Lecture 4. Class
Is Britain a Class Society?
The answer to this question is ‘Of course’. Of course, there are classes in Britain, as in any other society. Once upon a time there was an upper class, a middle class and a working class. The upper class possessed wealth and power and resources. The middle class were the professionals, the administrators and people in business who wanted, above all, to be respectable. And the working classes (the largest class) who had no welth, did the work for poor wages. Then, gradually, more and more people identified themselves as ‘middle class’ even though they had very different positions. So sociologists began to talk about ‘upper middle class’ and ‘lower middle class’ and even ‘middle middle class’. Meanwhile, the ‘upper class’ seemed to have disappeared.
Now there are many new kinds of work, and new relatioships between jobs; and there are new methods of organising and controlling employment. It seems that a more up-to-date classification is needed, which will take into account the changes in our ‘post-industrial’ society. In the early nineteen-seventies, two sociologists devised a new scale of classes in which they tried to categorise different occupations which shared, more or less, similarities of wealth, power, status, responsibility, skill and security. It is not ‘correct’ or ‘official’ but it is contemporary. There are seven basic classes:
Class 1. This includes large property owners, managers in large establishments, higher-grade administrators in government and large enterprises; and higher-grade professionals such as lawyers, most doctors, university lecturers, senior architects, etc.
Class 2. This includes lower-grade administrators and officials, managers in small businesses and industrial establishments; lower-grade professionals (school teachers, junior doctors, journalists, social workers) and higher grade technicians.
These two classes represent the ‘service’ class of modern capitalist society. They are essentially the large-scale emloyers, the bureaucracy and professionals who together exercise power and expertise on behalf of the major ruling bodies of the society. These people have high income (higher in Class 1), job security and the expectation of incomes likely to rise steadily over their lifetimes. The jobs either involve significant exercise of authority, or considerable freedom to choose how to do the work.
Class 3. This includes routine non-manual employees, that is, clerks and other office workers, salesmen, people who work in shops and in similar services. They are a kind of ‘white collar labour force’.
Class 4. This includes small businessmen including farmers, self-employed skilled workers (plumbers, carpenters, decorators, etc. working for themselves), and those in similar occupations who employ a few workers.
Class 5. These are the supervisors of manual labour, and lower-grade technicians; people who have some degree of authority (more, say, than many of those in Class 3) but who are unlikely to make the jump from ‘manual’ responsibilities to management responsibilities.
Classes 3, 4 and 5 are grouped together as ‘intermediate’ between the ‘service class’ and the ‘working class’.
Class 6. Skilled manual workers in all branches of industry including those who have had some training before starting work, and those who have acquired special skills during the course of their work.
Class 7. These include unskilled and semi-skilled workers in all branches of industry, and agricultural workers.
Classes 6 and 7 together comprise the working class, and although those in Class 6 tend to get higher wages, both groups sell their labour power specifically for wages, and both groups are placed in an entirely subordinate position and subject to the authority of the employer or his managers.
The sociologists explain that whereas Classes 1 and 2 are seen as highly desirable groups with the best opportunities and attractive work, the next three classes are not really a hierarchy, but different kinds of work which overlap considerably in their ‘desirability’ and status. This categorisation is not simply a pyramid-shape.
What are the implications of belonging to one of these classes? First of all, there is a wide disparity of incomes. This is more than simple payment for work: some jobs have pensions, for example (besides the State Old Age Pension, available to everyone). Some jobs have allowances for housing, travel and other expenses. People in such jobs, which are typically in Class 1 and sometimes in Class 2, end up with much more money than those in Classes 6 and 7 who are paid simple wages. A wage is normally paid weekly, for labour. A salary is normally paid monthly, and is perhaps considered rather differently – as payment for a whole job involving complicated commitments on both sides. In higher-paid jobs people tend to get more and more money as they get older and more experienced. Even without ‘promotion’ university teachers will continue to have annual increase in their salaries until they are in their early forties. Wage earners – the woking classes – cannot expect to improve their wages much, if at all, unless the country overall is getting richer. Even then, they will probably benefit proportionally less.
