old individualist hierarchy. Yet it remains a widely held belief that the period from the 1790s to the 1830s witnessed the origin of contemporary ‘class distinctions’ in Britain.¹⁰ But class, like rank, often meant hierarchy, and it is the failure to recognise this which helps explain one of the greatest gaps in modern British historical writing: giving due attention to hierarchy as a way of seeing society, and as a system of social belief. It has been ignored by historians of the right, who tend to take its continued existence for granted; and by historians of the left (and by most sociologists) because they take its disappearance no less for granted.¹¹ Yet as E.M.W. Tillyard pointed out two generations ago, the Elizabethan world picture did not die with the Elizabethans. ‘We shall err grievously’, he noted, ‘… if we imagine that the Elizabethan habit of mind [seeing the world hierarchically] is done with once and for all. If we are sincere with ourselves, we must know that we have that habit in our own bosoms somewhere.’ One of the purposes of this book has been to urge that we cannot understand the history of modern British society unless we recognise the continued existence of hierarchy as a way of seeing and making sense of it.¹²

Marxists and Marxisant historians (to say nothing of sociologists) have not been generally at ease with hierarchy, and in largely ignoring it, they have been much in error. But non-Marxists, and anti-Marxists are no less in error in asserting, along with Margaret Thatcher, that class is exclusively ‘a communist concept’ which ‘groups people as bundles and sets them against one another’.¹³ Class, as this book has sought to show, has not only meant three different ways of looking at British social structure, one of which is very strongly individualist and consensual rather than collective and conflictual. Class – in all its three guises – was alive and around in Britain for more than half a century before Marx, and – again in all its three guises – it is clearly going to survive in Britain long after Marxism's day is done. Since Marxism's day does seem to be done, this is an appropriate point to add two final observations on this subject. The first is that, in asserting in The Communist Manifesto that ‘society as a whole is more and more splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat’, Marx was wrong in his own day, and has become even more wrong since his death.¹⁴ The second is that, in describing society as deeply riven, he was merely offering the most elaborately worked out (and generalised) version of a very commonplace (yet specific) model.¹⁵

One purpose of this book has been to argue that three models of British society have been continuously present during the last three hundred years, that for much of the time they have easily co-existed in people's minds and imaginations, and that the hierarchical vision of British society has been the most pervasive and persuasive. But it has also been concerned to describe and explain how, at different times, hierarchy became less appealing to some people, who instead embraced one or both of the alternative ways of seeing their society, and did so in a more adversarial frame of mind: envisaging their social existence in collective and confrontational terms, rather than consensually and individualistically. This, it bears repeating, now seems a more appropriate way to approach the problem of class than to suggest that classes were coming into being, did battle, won or lost, rose and fell. No doubt part of the explanation for changes in the appeal of visions of society lies in the changes in society themselves: social reality does influence and inform social perceptions. But as has been regularly demonstrated, changes in the ways in which people saw society – or came to see society – were often more rapid than changes in society themselves. And while many developments (growth in population, urbanisation, secularisation) have been in one direction only, the ways in which people have seen their society have gone back and forth, from one model to another, across the decades. How, then, is this to be explained?

Part of the answer to this question must have to do with discontent: not in the sense that discontent results in fundamental changes in the social structure, which has not been the case in Britain during the last three hundred years; but rather in the sense that it is discontent which causes some people to see their society in an alternative way. For dissatisfaction means they discover new friends, make new enemies, and establish (for a time) new identities; it means that riots and protests project and render credible what is literally a dramatically different version of their society from that proclaimed by elaborately staged and carefully ranked official processions; and it means that the three-or two-stage models of their society thus come, for a time, to have more appeal than the traditional hierarchical picture. But if this is right, then we ought to be looking at the ways in which social description becomes explicitly politicised. For most politicians, from Wilkes to Cobbett, Cobden to Gladstone, Lloyd George to Baldwin, Thatcher to Major, one of the most important tasks was to persuade people to see their society differently, and to persuade people to see themselves differently: in short to change people's sense of identity, which in practice meant moving them from accepting one vision of British society to embracing another.

Consider, in this light, the following examples. When Wilkes invoked ‘the common people’ against the Hanoverian oligarchy, when the Whigs in the 1820s lamented that the social fabric was being rent in twain, when the Anti-Corn Law League described themselves as a ‘middle-class set of agitators’ railing against ‘aristocratic tyranny’, when the great Lord Salisbury feared the ‘disintegration’ of hierarchy, when Lloyd George attacked ‘the peers’ in the name of ‘the people’, when Stanley Baldwin tried to heal class divisions, and when Aneurin Bevan sought to widen them: people did come to believe that these arresting but over-simplified descriptions were genuine, truthful accounts of how British society actually was – or actually was in the process of becoming. But in fact, they were no such thing: they were not objective descriptions of the British society of their day, and nor were they evidence that old social formations were dying, or that new social formations were coming into existence. They were merely evidence that politicians were trying to change the way ordinary people looked at their social worlds.

This has involved politicians in two related and complementary activities. The first consists of providing the collective social categories through which people can understand society as a whole. The second consists of trying to persuade them that they belong to one collective category, rather than another, by extolling the merits of one group, while denouncing the other group (or groups) as being wholly without virtue. Much political endeavour in Britain, from the time of Wilkes to our own day, should be understood in this light, as the attempted creation of alternative social identities, which are endowed, as appropriate, with either good or bad qualities. ‘Ideological stereotyping’ is the name rightly given to this activity.¹⁶ And the measure of a politician's success is the extent to which he (or she) succeeds in persuading a significant proportion of the public to accept these over-simplified collective categories as authoritative accounts of how society is, and these over-simplified moral evaluations as authoritative accounts of how these different collective groups behave – or misbehave. Thus regarded, the task of politicians is the creation and manipulation of social identities, sometimes articulated in the language of class, sometimes not. It is not so much that ‘real’ social identities directly inform and animate party politics; it is that party politics is concerned with creating social identities.

