Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Another bit of British class politics

I seem to be on a kick about British politics and class cleavages. Most of the time I don't choose these themes. They appear because of events and the stories that journalists want to tell. As the British campaign season gets into full swing, we'll see more about the issues that the parties want to highlight and the issues that journalists want to highlight.

This is a follow up to Social Class in the UK

"Britain’s teeming but invisible average earners will decide the coming election. Neither David Cameron nor Gordon Brown seems to understand them"

The misinterpreted middle

In America these people would be called what they plainly are: middle class. They are around the middle of the national income distribution. They have jobs of middling status, perhaps in retail or self-employed manual trades. Their nondescript semi-detached houses are neither in the inner cities (from which they, or their parents, often migrated) nor in the kind of suburbs conventionally described as “leafy” (to which they aspire to move).

In Britain, though, “middle class” has come to refer to people who are actually well off… Middle-class professions are taken to include medicine, teaching and the law… Rising school fees are supposed to be a middle-class worry, though only 7% of British schoolchildren are educated privately…

There are many reasons why it matters that elites do not recognise the real middle class. One is their sheer weight of numbers. In 2007 half the population belonged to the socioeconomic categories C1 (lower-end white-collar workers) and C2 (skilled manual workers). The top two categories, A and B, accounted for 26%; the poorest two, D and E, for 24%. British society has morphed from a post-war pyramid, with a tiny elite, a somewhat larger middle class and a vast working class, into a diamond, where the middle is fattest.

The middle classes also matter because they are natural swing voters. Unlike the rich or the poor, it is not obvious whether their economic interests should dispose them to small or big government. Unlike the residents of great northern cities, or gilded areas of the south, middling suburbia has no tribal or historical link with either Labour or the Conservatives…

But the most important reason for recognising the real middle class is that it has had a worse time of it in recent decades than is generally recognized…

Much of this is down to the loss of middle-income jobs to technology or cheaper foreign labour…

Recognising the middle class is easier than winning their votes. David Cameron’s Conservatives are struggling to match Lady Thatcher’s rapport with them. His poshness… is a handicap… His policies are skewed too. He has goodies for the rich… and for the poor… But he has no equivalent of Lady Thatcher’s council-house policy for the middle class…

When asked whether responsibility for solving economic and social problems should lie mainly with government or with people, 62% in the middle quintile said government. No other quintile was as statist. They were also most likely to say that it is the responsibility of government to reduce inequalities in society. More than half said the government should redistribute money from the rich to the poor—as many as in the lower two quintiles. The romantic myth of rugged middle-class individualism is just that…

This seems good news for Labour… If they now want social democracy, so much the better for a party of the left. But New Labour was also about addressing middle-class worries concerning crime and other social ills...

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Labels: civil society, cleavages, politics, UK