Then there are conditions of work. Again, these are most pleasant in Class 1 and Class 2, not surprisingly, since these are the people who make decisions about what the work conditions will be. In the other classes, it is much less clear-cut. Many people feel that routine clerical and sales work (Class 3) has extremely depressing conditions – long hours, overcrowded offices or shops, little comfort and dull work. Skilled workers in some industries may have better conditions – but they may have a lot worse. As for the self-employed and the small employers in class 4, conditions for them may be terrible, but as a class, they are usually working in that particular job because they want to do so; and in general they will have a lot more freedom of action than most.
Authority over others is another attraction in a job. Most people in Class 1 and many people in Classes 2 and 5 have authority over other employees. But those in class 2 and Class 5 are also themselves subordinate to those further up the hierarchy. So they will always be looking over their shoulders, keeping an eye out for the boss! But, in general, responsibility is a very important part of our evaluation of a job – and taking responsibility is likely to increase income, status and opportunities for promotion. Indeed, making dicisions, taking responsibility, making sure that the work is done in the way you want it done is the chief pleasure of many people in Class 1. They usually get well-paid for doing so. On the other hand, if things go wrong, they are the people who should be blamed, who should be held responsible.
Class 4 people, the self-employed and small employers, also have immense and direct responsibility. They have to make decisions all the time and be willing to get their hands dirty (i.e. to do the actual work alongside any employees they have).
Then there is job security. Very few jobs in Britain are totally secure. Emploees, whether in a private company or working for the state can almost always be ‘sacked’. Only the working classes and those in Class 4 who are experimenting with small businesses are considered to be basically insecure in their work. Once upon a time, state employment was very ‘safe’, but no longer. (Rather less than one third of Britain employees are employed by the state; there will be fewer since the recent privatisation of some of their public corporations.)
In 1991 there were nearly three million would-be workers officially unemployed and probably many more who would like to be employed if there was any work available byut who are not applying for unemployment benefits. Many sociologists believe that these people are forming a new kind of class, an ‘under-class’ which suffers real poverty and whose members have extreme difficulty in climbing out of their ‘under-class’ situation.
Then there is a question of status. In Britain the workers come at the bottom of their social classification. On average they get smaller incomes, worse conditions, fewer advantages, no responsibilities, little skill which can be used elsewhere and job insecurity. Once there were many really skilled workers in the heavy industries (steel workers, some miners, men and women in the pottery industry) but such jobs have declined or disappeared. The numbers of working-class men and women are declining, but so are their valuable skills. They are losing people at both ends – skilled people to non-manual jobs, often operating the computers and electronic machinery which have taken their place on the factory floor – and unskilled workers to the unemployed ‘under-class’.
There is no ‘intelligentsia’, no group of clearly recognisable ‘intellectuals’ in Britain. They call people whose work depends on specialist intellectual skills such as lawyers, doctors, teachers, architects and so on, ‘professionals’. Journalists, artists and entertainers also like to think of themselves as professionals. Professionals may be employed by the state (like teachers, through their local authorities) or in private firms (some lawyers, architects, clergymen) or they may be self-employed like most lawyers and architects. In any case they are in jobs which they usually find satisfying with substantial freedom and responsibility. Traditionally, lawyers and doctors have been well-paid, whereas school-teachers, for example, have had much smaller incomes. But almost all of them get above average incomes. What they do not have is a sense of being a particular group or class with distinct natinal responsibility for upholding spiritual values. Many British people find this notion not just puzzling but offensive. And also comic. A British worker has his or her own values.