Of course, and as the examples recently quoted suggest, there are a limited number of such identities which are in practice available: decent middle classes against a corrupt élite and idle labourers; the virtuous many against a selfish and irresponsible few; or the virtuous few against a selfish and irresponsible many. Along with stable, venerable, time-honoured hierarchy, these constitute just about the full repertoire of sociological and rhetorical options, and the social identities articulated and projected by British politicians generally conform to one or other of them. Most are concerned to define, homogenise and praise certain numbers of people (who are occupationally, sociologically and behaviourally very diverse), and to define, homogenise and demonise others (of whom the same may be said). This is what politicians always do when they seek to create social identities and to transform social understandings. How successful they are in these endeavours depends on the extent to which their images resonate, and on the number of people with whom they resonate. Politics does shape perceptions of social structure, but these perceptual options are distinctly limited in their number, because all of them are ultimately derived from the same three basic, enduring models of British society.

But this book has not been entirely about unchangingness. One reason for this is that each of the three models of British society that has been discussed carries with it an implicit temporal dynamic and perspective which is part of its appeal. Hierarchy is generally about how society was: a backward-looking picture of an ideal way of ordering the world, which needs to be preserved or restored. The three-stage model tends to be about how society is: especially when viewed, as is usual, from the vantage point of those in the middle. And the two-stage model is often concerned with how society might be: perhaps for good (if you are a would-be revolutionary), perhaps for ill (if you are not). A second reason for stressing change is that the relationship between politicians and social identities during each of the three centuries that has been surveyed is in some ways significantly different. Before 1776, politicians did not talk about social structures or social identities (with the exception of John Wilkes), and they took hierarchy for granted. Between the 1780s and the 1870s, they no longer felt they could take hierarchy for granted, and they worked hard to preserve it, and to dampen down alternative, collective social identities. Since the Third Reform Act, social Identities have been brought inside the electoral system, which meant that politicians became more active than ever before in trying to mould and manipulate them.

But notwithstanding these significant changes over time, it is the enduringness of these three basic ways of seeing British society which most stands out. Although they do not realise it, this is probably what most outsiders mean when they remark – as they regularly and repeatedly do – that the British are more obsessed with class than any other nation in the world.¹⁷ For it is not that Britain is the most unequal society on the planet: the rich are not as rich as those in the United States, nor the poor as poor. Nor is it that social mobility is uniquely restricted: it is, in fact, comparable to most countries in Western Europe. Rather, it is that the British think and talk about their inequality and immobility more, and that is because, for good historical reasons, they have a larger repertoire of surviving vernacular models than most nations in which to describe and discuss them.¹⁸ When remarked that Britain was the ‘most class-ridden country under the sun’, this is surely what he meant – or what he ought to have meant. For there is something unusual about the history of social structures and social perceptions in Britain and also about the interconnections between them. Britain has had no 1776, no 1789, no 1917, no 1921, no 1947: hierarchy has not been forcibly abolished; society has not been changed through revolution; and neither have the three different ways in which people look at it.

This, in turn, explains why the history of class in Britain should only be written, and can only be written, as the history of multiple identities. Such a conclusion brings us a long way from the single master narrative, built around class formation, class consciousness, class war and class dominance, with which this book began. This may have been the way historians saw the British past a generation ago, but it is not the way they see it now. In the post-modern world we inhabit today, this seems a necessary and healthy development. But post-modernism should not be taken to extremes: multiplicity is not the same as incoherence, and should be made neither the excuse nor the justification for it. What has been offered here instead is an alternative master narrative, built around a very different notion of class: of class as social description, social perception, social identities and political creation. This history of class is as much about the history of ideas about society as it is about society itself. Thus properly regarded and understood, class remains an essential element in the British past and in British life, and there is no one whose attitudes and accomplishments provide more emphatic proof of that than Margaret Thatcher.

II. The Impact of Thatcher

Throughout her years in power, Margaret Thatcher was determined to ‘change the way we look at things, to create a wholly new attitude of mind’, and in this Messianic endeavour, the transformation of social visions, and of the social attitudes which went with them, were as important to her as they had previously been to Stanley Baldwin, but in a very different way.¹⁹ The essential starting point for any investigation into Thatcher's conceptions of Britain's social structure is Grantham: the place where she was born and which she vividly recalls in her memoirs. Her most expansive recollections are of the town on display in the civic processions associated with Remembrance Day and King George V's Silver Jubilee in 1935: the ‘mayor, aldermen and councillors with robes and regalia’, followed by the ‘Brownies, Cubs, Boys’ Brigade, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, Freemasons, Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, Working Men's Clubs, trade unions, British Legion, soldiers, airmen, the Red Cross, the St John's Ambulance’, and then the ‘representatives of every organisation which made up our rich civic life’: all these, she recalls, ‘filed past’. This, for her, was the outward and visible expression of a layered, hierarchical society, held together by loyalty to monarchy and empire. In such a community, she ‘did not grow up with the sense of division and conflict between classes’. Indeed, she did ‘not see that class was important’.²⁰

This was not the only way in which Thatcher recalls the social order of her youth in Grantham, though it is certainly the one on which she dwells most vividly, evocatively and affectionately. She also remembers that she was born and brought up, ‘neither poor nor rich’, in the middle-class world of prosperous shopkeepers and small-town businessmen, who formed the solid backbone of local society. Some distance above, there was the aristocratic splendour of such local landed notables as the earls of Brownlow and the dukes of Rutland. Some distance beneath, there was another and very different world, of unemployed workers, queueing up for the dole at the Grantham Labour Exchange. And finally, seeing Grantham yet a third way, Lady Thatcher remembers one deep, fundamental social divide: ‘the real distinction in the town’, she thinks, ‘was between those who drew salaries for what today would be called “white collar” employment, and those who did not’.²¹ Taken together, these recollections add up to the three familiar modes of social description: the hierarchical, the triadic and the dichotomous. Thus described, Grantham in 1935 bears a striking resemblance to Montpellier in 1768, and to the stock pictures of British society across the centuries.

