Is Talking About Social Class Classless?
Recently, the BBC’s debate programme, Moral Maze ran an episode about social mobility and social class.
Here is a description of the episode from the BBC’s website:
What place should class have in Britain today? If you’ve been living in hope of creating a society where the moral character of a man is judged by his actions and not the colour of his old school tie, you may have been sorely disappointed over the last week or so. Too many toffs in the cabinet and patronising adverts about the pastimes enjoyed by hardworking people might suggest that for our politicians at least, it seems class still matters. There was a time when a person’s class was defined by their job, but that’s become much more tricky since the demise of large scale industries like coal mining. It hasn’t though stopped many people from defining themselves as working class – and claiming a Prolier-than-Thou kind of moral superiority, – even though by most measures like income, education and profession, they’re anything but. We’ve all experienced that kind of reverse snobbery, but how many of us would be comfortable in a socially mixed group of saying they were middle class and proud of it? Let alone upper class? It was Alan Clarke who famously dismissed his fellow Conservative MP Michael Heseltine as the kind of person “who bought his own furniture”. Not all of us are blessed with his patrician perspective, so what should be the modern indicators of class? Is our obsession with class a sign of our deep sense of fairness and desire for a more open society, or a prejudice that should be consigned to the dustbin? Or is the problem that we need more subtle categories? Beer and bingo? Bolly and ballet? Class on the Moral Maze.
Combative, provocative and engaging debate chaired by Michael Buerk with Melanie Phillips, Claire Fox, Michael Portillo and Matthew Taylor.Witnesses are Kate Fox, Owen Jones, Alwyn Turner and James Delingpole.