Now let us take bureaucracy. In Britain the State bureaucracy is not so extensive, but it can be found in big private corporations such as those which run Gas and the Telecommunications system, or the BBC or (despite its comparative independence from the centre) State Higher Education system. Typically we think of bureaucrats as administrators in a hierarchical organisation with the power to delay decisions, to invent ever more complications and red tape, and to frustrate public access to the real policy makers. However, a significant new trend has been developing in Britain over the past few years. New technologies are changing the nature of administration. Computers are taking the place not only of clerical workers but also of their bosses. In the place of bureaucrats are a few highly specialised administrators, evaluating and acting on the information which the computers pour out steadily. They are supported by the new masses of specially-trained computer programmers, operators, analysts and trainers. The old bureaucrats, the ones more adaptable, perhaps more intelligent than the rest, have set themselves up as consultants. This means that they are self-employed professionals (a kind of mixture of Class 1 and Class 4), offering their knowledge, experience and advice for a very substantial fee.
Finally, what about the land? The big landowners who run farming as big business, ‘agribusiness’, belong obviously in Class 1. They are among the richest people in the country. The small farmers with a few hundred acres who employ a handful of men to raise, for example, a dairy herd, or vegetable and soft fruit crops, or the hill farmers with their flocks of sheep – these people come into Class 4, with freedom, but hardly any free time and no job security. The small agricultural labouring class are part of Class 7, the least privileged group of workers in the country.
There is one more, the small but very influential group of the truly rich, an ‘upper class’. It consists of families possessing great wealth, land, and access to the powerful positions in major organisations. Much of the wealth and power is inherited.
Privileged Élites or Democracy for All?
Once upon a time there were gentlemen, English gentlemen. And these gentlemen inherited their wealth, their property and their manners from their forefathers (or pretended that they did) and also inherited (or so they claimed) a fine and noble set of moral values that gave them the right to enjoy their privileges, to govern Britain and to treat everyone else as inferior.
They were the ‘ruling class’. Naturally, they ruled. Some of them, no doubt, were decent fellows, and some of them were cruel and idle; most of them, of course, were perfectly ordinary human beings who happened to have been born to a position of privilege. You can still find gentlemen around, today, but they are almost all old – in their seventies and eighties. Since the Second World War it has become harder and harder to define a gentleman. Some people, for example, would disagree over the term. Some of them think they know what the term used to mean, but nowadays it seems irrelevant. An instantly recognisable élite used to have political associations, as well as cultural and social associations, which aroused bitterness and anger in working class. Nowadays ‘gentlemen’ do not seem to be the problem. If you ask young people, they will shake their heads and shrug their shoulders. ‘How would I know a gentleman when I met one?..’
Along with the disappearance of an important stereotype, the British have experienced many other changes in social manners. If you come to Britain, you will probably find them a much more relaxed, unsmart, non-triumphant nation than you had expected.
Having the right accent, for example, used to matter a great deal. Now you can hear all kinds of regional accents if you listen to the BBC News or to the speeches of Cabinet Ministers and Vice-Chencellors. They are the voices of educated men and women who are not ashamed of the fact that they were born somewhere outside the south-east region of England. The significance of accent was in the subtle mixture of region, education and social class which it revealed. Increased mobility, increased mixing with other groups, and the wide-spread public use of a variety of accents have made these subtle distinctions much less obvious than they were. The term ‘Oxford accent’ is no longer used, ‘cockney’ is a rather dubious term because it refers in practice to a smaller and smaller group in an increasingly multi-racial, multi-cultural capital. Accent still has some significance, but not nearly as much as it did.
The use of ‘Sir’ from inferior to superior (builder or decorator to middle-class house-owner) used to be common. Now, if it is used, it is used as a politeness, not as a sign of deference and social inferiority. But these and many other details are on the surface. The interesting questions are about distribution of wealth, power and status, and of the possibility of mobility between one class and another.