In other ways, Thatcher's original social vision was even more localised. Her father kept a grocer's shop, and this meant that in her formative years, she got to know about people, not as manufacturing producers, nor as collective aggregates, but as individual consumers. ‘We lived’, she recalls, ‘by serving the customer.’²² This in turn meant that she did not share the views of Adam Smith (or Karl Marx) that social identities were fundamentally fashioned by a person's relationship to the means of production, and that as a result they were primarily shared, group identities. This preference for individual consumers over collective producers was further reinforced by the fact that Grantham provided her with no first-hand experience of the factory-based, traditional working class ‘as a sociological entity’. Apart from a small engineering works, there was no heavy industry in the town, and no large-scale, segregated industrial workforce. To be sure, Thatcher's Grantham was not Trollope's Barchester, but nor was it Dickens's Coketown. And although she went away to Oxford, qualified as a lawyer, married a businessman and lived in London, she never achieved first-hand knowledge of the industrial working classes or of manufacturing industry.²³ Nor, having entered politics and risen to the top, did she much modify the three visions of society she had formed while living above the corner shop.

Indeed, as prime minister, Thatcher's social vision of Britain and for Britain was in many ways Grantham writ large. She continued to believe in ordered hierarchy, and she felt an almost Burkeian reverence for ‘a great chain of people, stretching back into the past and forwards into the future’, just like those civic processions from the days of her youth. To begin with, she had a deep respect for the institution of monarchy as the apex and epitome of an established society: nobody would curtsey to the queen lower than she.²⁴ Nor was this obsequiousness confined to the crown. As one contemporary noted, ‘She still actually has a sort of reverence for the Archbishop this and the Lord That and the Duke of Whatever. She really does. She actually still slightly bends the knee. It's not as if she thinks it: she was brought up to it.’ The hierarchical outlook of her youth, epitomised by the Brownlow family silver, and her father's mayoral chain and aldermanic robes, accompanied her to 10 Downing Street. And so did her belief in the permanence of social inequality and the importance of social subordination. Like Disraeli and Churchill before her, she saw society as a ladder, with ‘differentials at every level’, and she was deeply opposed to any government intervention intended to undermine it, or lay it flat, or break it, or remove it.²⁵

But as befitted someone who had been born in the lower middle class, and risen by marriage and merit within the same class, Thatcher also remained wedded to the three-layered model of society. For she genuinely believed that ‘the great middle mass of the British’ was the repository of all the virtues she most admired. Among them were thrift, hard work, self-reliance, independence and responsibility – qualities she once described as ‘Victorian values’, but which were in fact the values of her father's Grantham shopocracy.²⁶ Put more positively, this meant that she regarded the middle classes as the backbone of the enterprise economy she sought to promote, and as the most important wealth creators of the nation: men like Lords Taylor, White, Hanson and King, whom she delighted to ennoble. And she took pleasure and pride in contrasting these vigorous middle-class attributes, and these exemplary middle-class entrepreneurs, to the languid, appeasing, privileged aristocracy, and to a working class easily swayed by the propaganda of trades union leaders. For Thatcher was in no doubt that it was ‘the interests of the middle class of a country’ on which ‘future prosperity largely depends’.²⁷ She was herself indebted to Enoch Powell and Sir Keith Joseph for these views. But in a longer perspective, she was merely resorting to a rhetoric that had been commonplace in Britain since at least the late eighteenth century. All that was unusual was that she asserted it with a conviction that had not been heard in a hundred years.

At the same time, Thatcher continued to believe that British society was riven by one great, single divide – though it was not primarily the line that she had earlier discerned in Grantham. For now the starting point was Communism, which she claimed ‘gives privileges to the few at the top, and none to the many’ below. Nor was Socialism any better. It resulted in ‘two nations: the privileged rulers and everyone else’. And it produced ‘the most stratified of all societies, divided into two classes, the powerful and the powerless, the party-bureaucratic élite and the manipulated masses’.²⁸ In Britain, this had given rise, since the Second World War, to a self-interested, self-perpetuating and unaccountable élite, contemptuous of ‘the people’, which occupied entrenched positions in the BBC, the Foreign Office, the universities and the Church of England. It was against this new form of ‘Old Corruption’ – and its 1980s characterisation as the ‘chattering classes’ – that Thatcher presented herself as an anti-Establishment crusader, as a Tory who was on the side of the plebs against the patricians, the producers against the prasites.²⁹ Here was a new-style populism, with Thatcher as a latter-day Cobbett, claiming ‘it is our policies which are in tune with the deepest instincts of the British people’. And it was on the basis of this adversarial vision of society that she campaigned for ‘an irreversible shift of power [in Britain] in favour of working people and their families’.³⁰

As the foregoing quotations frequently serve to show, Thatcher expressed her views on Britain's social structure with characteristic force and candour. But for all their inimitable articulation, the models which she used were commonplace – indeed, so commonplace that they may be closely compared to those which Gladstone had used a century before. Like Gladstone, Thatcher was an ‘out and out inequalitarian’, pledged to protect and preserve hierarchy. Like Gladstone, Thatcher came from the upwardly mobile middle classes, and she was very conscious that society was divided into three basic groups. And like Gladstone, Thatcher was a ‘moral populist’, on the side of ‘the people’ against the ‘upper ten’, and would back ‘the masses’ against ‘the classes’ any time.³¹ Nor are these the only similarities. For like Gladstone again, she moved easily from one of these models to another. In one guise, she was a neo-conservative, believing society was a Burkeian hierarchy of disciplined authoritarianism and ordered subordination. In another, she took a neo-liberal view, that society was a tripartite construct, dominated by the laissez-faire ideology and entrepreneurial ethos of the middle classes. From yet a third perspective, she was a neo-populist confrontationalist, leading what was often described as ‘the peasants’ revolt’ against established and entrenched élites. Here were contradictions aplenty. But such was the force of her personality and the extent of her dominance that in her years of power, they were rarely remarked upon.³²

