Earlier this month, the Resolution Foundation thinktank revealed fresh evidence that low- and middle-income families have seen their living standards stagnate for more than a decade. This might be a good moment – coupled with the great white-working-class howl of outrage represented by Brexit – to ask what role class plays in family life.
The trouble is, I don’t really know where to begin, because I don’t know what class is. It has something to do with money, obviously, but there are plenty of well-off working-class people. There are also poor people who speak with middle-class voices and have what are often referred to as “middle-class values” – which are assumed to include a respect for the law, tolerance, hard work, and so on.
But when did such values become copyrighted by the middle class? I grew up in a working-class family, but we adhered to all those values – and my dad, who worked in a greengrocer’s shop all his life, played bridge, tennis and golf and was a voracious reader, like many of our friends and relations.
So why are these activities middle class? The working class don’t simply sit around drinking, fighting, gambling, signing on and watching TV, just as the middle class don’t only sip pinot noir and listen to opera. This is important because since the salt of the earth were branded the scum of the earth, some time after Margaret Thatcher, working-class families have been left behind not only financially, but in terms of their status – and status matters.
Now the issue of class and inequality has come to the fore again, as it always must and always will, sooner or later. Because many of our children have been abandoned as no use to anyone. That great play about the inhumanity of inequality for children, Willy Russell’s Our Day Out, is as relevant today as it was when it first aired 40 years ago.
When I talk about “our” children, who am I talking about? Not mine, who grew up in London’s cosmopolitan enclaves. No, I must wrench my eyes away from them for once, and their cultural capital, useful contacts and pleasant homes. I must look to all those children who may well have roofs over their heads, flatscreen TVs, and perhaps a car and some decent trainers, but are bitterly aware of what they don’t have and have no likelihood of attaining – hope, an equal chance, pride.
Just project yourself into the mind of a child in a working-class family in Wirral, or Blackpool, or Margate. What would you see there? You would see vain fantasies about being a footballer or a singer. You may see a child as fundamentally decent, intelligent and thoughtful as any middle-class child – but who has been told very insistently that lack of money, lack of education and lack of taste (this part is very important, as taste and vulgarity are a part of pride) makes them lesser human beings, worthy of scant opportunity. So you would see shame, the great corroder of social bonds.
These are children, for God’s sake. They know nothing except what they are shown and what they are told. And the fact that my children have a better chance than them to make a mark in a difficult and uncertain world is unfair. I feel helpless in knowing what to do about it, but removing the charitable status of private schools (which, incidentally, my children didn’t attend) might be a start.
British children have been betrayed in the same way a whole class has been betrayed – and I speak as someone who escaped. But the ladder has been pulled up after me. Until we build a more equal society again, children throughout this nation will be excluded from the good things of life – and the anger they will come to feel will be visited on all of us sooner or later. And their parents, in voting Brexit, have already paved the way.
