What’s happened to the 21st-century protagonist of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey? Where is the contemporary kestrel-loving Billy Casper of the novel Kes? White, English working-class-born writers, educated out of their class, have largely abandoned their mates, who are now relegated once more to the margins of literature. Mates to their mates, “chavs” and “pikeys” to others, such people make more regular appearances in tabloids, where they are depicted using Morrisons plastic bags instead of nappies, and kidnapping their own children to claim the ransom. If their reputation is to be rescued then it might come down to serious non-fiction writers such as Lynsey Hanley, a journalist who grew up working class on a council estate and whose compassion and empathy for working-class people has not been worn away by the years.
Hanley’s Respectable, in which she offers herself as a case study, is an ambitious attempt to update Richard Hoggart’s groundbreaking 1957 treatise, The Uses of Literacy. Hanley acknowledges that there have since been substantial advances in opportunities for working-class people, but there have also been worrying signs of regression. On the fiction of more choice in education, for example, she is inclined to agree with professor of education at the University of Cambridge Diane Reay’s assertion that the “working class end up making the choices that the middle classes didn’t want”.
We are light years away from creating a classless society. As The Great British Class Survey of 2011 on the BBC’s Lab UK website highlighted, the differences between groups have, in some ways, become more subtle. Filling in the survey, Hanley recognised that she had changed class and become “part of an emerging elite”.
In that study, the nation was reconfigured into seven social classes. Gone was the old tripartite model once illuminated in novels such as Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and in 1960s TV dramas such as Dennis Potter’s Stand Up, Nigel Barton. Back then, working-class life was richly rendered but authors of such classics would afterwards feel less sure of their place, experiencing a dislocation as they migrated from one class to another. Early on in Respectable Hanley too suggests that she doesn’t know fully where she belongs, and is a candidate for the condition Hoggart identified in the Uses of Literacy as “uprooted and anxious”. Having acquired “as full a compliment of middle-class cliches as it’s possible to have”, she returns to her roots on the Chelmsley Wood council estate on the outskirts of Birmingham. That’s where she “grew up respectable: neither rough nor posh, neither rich nor especially poor”; where her dad was a tie-wearing utilities clerk.
Hanley explored the psychological bridge from one class to another in her previous book, Estates, and some of its cast returns in Respectable: her Sun-reading nan and granddad live just a few doors down on the estate from her parents, who are partial to the Mirror. Hanley is barely out of nappies before she too is reading the Mirror. As she grows up, her education is supplemented by Smash Hits with its “consistent tone of irreverence without cynicism” and the NME – cherished by her for its ability to shoehorn structuralism and the theories of Jacques Derrida into a magazine about pop music. The young Hanley was “head girl material” – when opening her mouth, classmates would say “blimey, you swallowed a dictionary?”
The new book sets off briskly, charting how social mobility has been allied to education, with Hanley drawing on her own experience. She examines what is lost and gained in the transition from one class to another, invoking Graham Greene’s “splinter of ice in your heart” as necessary for successfully climbing the social ladder. As a counterbalance, Hanley cites Hoggart’s assertion that betrayal is not a given for the tertiary educated man: “The real test of his education lies in his ability, by about the age of 25, to smile at his father with his whole face and to respect his flighty sister and his slower brother.”
But 60 years on, Hanley argues that the state almost posits a Mephistophelean pact as a prerequisite to getting on, communicating to working-class children that “they must reject the values of their parents and community if they are ever to hope to be a part of society”. And what of those left behind? Hanley captures the mood of the disaffected, the kind of nihilism (sometimes jaunty, always desperate) born of the belief that none of it really matters.
There is fury contained within the pages and between the lines of Respectable. Yet as Hanley goes about her work, quietly skewering the hypocrisy and continued inequality at the heart of British society, you anticipate that moment she has described as a feature of working-class life, when “the plug of repression pops out with the force of a champagne cork”. It duly arrives more than halfway through this impressive book, when the teenage Hanley is interviewed for a place at Cambridge by a snobbish don. When asked to read a passage from Wordsworth, she recalls, she sounded “like someone attempting to translate a language they’d never seen before … The tutor started to snigger.”
Hanley does not attempt to disavow the pernicious significance of that event. Here then is the pathology of class – an open, seeping wound over which flies continually buzz.
Inevitably in a book about the experience of class, Margaret Thatcher rears her divisive head. Hanley argues credibly that Thatcher’s right-to-buy council house policy drove a wedge between the working classes. Those who didn’t take up the offer were damned as an unambitious underclass, portrayed by politicians and tabloids as determinedly holding on to their victimhood and cast adrift permanently on benefit streets, Asbo tags slapped on their ankles, venting casual racism.
Too much is made in Britain of the “white working class” as if it constitutes a designated group, separate from the rest of us, not sharing our outlook or values. It’s a big lie. As someone who grew up black and Caribbean on a council estate in Luton, much of what Hanley writes rings true: the yearning for respect as an expression of self-worth; the safety of a group identity; the sense of being under attack and the consequent desire to stick it to the Man. I wish Hanley had taken more time to reveal the connections between people that transcend colour. Respect, after all, is one of the most common words in the working-class Caribbean lexicon.
Her wit is nonetheless sharpest when confounding prejudice and putting to the sword stereotypes perpetuated by lazy journalists. On the question of racist attitudes, she looks to her home constituency: when Chelmsley Wood’s sole BNP councillor was replaced in 2011 by a member of the Green party, there was “remarkably little commentary on the tendency of the downtrodden white working class to be driven into the arms of environmentalists”.
Respectable doesn’t display the same level of ambition as The Uses of Literacy, but it is an intelligent and important book that deserves to be widely read. Long after Hoggart’s seminal work, Hanley shows that the coffin of class remains open.
• Colin Grant’s Bageye at the Wheel: A 1970s Childhood in Suburbia is published by Vintage. To order Respectable for £12.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