In any case, whatever the commonplace contradictions of her social visions, Thatcher was extremely accomplished at turning these vague and contradictory rhetorical imperatives into vigorous political programmes. To begin with, she was determined to drive the language of class – and the idea of class conflict – off the agenda of public discussion, and this was something she very successfully accomplished.³³ The word ‘class’ hardly ever appeared in her speeches, except when she was denouncing Communists or Socialists or the Labour Party or the trades unions. Politics, she insisted, was not ‘a matter of social class’, and ‘class warfare’ was an ‘outmoded Marxist doctrine’, which had incited social conflict where it would not otherwise have existed. At every opportunity, she berated Marxists as believers in false laws of history and of human behaviour, based on the misleading categories of class and the concept of class struggle. Marx had been wrong to claim that class was the key to the politics of the mid-nineteenth century, and his prescriptions for the future were as mistaken as his contemporary analysis. For there was not now, and there had never been such a thing as ‘an underprivileged and internationally recognisable’ working class. Indeed, the very idea that history – or society – was fundamentally about ‘one class against another’ was to her a perversion of the truth.³⁴

Thatcher's constantly and determinedly negative rhetoric was very successful in discrediting class and class conflict as the languages and concepts of political discussion, and it is not coincidence that it was also in these years that they disappeared as the languages and concepts of historical inquiry.³⁵ She did not accept collective social categories based on mutually hostile relations to the means of production. Instead, and more positively and predictably, she talked about individuals and consumers. The purpose of production, she insisted, was ‘to discover what the customer will buy and to produce it’. ‘People must be free to choose’, she went on, ‘what they consume in goods and services.’ The market economy was not about collective groups of producers: instead, it devolved ‘the power of consumer choice to customers’. Here were her childhood memories of Grantham elevated into social taxonomies for the country as a whole. In the same way, she repeatedly spoke of ‘the nation’, or ‘the people’, or ‘the working people’, or ‘the British people’, or ‘the working population’. Indeed, she even coined the phrase the ‘classless society’ long before her successor, John Major, made it his own. ‘It was not so much’, she was later to write, ‘that I wanted a classless society, as the socialists (somewhat disingenuously) said they did, but that I could not see that class was important.’³⁶ We are back to her father's shop: class had not signified in the Grantham of her youth, and she was resolved it should not signify in the Britain of her prime.

But for all Thatcher's hostility to Marxism, Communism and Socialism, and notwithstanding her resulting determination to stamp out the language of class and the substance of class conflict, Hugo Young is surely correct when he notes that she was in practice ‘acutely sensitive to class’. Despite her veneration for the traditional Burkeian hierarchy, she was ‘remarkably indifferent’ to those who personified that hierarchy at its apex: royalty, aristocracy and landed gentry. Both ideologically and socially, she was ill at ease with the old-style paternalism of the queen and the prince of Wales; the snobbish, self-perpetuating royal court was just the sort of élite vested interest that radical Thatcherites wanted to sweep away; and she herself had no more regard for royal audiences at Buckingham Palace than for country pursuits at Balmoral.³⁷ She was equally suspicious of the traditional Tory patricians: she had no time for ‘the agonised social conscience of the English upper classes’, and hated their condescension, their patronising attitudes, and their concern for an idealised poor from a position of inherited privilege. It is easy to see why. To read the memoirs of such ministers as Lords Carrington or Whitelaw is to encounter an alternative social world: rural, privileged, secure, centred on the paternal family estate and the ordered ranks of the regiment. It is, in short, a very different version of the local hierarchy from that which Thatcher recalled in small-town Grantham.³⁸

Here was the basis for a conflict of social perceptions and political attitudes within Thatcher's cabinets which amounted to a kind of class war. For she knew she was ‘of a different class’ from them, and they knew it too. As a result, she was the target of a great deal of social disparagement. There were whispers at court, Willie Whitelaw thought her ‘governessy’, Francis Pym claimed she was ‘a corporal’ rather than a ‘cavalry officer’, and Sir Ian Gilmour warned against ‘retreat behind the privet hedge into a world of narrow class interests and selfish concerns’.³⁹ She was clearly enraged by this patrician condescension, and her memoirs record not only her resentment, but also her scarcely concealed delight in getting rid of these privileged notables. She had no time for Lord Carrington's notions of ‘dignity’. She described Jim Prior as a ‘false squire’, a phrase which clearly ranked high in her lexicon of personal and political abuse. And when she sacked Lord Soames, he gave her the impression that ‘the natural order of things was being violated’ and that he, a ‘dispossessed grandee’, had been ‘dismissed by his housemaid’.⁴⁰ The metaphor is as revealing as the phraseology. For all her attachment to traditional order and inequality, Thatcherism did portend ‘the end of deference’, and the erosion of respect for an ordered vision of society. It was, after all, during the 1980s that Thatcherite newspapers toppled the monarchy from its revered place at the summit of the social hierarchy.