Over the last twenty years, sociologists have done various studies to analyse class mobility. In order to explain their findings let us look at the history of education in this country. There used to be two sorts of education – one sort in fee-paying schools for the children of the privileged , to educate them to be tomorrow’s rulers and administrators, and another sort for the children of the workers, organised and paid for by the state. What about the middle classes? They used to send their children to small private schools, but since 1944 when secondary education was made free for everyone, and higher education, including university degree courses, were made free for those who could win a place on academic merit, the middle-classes have been sending their children to the State schools. 93% of the nation’s children go to State schools. The effective introduction of universal free secondary and (where appropriate) higher education meant in England an initial great mixing-up of groups and classes. All sorts of opportunities were available which had never been available before to many children from poorer homes. But, as always happens, those who have done well out of the system have encouraged and supported their children, so that they also have gone on to do well out of the system. You do not need to be corrupt to make sure that your children have much greater opportunities for wealth and power than the children of your poorer, less educated neighbours. You simply need to be educated and fortunate yourself – so that you can help yor children with their homework, talk to the teachers and follow up any problems, and encourage your children with useful advice and knowledge about qualifications. All these things happen normally in fortunate house-holds; they do not happen in unfortunate ones. So the lucky children, usually of educated parents, end up going to university, and the unlucky children, often of uneducated parents, end up going into unskilled work, or being unemployed. Of course, there are many many exceptions, but this is a general trend which can be validated by statistics.
What about the children who go to private schools? The education is not necessarily better – and sometimes it is notably worse – than State education; but the children who go to these schools think of themselves as a social élite. They are also given special training which makes it easier for them to pass the examinations for getting to university. A small proportion of this 7% of children go to a few famous schools, and, after university, there is no doubt that they cling together, support each other in the pursuit of the topmost jobs (many of which are currently held by their fathers and other relations) and form a very small upper-class, distinguished by its wealth, connections, influence and self-recruitment (i.e. most of the people in this élite group have parents who are or were in this group). It is a network of families who produce senior financiers and businessmen, senior civil servants, senior judges and barristers, senior politicians, and so forth.
Not everybody with power comes from this group; and not all the successful outsiders are recruited into it. For many people this kind of enclosed power is old-fashioned and irrelevant; they want to be dynamic, to make new connections, to ignore this world of family connections and shared schooling. And please note, it is very small, it is not the same as ‘the aristocracy’ or ‘gentlemen’ and some people say it has little practical significance. To illustrate the problem of analysing the British ‘top class’ of society, let us consider the Conservative Government of October 1990.
The Prime Minister, Mr Major, came from an ordinary family, went to the local school and had no special privileges. The same is true of the leader of the Opposition (Mr Kinnock). Of other Prime Ministers (moving backwards) Mrs Thatcher, Mr Callaghan, Mr Wilson, and Mr Heath (2 Conservative, 2 Labour), none came from a privileged home. Mrs Thatcher was the daughter of a successful businessman, and herself married a very rich man, which made it easier for her to organise her private life and continue with a career. But she did not need money or family connections in order to become Prime Minister. Mr Callaghan came from an underprivileged family. So it would seem that in politics at least, Britain is an open society, a dynamic society. But, while nobody doubts that individuals with fierce ambitions, special abilities and good luck can get to the top, the fact remains that they are exceptions. Most people have other advantages, including most members of Mr Major’s government. All the Ministers he has chosen have university degrees, which is not so surprising since university education is now quite widespread and free. But in addition, almost all of them went to fee-paying schools, and a very high proportion to these famous, expensive, ‘élite’ boys’ boarding schools. The world they know is that which is inhabited by other people from these famous, expensive ‘élite’ boys’ boarding schools. They have known each other since they were children, and, whatever their individual merits, they obviously have very little conception of how most people live, including those fifty-odd million whom they are governing. Clearly this is not a model for an open, democratic, dynamic and changing society. Since what is true of the Government is also true of many senior institutions, it is not surprising that in a recent sociologist’s poll of people all over Europe, the British believed most firmly that in order to be successful in their society you needed to have ‘connections’ and ‘influence’. It is not so much the money – though these people are often very rich – as the ‘knowing each other’.They do not need to be corrupt in any obvious sense of the word; it is simply more straightforward to encourage those whom you know and understand rather than those whom you do not know and understand.
What many analysts argue over is the exact importance of this small group. Is it dying out? Are the clever young financiers part of it? What links does the group have with the multi-national industrialists? Is Britain run by a kind of conspiracy of the traditionalists and the very clever – or is it run by the governrment and other democratically elected institutions? Nobody quite knows.
