Decades of change fail to shift class identity

Huge rise in numbers of managers and professionals fails to alter the way people bracket themselves

New data from Britain’s longestrunning barometer of public opinion shows that, despite massive economic and social change over three decades, six out of 10 Britons still identify themselves as working class. The figure from the annual British Social Attitudes Survey, is unchanged since 1983. The small proportion of people who see themselves to be outside the class system has halved since the Eighties from six per cent to just three per cent.

JOHN LENNON hoped to be a “working-class hero”, while Jarvis Cocker sang of affluent students who wanted to live and sleep with “common people”.

Now, new data from Britain’s longest-running barometer of public opinion shows that, despite massive economic and social change over the past three decades, six out of 10 Britons still see themselves as working class.

The figure, in the latest edition of the annual British Social Attitudes, is unchanged since 1983, the year Margaret Thatcher won her landslide second general election victory.

While 40 per cent see themselves as middle-class, the small proportion who see themselves as outside the class system has halved since the Eighties from six per cent to just three per cent.

The finding appears to challenge the view once voiced by Lord Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, that “we are all middle-class now”.

And it suggests that Britain’s retreat from manufacturing, the birth of the internet, successive property booms, a culinary revolution and political movements from Thatcherism to New Labour have all failed even to make a dent in the Great British class system.

It also contradicts evidence from economic data suggesting that traditional “working-class” manual or routine jobs now make up less than a quarter of posts in the British economy.

At the same time the number of people in managerial or professional jobs, whom economists and social scientists would count as middle-class, has grown to more than 42 per cent.

And, strikingly, the survey found that almost half of participants in the survey who are employed in manage- rial or professional jobs see themselves as working-class.

That suggests that millions of British people are part of a “working class of the mind”, a report published by NatCen Social Research, which carries out the BSA survey, argues.

“Why is there such a gap between the prevalence of class identity, the occupational classifications of the Office for National Statistics, and John Prescott?” the paper asks.

“One possibility is that although occupationally middle-class people say they are working-class they do not mean it as strongly. They might call themselves working-class but they do not really believe they have a lot in common with working-class people.”

Kirby Swales, director of NatCen’s survey centre, said: “Class identity is also closely linked to attitudes in other areas. Those who say they are workingclass are far more likely to be opposed to immigration, one of the defining issues of the EU referendum, even when they are in professional and managerial jobs.”