Thatcher's deep-rooted dislike of the traditional aristocracy was matched by her equal dislike of the traditional working class, especially organised labour, about whom she had never known (or cared) all that much, and about whom she had unthinkingly absorbed the powerful Tory negative stereotypes of the inter-war years. Unlike the grandees in her party, she neither romanticised nor sentimentalised the workers. On the contrary, she regarded them as ‘idle, deceitful, inferior and bloody minded’ – a catalogue of behavioural failings no less selective than the moral approbation she simultaneously lavished on the middle class.⁴¹ She was widely criticised for her lack of public compassion for those less well off and less fortunate, and her hostility to the traditional paternalist concern for them. She did not like the culture of dependency, regarded the rise in unemployment during the early 1980s with an equanimity bordering on indifference, and believed (along with Norman Tebbit) that out of work people should stop complaining, get on their bikes and go out to look for jobs.⁴² Here was another binary Thatcherite social vision, but a very different one from that in which she was on the side of ‘the people’ against a corrupt Establishment. For now, in a manner reminiscent of her sense of the great Grantham social divide, she presented herself as being on the side of the majority of the decent, respectable population against the most unsavoury and wayward elements of the working class.

It was this confrontationalist vision of society which reinforced Thatcher's determination, in 1984–5, to take on Arthur Scargill and what she termed the miners’ ‘insurrection’. Unlike Harold Macmillan, she did not think these people were ‘the best men in the world’, who had beaten the armies of the Kaiser and Hitler, and who ‘never gave in’.⁴³ On the contrary, she thought they were revolutionaries, ‘the crack division of the working class’, and that they had to be defeated. This was a class war Thatcher was determined to fight – and to win. So was Arthur Scargill. He was a Marxist-Leninist who believed in ‘pure class struggle’, he thought the miners were the vanguard of the working-class revolution, and he was determined to secure ‘victory’ for the proletariat.⁴⁴ But his lurid rhetoric and apocalyptic social vision never shaped any social reality except that existing inside his own head: for the miners' struggle was not synonymous with the struggle of the working class, and there was nothing he could say or do which would have made it so. In beating Scargill and the miners, Thatcher scored a political and rhetorical victory against the Marxist vision of society, which in defeat looked increasingly outmoded and irrelevant. It was, she claimed, a triumph for ‘the whole working people of Britain’ over ‘the rule of the mob’.⁴⁵ The words, as usual, were carefully chosen: class war, yes; the language of class, no.

All this suggests that Thatcher's notion of Britain as a ‘classless society' was one where she had won the class war, where there were no collective class identities or class enemies left, and where she had driven class off the agenda of public perceptions and discussion. Yet to do this, she herself had to be obsessed with class, and that she seems to have been. Nor was this the only irony and contradiction in her position. For while she had driven the language of class off the agenda, the three basic models of British society, which were frequently but not exclusively articulated in the language of class, remained essentially unchanged, and most of all in 10 Downing Street itself. The vocabularies in which social perceptions were described had altered; the social perceptions themselves continued largely unaltered. Although she did not use these words or concepts, she still envisaged the British social structure in terms of traditional hierarchies, or as three collective groupings, or as fissured by one great divide, which was drawn at different levels for different political purposes. Small wonder that Thatcher never projected a fully coherent social vision. Perhaps this was what she meant when she famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women, and there are families.’⁴⁶

Nor did Thatcher succeed in pinning behavioural characteristics on particular social groups in the way that she wished. She hated the patrician ‘wets’, for their weakness, disloyalty, condescension and vacillation. But two of her most fervent supporters in cabinet came from just that much despised social group – Willie Whitelaw and Nicholas Ridley – and displayed no such incontinent tendencies. She celebrated the entrepreneurial and money-making virtues to such an extent that she was rightly accused of ‘bourgeois triumphalism’.⁴⁷ But she alienated many many members of the professional, university-educated middle class, who (like Jonathan Miller and Mary Warnock) rejected her celebration of business attitudes and wealth creation, found her incorrigibly strident and suburban, and increasingly moved to the centre parties and modernising Labour. And she attacked organised labour with unsympathetic ferocity, and was icily compassionless to the underprivileged. But she won the votes of many trades unionists, upwardly mobile workers and first-time owner–occupiers, for whom voting Tory had previously been unthinkable.⁴⁸

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Thatcher brought about a revolution neither in social perceptions nor in social attitudes, though she clearly tried very hard to achieve both. To be sure, she made the language of the customer and the consumer more pervasive than the language of class or of the producer, and she was very determined to accomplish this. But this change in people's thinking would probably have happened sooner or later in any case, given the long-term decline in Britain of traditional manufacturing, and the rise of many new service industries. Moreover, she offered no new vision of the social structure as a whole, and her attempts to come up with a new moral sociology also made little progress. Even more interestingly, the relationship between what she said about society and the way voting habits actually changed owed little to her. For as Daniel Bell pointed out some time ago, these developments – an increasingly radical middle class and an increasingly conservative working class – have been commonplace in most post-industrial societies.⁴⁹ All that can be said is that she politicised social categories and social models in an adversarial way as no British political leader had done since Lloyd George – a figure whom in many ways she markedly resembles.

Nevertheless, it is arguable that the most resonant and abiding descriptions of British society during the Thatcher years were not in the end those of her own choosing or articulation. The massive rise in unemployment during the early 1980s, and the evidence that poverty and inequality were increasing during the later part of the decade, led many to believe that the fabric of British society was once again being rent asunder, and the language of the ‘two nations’ duly came back on the agenda of public discussion. It was clear, according to the archbishop of Canterbury, ‘that rich and poor, suburb and inner city, privileged and deprived, have been becoming more sharply separate from each other’. The sociologist A.H. Halsey agreed, arguing there had been a polarisation between ‘a majority in secure attachment to a still-prosperous country, and a minority in marginal social and economic conditions’ – a new underclass of poor and unemployed and black youngsters in inner cities, turning to crime and drugs. It was not only ‘one nation’ Tories who increasingly believed (and feared) that Britain was becoming ‘a two-thirds/one-third society of winners and losers’, where the latter could expect nothing from the former. Combined with the early riots at Toxteth and Brixton and those which came later over the poll tax, this projected an image of a deeply divided British society under Thatcher which was very different from that she had hoped to impose.