Meanwhile, what about the 98% of the population, most of whom have nothing to do with this small group (who with their families are not more than 2% of the population)? Studies show that people move up and down and between classes quite a lot. Those who do a skilled job in the mines, and who work on the electrical gear on the surface are skilled working men (Class 6). Primary school teachers (Class 2) have had advantage of a free college education. Skilled engineers with some managerial responsibility would also fit into Class 2. Accountants, or at least, successful ones probably come into Class 1. They are a kind of cross between successful businessmen and rich professionals. Mending bicycles is a ‘blue collar’ job, perhaps Class 6, but with some responsibility around the shop, maybe would fit into Class 5. If you get a share in the business, this would put you into Class 4. A secretary thinking of herself as a ‘personal assistant’ comes into Class 3.
However, the sociologists who analysed class mobility about 15 years ago, noted that (a) It is very difficult for the unskilled working class to move up the social scale. They are at the bottom of the pile, and they and their children stay there. This is perhaps the major failure of the British system – the treatment of the people at the bottom. They are poor, under-educated, with less access to the benefits of the state, with bad housing, inadequate or no jobs, and with no means of getting out of their situation. You will not see them on a normal visit to England, because they live in areas the tourist does not visit. (b) Because the working class is getting smaller, the majority of people moving around the social structure are improving their position, above all moving into Class 3. But although their work conditions may be better, the jobs they are doing are often just as monotonous. Operating a computer at basic levels all days is not much better than working on a factory line. (c) A free higher education system ensures that plenty of clever, energetic people, capable of taking responsibility get into Class1. But increasingly these children come from Class 1 homes. They do better in the system whether they go to state schools or private schools. A mixture of social, cultural and genetic factors give them advantages with which children from other homes find it hard to compete. Statistics are difficult, but probably more than 50% and an increasingly higher percentage of senior managers, businessmen and professionals come from families within this group. The great social mix-up which education offers the citizens is mixing them up less than it did.
In addition, the small group of families with vast wealth, inherited privilege and a special social and educatiuonal style continue to hold an unusual number of positions of power and to recruit from among themselves into these positions. They, however, may be declining in influence against the pressures of democracy.
Britain is a complex society in which the old relationships of boss and worker do not apply to a large part of the population. Many people are employed by the state (nearly a third of all jobs) or are self-employed, or can expect to move among all three possible work situations (employer, employed, self-employed) during their working life. An increasing number can also expect to be unemployed for shorter or longer periods. Also, the available jobs are constantly changing; in general ‘blue-collar’ manual jobs are decreasing and ‘white-collar’ jobs, many requiring only limited skills, are increasing. Within this broad range of work, if you find yourself at the bottom, it is very difficult to get out; if you find yourself at the top it is relatively easy to stay in. In the broad middle area people move about from class to class and group to group pretty freely – certainly much more freely than they did. Consequently many social stereotypes and many identifiable class features have virtually disappeared. But this varies from region to region. For example, the traditional manual working class is more important in the north than in the south. Ask them, they will tell you that the boss is always the boss, and that accent, style, inherited wealth and social assumptions are still very very important. Ask the people from broad middle bands, especially the young, and they will disagree. On the whole they believe that they are much freer than their parents to pursue their own paths in their own way. Unemployment looms over everybody but so do possibilities. The national economic situation (recession and increasing unemployment) is what restricts people – not class.
To be honest, the middle classes and the working classes in England don’t mix much either, but there is an increasingly wide social area which isn’t quite middle class and isn’t quite working class, an area occupied by many millions, especially among the young. They will have little in common with factory workers, miners, bus drivers, canteen cooks and warehousemen. But they know their lives touch theirs at many points. They could be such people themselves. They will often take on such work temporarily, they will know the cleverer brothers and sisters of these workers, they will join them in sports, in hospitals and in voting booths. A pluralist society which allows those with intelligence and energy to take on responsibility, which has democratic routes to power, which provides varied opportunities for different kinds of people and which, above all, gives a decent life to each individual, whatever his or her abilities and position, is the kind of society Britain is.