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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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