III. Major, Blair and Beyond

In any case, Thatcher has been gone a long time. How, then, have and do those politicians who have come after her conceive of contemporary British society? What sense of its overall shape and form and structure do Major, Clarke and Heseltine, or Hague, Redwood and Howard, or Blair, Brown and Prescott, or Cook, Harman and Ashdown, actually have? In what words and categories do they conceive and describe the social world around them? How do they think British society has evolved across the centuries to be the way they think it is now? These questions are rarely asked of British politicians. But since they have been, are now, or wish to be responsible for conducting the nation's affairs, it does not seem unreasonable to inquire what social vision they have of the aggregate of people over whom they have governed, are governing, or wish to govern. Do they think there is such a thing as society? Does it consist of two or three collective groups? Or is it best envisaged in another way? And in what language do they think about British society and describe it? Such questions might be asked of politicians every time there is a general election, and they might be regularly and insistently repeated in between. But even without explicit answers, it is possible to give some idea of what British politicians have been thinking and saying about British society in the aftermath of the collapse of Communism and Thatcherism.

When Margaret Thatcher left office reluctantly in November 1990, she was followed by someone who also made much of politicising social descriptions, and who owed his election as leader of the Conservative Party to his repeated identification with a Thatcher phrase which he had made even more his own: the ‘classless society’.⁵⁰ But whereas Thatcher meant by this that she had won the class war against the unionised workers, and had driven class off the agenda of public and political discussion, John Major meant something very different: a society which was ‘at ease with itself’, which was not fissured by any great divide, and where people were not looked down on because of their lowly social origins. Thatcher's ‘classless society’ was the product of confrontation and struggle and victory: Major's ‘classless society’ was one where everybody would try to be nicer to each other. In the manner of his hero, Stanley Baldwin, he presented himself as a class conciliator rather than a class warrior.⁵¹ This may explain why the phrase became much more associated with him than with her, and why it has taken on a life of its own during the 1990s. Yet on closer inspection, Major's vision – or, rather, visions – of British society turn out to have been very familiar.

Like Thatcher, Major envisaged people as disaggregated consumers rather than collective producers: hence his attacks on Labour for treating them ‘as blocks and groups’ but never ‘as individuals’, and his belief in the importance of customer choice. But he was less successful than Thatcher in disguising the inherent (and inherited) contradictions of the modern Tory social vision: was Britain a Burkeian hierarchy, or a three-level society with a dominant middle class, or ‘two nations’ divided between us and them? In one guise, Major was a Trollope-reading social traditionalist, wedded to ‘the vivid tapestry of distinctions that we have in this country’, exemplified by the royal yacht and the hereditary peerage, both of which he defended with a reactionary vehemency that would have done credit to the duke of Wellington.⁵² In another, he saw Britain from a middle-class perspective, with his suburban liking for school uniforms and the Great Western Railway, John Arlott and Brian Johnston, and his love of Surrey cricket and Chelsea football. But he was also a Tory populist: the self-made man from Brixton, battling against the condescending establishment of the ‘chattering classes’, supporting the ‘Citizen's Charter’ for ordinary people, and attacking Tony Blair for his élitist education: ‘New Labour, old school tie’.⁵³

Since Major's departure, Tory visions of British society have been much less in evidence. But some indications of what Hague's party thinks may be gleaned from the words of Michael Portillo. From one perspective, he is a crusading populist, railing against sick, corrupt, unpatriotic, self-perpetuating élites in Britain and Brussels: ‘the people who think they know what's best for us’. From another, he is the standard bearer of the free-marketeer hard right, stressing the importance of ‘entrepreneurial flair’ and the middle classes. But as befits a product of Maurice Cowling's Peterhouse,⁵⁴ he has also embraced traditional hierarchy, urging the need for ‘order in society’ and ‘respect and duty from top to bottom’, and quoting these familiar lines from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, which remain central to one strand of Conservative social philosophy:

O, when degree is shak'd,

Which is the ladder of all high designs,

The enterprise is sick! How could communities,

Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,

Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

The primogenity and due of birth,

Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,

But by degree stand in authentic place?

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark what discord follows!⁵⁵

As these examples suggest, the same deep contradictions remain at the heart of the Tory social vision that emerged in Margaret Thatcher's day, between the neo-conservatives who see Britain in terms of hierarchy and history, order and subordination, the neo-liberals who embrace the three-layered, middle-class, free-market option, and the neo-populists who draw one great divide between ‘the people’ (who are good) and ‘the élite’ (who are bad).⁵⁶ Whether it will be possible for the Tories to contain and to fudge these divergent models of society indefinitely, only time will tell. It is one thing for ordinary people to live with these different visions, and to move from one to another as they navigate their way through their social life. It is quite another for a political party to espouse all three of them, when they carry such very different, very potent ideologies, and such very different views of the nation's past, present and future. During the course of the twentieth century, the Tory Party has moved from patrician to middle class to petty-bourgeois leadership, and during that time, its traditional hierarchical social vision has been joined by the middle-class triadic and the Essex-man-confrontational models. Indeed, it has been the party's capacity simultaneously to broaden its personnel and widen its social vision which goes a long way to explaining its unique electoral success.⁵⁷ But for how much longer? Who can say?

