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Andrew Pearmain
© Andrew Pearmain 2008
Much recent debate about class has concentrated on what’s been happening
among ‘the lower orders’: the break-up of the industrial proletariat,
the subsequent decline of tribal Labourism and its displacement by the ‘common
sense’ of Thatcherite ‘authoritarian populism’. More recently,
we’ve seen the deeply troubling rise of the BNP amongst some of the
disaffected white English. Alongside the political ramifications of working-class
disintegration, successive moral panics - about crime and disorder, drugs
and drink, violence and family breakdown, health and longevity, education
and employment - have assumed a clear class dimension, with the re-emergence
of what Raphael Samuel called ‘the menacing other’ in the darker
recesses of the respectable imagination. Much of this proceeds from Eric
Hobsbawm’s seminal 1978 ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’,
which served as a timely and in many quarters unwelcome wake-up call to
the Labour Movement. I want to argue here, thirty years on, that we are
now seeing an equivalent disintegration of the comfortable, complacent,
settled middle class, whose tastes, manners and prejudices have dominated
British society, culture and politics for much of the post-war period.
A middle class by definition has to look, and try to have it, both ways:
upwards and downwards at their social superiors and inferiors, backwards
to where it’s come from and forwards to where it’s going. This
leads to a kind of cultural ambivalence, a wary appreciation of subtlety
and nuance, a modus operandi of ‘muddle and fudge’,
a complex array of practical hypocrisies, and a sense of humour largely
based on social misunderstanding. It also creates a quite distinctive ‘emotional
economy’ of anxieties and satisfactions, fears and entitlements. This
characteristic middle-class ‘two-mindedness’ (or to others ‘two-facedness’)
serves it well at times of historical ascendancy, as a kind of social radar,
but also articulates its grievances at times of crisis and decline. If you
can identify the peculiar middle-class ‘temper’ that ensues,
in advanced liberal-capitalist democracies like our own, you can go a long
way towards the ‘spirit of the age’.
The story begins before the Second World War, with what I’d call the
Brief Encounter middle class, after the brilliant and recently revived
David Lean/Noel Coward film about a frustrated love affair between two (separately)
married people set in 1938. On first release in 1946, it reportedly produced
guffaws among working-class audiences, who couldn’t believe Alec and
Laura wouldn’t ‘consummate’. But amongst its middle-class
audiences it reinforced the primacy of honour and restraint. This was a
middle class whose ‘identity was constituted amid a sea of social
fears … all kinds of spectres loomed - “rude” language,
“vulgar” clothes, “coarse” looks … Keeping
up appearances was a very condition of middle-class existence, snobbery
a way of life’ (Samuel). These were the doctors and lawyers, the managers
and businessmen, the civil servants and local worthies (and their good lady
wives), who liked to imagine themselves holding everything together, including
themselves: ‘Fear of losing caste within the middle class was accompanied
by real terror at the thought of falling out of it’ (Samuel again).
The ‘post-war social democratic consensus’ - more accurately
the historic compromise with capitalism by Labourism and its allies among
the urban intelligentsia - re-orientated and reshaped the middle class.
Mass education, to university level for the brightest of all classes, created
new professional and managerial hierarchies, and a whole new set of preferences
and aspirations. This new middle class was much more expansive and confident,
inclined to ‘ostentatious display’ of their new wealth and tastes
and mores, ‘distinguishing itself more by its spending than its saving’
(Samuel). This is what we might call the Sunday Supplement middle
class, after the newspaper magazines that furnished it with a self-image
and above all, a collective statement of style. For employment, these people
elevated teaching and social work into the pantheon of respectable middle-class
professions, while business was briefly devalued as sordid ‘money-making’;
a steadily growing proportion were women. They were much less stuffy and
snobbish and more relaxed, not least because they carried some recognition
of where many of them came from, and some residual if patronising loyalty
to their ‘solidly working-class’ forebears. The ‘gentrification’
of previously run-down inner city areas assumed the moral purpose of a civilizing
mission. They consumed and created the new popular cultures of literature,
music, film and television, populated and supported the new voluntary and
charity sectors of civil society and, as time allowed, took on political
and civic responsibilities via the Labour Party and (briefly but archetypically)
the SDP, by far the purest political expression of the new middle-class
sensibility: ‘nice’ but steely, politely angry, technically
efficient, materially comfortable but morally aware, and (in Samuel’s
description) profoundly ‘unalienated’.