Like the Conservatives, New Labour nowadays talks the language of individual ‘consumers’ and ‘citizens’, rather than that of collective ‘workers’ or ‘producers’ or ‘classes’.⁵⁸ And like the Tories again, it has embraced the three conventional models of society: though not always with the same attitudes to them. When Tony Blair attacks ‘a class system unequal and antiquated’, and when he laments that ‘Britain is still, after all these years, a place where class counts’, he is insisting that the ‘old hierarchy of deference’ remains, and that it has to be ‘dismantled’.⁵⁹ He agrees with the Tories that it exists: unlike some of them, he wants it to go. But when he says that ‘between the underclass and the overclass is a new and growing anxious class’, he embraces the three-layered model of British society, appealing to those in the middle, including businessmen and entrepreneurs, whose anxieties he promises to allay more effectively than the Conservatives. And when he attacks the Tories as ‘the party of privilege’, governing in the interests of ‘the élite at the top’, or when he urges that ‘wealth, power and opportunity’ should be ‘in the hands of the many, not the few’, or when he mourns Diana as ‘the people's princess’, he is resorting to the binary model, with New Labour as the party of ‘the anti-Establishment’, and of ordinary men and women.⁶⁰

The similarities between the social visions of the Conservatives under Major and Labour under Blair are thus very marked, and their triadic images are especially alike in all except their vocabulary. In the case of the Tories, they have been built around the idea of ‘middle England’, a phrase apparently derived by Margaret Thatcher from Richard Nixon's idea of ‘middle America’.⁶¹ But it has been especially associated with John Major (‘the personification of middle England’) and also with Kenneth Clarke (born in ‘the unchanging world of middle England’). For them, middle England means ‘the long shadows falling across the county ground… the invincible green suburbs… old maids bicycling to Holy Communion’.⁶² This is emphatically England not Britain, and the ‘middle’ being referred to is neither geographical nor sociological, but essentially rhetorical. As Martin Jacques recently explained, ‘Middle England is primarily a political invention… a metaphor for respectability, the nuclear family, heterosexuality, conservatism, whiteness, middle age and the status quo.’⁶³ It is, in short, the latest version of the traditional three-layer model of society, which has always privileged those in the centre, given a contemporary, sub-Baldwinian, sub-Orwellian spin.

Tony Blair's equivalent social image was that of ‘community’, which was intended as a retort to Thatcher's claim that there is no such thing as society.⁶⁴ But like ‘middle England’, ‘community’ is a term at once comforting and vague. It is comforting because it disregards social inequality or class conflict, and because communities are depicted as inclusive congregations of the virtuous: no one speaks of the ‘gun owning community’ or the ‘fox hunting community’, or the ‘smoking community’: they are ‘lobbies’, or special interest groups, with selfish and sectional agendas. By contrast, a recent list of ‘communities’, by a well-disposed commentator, enumerates ‘trade unions, business associations, co-operatives, universities, cricket clubs, churches, Rotary Clubs, the Women's Institute, local councils and the BBC’ – most of which are as middle class (and as middle England) as Major's bicycling old maids. Beyond that, and like ‘middle England’ again, there is no real sociological or geographical substance to the notion of ‘community’, and in the post-modern era of shifting and multiple identities, it is difficult to see how there can be. Like ‘middle England’, ‘community’ is an unspecific rhetorical construct: and as Benedict Anderson noted some years ago, all communities are by definition to some degree ‘imagined’.⁶⁵

Thus regarded, Blair's ‘community’ was virtually identical to Major's ‘middle England’, though of a slightly pinker hue: appealing to readers of the Independent rather than the Daily Telegraph.⁶⁶ Indeed, as the 1997 general election drew nearer, Blair and his supporters became more interested in defining and seeking the votes of ‘middle Britain’ than in defining or talking about ‘community’. The broader geographical range was appropriate (indeed, essential) for a party heavily dependent on Welsh and Scottish votes. But like ‘middle England’, ‘middle Britain’ was largely a rhetorical construct, based on imaginative and collective behavioural stereotyping. The result was two different versions of ‘the middle’ which were offered to the electorate by the party leaders. According to Labour, it was a ‘constituency of enlightened self-interest, perhaps even altruism, where voters would happily pay more taxes for better schools, hospitals and transport, and more social justice’. But according to the Conservatives, middle Englanders preferred ‘tax cuts and people to stand on their own two feet’. They ‘looked back fondly on Margaret Thatcher, loathed trades unions, wanted to be tough on crime’.⁶⁷

Here were two mutually exclusive versions of what was supposed to be the same social group. But they also had much in common. Both assumed the three-stage model of British society, with ‘the middle’ as the most important. Both were post-Thatcher attempts to talk to and about what they believed to be the middle class, without actually using the dreaded word ‘class’ as a collective social category. And both sought to convey an impression of concern for middle-class feelings of insecurity and marginalisation which had come to the fore during the 1970s and 1980s: the old beleaguered refrain once again.⁶⁸ Thus understood, ‘middle England’, ‘community’ and ‘middle Britain’ are merely the latest attempts by politicians to persuade the British public to look at the social structure in a particular way; they are the venerable triadic model articulated in a 1990s idiom, and they no more constitute ‘real social knowledge’ than do most politicised forms of social description. And as so often in the past, neither of these essentially political formulations could be easily or consistently related to alternative social visions which both party leaders also pledged themselves to realise: in positive terms the ‘classless society’ Major sought to create; in negative terms the ‘class distinctions’ which Blair proclaimed his wish to abolish.⁶⁹

Both the present and past prime minister are prepared to use the language of ‘class’ to describe something which they think to be bad, and which they want to get rid of, namely the social order as it now is. For however much it is welcomed (or feared) that deference weakened during the 1960s or the 1980s, there are few today who believe that Britain is yet a ‘classless society’. Most people still see Britain as a class-bound society: sometimes as a traditional hierarchy, sometimes in terms of three basic divisions, sometimes in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’.⁷⁰ What, then, would have to be done to persuade Britons to view their class-bound society in a wholly new way, to (literally) remodel their perceptions of the social structure so that they came to believe that it had become classless? It is not clear whether either Major or Blair has posed or addressed this question. But in order to do so, they would need to break it down into three more manageable areas of inquiry. First: what would a ‘classless’ society look like? Second: what steps would have to be taken to make it possible to persuade Britons to see their society in this new (indeed virtually unprecedented) way? Third: is it realistic to suppose that such a ‘classless society’ can in practice be brought about?

Since there have been inequalities of wealth and power in most societies throughout recorded history, it seems unrealistic to define a ‘classless’ society as one in which these inequalities have been abolished. Instead, it is more plausible to define such a society as one in which the majority of people do not think about the social order in terms of a formal or informal hierarchy, in terms of an upper, middle and lower class, or in terms of a great divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In this sense, the pioneering and prototypical classless society remains the United States of America. Undeniably, there are great – and growing – inequalities of wealth and power.⁷¹ But these do not translate into corresponding inequalities of social prestige or social perceptions. Unlike the British, Americans do not conceive of their society hierarchically. Nor do they think of it triadically, since the overwhelming majority regard themselves as middle class. And nor, therefore, do they think of their society as being fissured in one deep, fundamental way. (Or if they do, it is on the grounds of race, not class.) By comparison with England, Americans are not interested in the language of class, or in the models of society which in Britain that language describes. The result, as Lord Beaverbrook once remarked, is that in the new world, unlike the old, the only difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich have more money.⁷² This remains a shrewd insight.

Since it was originally a British colony, the classlessness of the United States is also of some relevance to the second question: how might Britain become a classless society? At the risk of extreme over-simplification, the Americans achieved it in part by abolishing all formal titles during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in part by spreading themselves out in localised settlements across an entire continent during the nineteenth, and in part by creating the world's most successful and democratic capitalist economy during the twentieth. It is the combination of these historical, geographical and economic developments which has produced in the United States that non-hierarchical, non-divided, overwhelmingly ‘middle-class’ nation which remains the closest thing we in the West know to a ‘classless’ society. And the American experience carries with it important implications for the potential creation of a classless society in Britain. In order to render the hierarchical model of class inapplicable, the visible manifestations of hierarchy would have to go. This would mean doing more than abolishing the rights of hereditary peers to sit or vote in the House of Lords. It would mean the blanket abolition of titles: not just life peerages and knighthoods, but also hereditary peerages and baronetcies.⁷³ It would also imply doing something about the monarchy: not necessarily abolishing it, but certainly making it less of a hierarchical institution and legitimator than it still is at present.

On the basis of the precedent afforded by the United States, this would be the minimum that would be required to rid the British of their hierarchical view of themselves. How might they be persuaded to give up on the triadic formulation of upper, middle and lower class, and come to see almost all of themselves as belonging to the same middle class? The abolition of titles would, of course, go some way to abolishing the sense of upper-class separateness. The duke of Westminster would still be a very rich man as the non-ducal Mr Gerald Grosvenor. But he would no longer be an aristocrat. Instead, like Rockefeller or Mellon or Gates, he would be a very wealthy member of the middle class. There would also need to be a greater cult of self-help and of the entrepreneurial virtues than even Thatcher was able to achieve in her attempts to turn Britain into a second United States. And it would also be necessary to rid the working class of what Ernest Bevin famously called their ‘poverty of expectations’, and to reduce the number of those who worked with their hands very substantially. Historically, there has always been a bigger lower class in Britain than in America, just as there has always been a bigger upper class. The plebs, as well as the patricians, would have to be diminished and downsized, and the middle class correspondingly increased in number, size and self-regard, so as to become, as in the USA, the only serious and substantial part of society.

These developments would render the tripartite model of British society less credible, as everyone increasingly came to see themselves as part of a massively expanded, and reconceptualised, middle class. This, in turn, would make it less likely that Britons would continue to think of themselves as a deeply divided society, split between ‘us’ and ‘them’, officers and men, U and non-U, those with accents and those without. But this would not of itself be sufficent to bring about a society whose inhabitants believed themselves to belong to a new, non-traditional, classless meritocracy. For something would also have to be done about education. The division between those who enrol in the state system and those who are educated at fee-paying schools is widely thought to perpetuate and intensify the view that Britain is not one but two nations, characterised by what many believe to be social apartheid.⁷⁴ There is much to be said for this view. Yet it remains unclear just how education can be reformed so that it is simultaneously meritocratic and classless. No British government this century has been prepared to tackle this exceptionally complex and contentious question with the courage and imagination it requires. But until it is addressed, it seems safe (and sad) to predict that many people in this country will continue to describe Britain's social structure as being deeply polarised.

These reforms would be the minimum required to persuade the British to stop thinking about themselves and talking about their society in terms of the three models which are all regularly articulated in the language of class. But is such a ‘classless society’ something which the British actually want? A nation which was agog over whether the soon-to-be divorced princess of Wales should be allowed to retain the prefix ‘Her Royal Highness’ is clearly besotted with class as hierarchy.⁷⁵ A nation which could not decide whether John Prescott was right to announce he had left the working class for the middle class, is no less preoccupied with class as the three-layered model of society.⁷⁶ And a nation which was gripped by the courtroom battle between Imran Khan and Ian Botham, a large part of which was devoted to considering and contrasting their social origins, is equally obsessed with class as ‘gentlemen versus players’.⁷⁷ None of these episodes suggests a society in which there is any overwhelming desire to be rid of divisive social distinctions, still less to stop talking about them.⁷⁸ Nor has the government yet been elected with the will and the knowledge to take the matter up. For all his talk of a ‘classless society’, John Major did little to match his deeds to his words. Tony Blair has promised to do better. Perhaps he will. But as Disraeli once remarked, Britain is a very difficult country to move.⁷⁹

5 Conclusion: Towards a ‘Classless Society’?

I. Long-Term Retrospective

II. The Impact of Thatcher

III. Major, Blair and Beyond

IV. How We See Ourselves