What we are now seeing is the break-up and sidelining of this second-phase
British Sunday Supplement middle class under a number of steadily
mounting pressures. The most obvious is the evaporation, under sustained
political attack by Thatcherism and its New Labourist variant, of the ‘public
service’ ethos which many subscribed to and derived employment from.
Not only has funding been whittled away, and centralised agencies and hierarchies
dispersed, but the very purpose and value of public service has been trashed.
Lifetime commitments and achievements have been disregarded. Deference and
respect is no longer accorded to ‘the caring professions’ (except
doctors, who were never really public servants but contractors, and continue
to enjoy a protective ‘scientific’ mystique), not least because
the rewards of private business, the new ‘creative industries’
and the semi-private outposts of the public sector are so much greater and
more obvious. And of course, many of the professional, ‘public-spirited’
middle classes are increasingly ‘old’ and ‘grumpy’,
physically and mentally ill at ease in a meaner, harder, quicker, greedier
world.
This second-phase Sunday Supplement middle class is still well
enough placed to air its new grievances. They complain that house prices
are now beyond their children’s reach, conveniently forgetting that
they have been the primary beneficiaries of the absurd and unsustainable
property mark-up of the last thirty years, and that the funds they draw
generous pensions from are major property owners and price-inflaters. They
complain that their children - subject to alien cultural influences - are
now beyond their reach too. They rail against the vulgarity of the new money,
especially if it’s foreign (Russian, Arab, Chinese, whatever …),
disproportionate or apparently undeserved (footballers, celebrities, etc).
They profess deep disappointment in New Labour, though their attachment
was always heavily conditional, and they seem quite happy to transfer their
allegiance to Cameron’s ‘new’ New Labour. And all over
popular culture, especially the ‘water-cooler’ television watched
and discussed by the residual Sunday Supplement middle class, we
see the emergence of a new ‘loser’ genre, whose primary interest
is in how people cope with failure (think about it: we remember the ‘fired’
apprentices far more vividly than the poor sod who ends up actually working
for ‘Siralan’).
The new, third-phase, Apprentice middle class are the self-styled
‘winners’, with their big houses and cars, big jobs and appetites,
big heads and voices (and, as an aside, very big mortgages and credit-debts
- unless, like a growing segment in our supposedly meritocratic society,
they’ve been born into unapologetic wealth and privilege). The Apprentice
middle class is unashamedly ostentatious, ‘ruthless’ and ‘tasteless’,
with fortunes derived (often plainly corruptly, and sometimes borderline
criminally) from the new finance, media, entertainment and celebrity industries.
If they lose those fortunes, they won’t succumb to ruin like previous
‘fallen’ middle classes, but simply set about accruing new ones.
They have no sense of ‘public spirit’ or civic duty; quite the
opposite in fact. Their wealth is used to buy separation and exclusivity,
and to control the terms on which they are viewed from a distance by the
rest of us. We are left gawping through their gates at their rumoured and
reported excesses, caught between decrying their vulgarity and encouraging
our children to emulate their apparent success: this is the new middle-class
ambivalence, the increasingly private ‘spirit of the age’.
Andrew Pearmain is research fellow in History at UEA, author
of forthcoming ‘Antonio Gramsci and the Politics of New Labour’
and ‘Episodes in Labour History’, and singer-songwriter for
up and coming punk-funk band The Simpletons.
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