Class system makes comeback
But profile of elite has changed with the times
For the past three decades, many Britons had hoped the rigid class system that defined their country from Dickens to Downton Abbey was finally dying. Now they fear that class, their old bugbear, is back on the rise.
From 1979, Britain was led for more than a decade by Margaret Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter, and then by John Major, the son of a music-hall entertainer. The current leader, David Cameron, is a descendent of King William IV whose cabinet is stacked with men, like him, from the country’s toniest private schools and Oxford and Cambridge universities.
Even entertainment has a more upper-crust flavour these days. A recent London Daily Telegraph story with the headline “Young, gifted and posh” said Britain’s oldest private schools, such as all-male Eton and Harrow, had become a “production line of young talent,” including Homeland star Damian Lewis, Benedict Cumberbatch of Sherlock and Dominic West of The Wire.
Major, alarmed by the apparent reversals, recently sparked a flurry of debate with a speech that made front-page headlines.
“In every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class,” Major said. “To me, from my background, I find that truly shocking.”
So is it true that class divisions are deepening again? While the ancestral upper caste still retains its mystique in Britain, the numbers reflect a more complicated reality. An elite still dominates, but it is now a club where money — and the education money can buy — counts more than lineage.
This means more women, ethnic minorities and foreigners have made it to the top. But the increase in diversity masks the fact that it’s becoming harder for the poor and unconnected to climb the social ladder, as the government’s social mobility commission concluded in a hefty report published in October.
A NEW WEALTHY CLASS
When the Sunday Times newspaper published its first Rich List in 1989, Britain’s wealthiest individual was Queen Elizabeth II. The top 10 was dominated by established British property and business owners, including the Duke of Westminster, who owns vast swaths of central London, supermarket magnate Lord Sains bury and food mogul Lord Vestey. It was a snapshot of an elite heavy on titled backgrounds, clubby connections and inherited wealth.
The 2013 list is a rollcall of international capitalists who have made London their base, with the Duke of Westminster the only carry-over from the original roster. Even the Queen has dropped out.
PRESTIGE AND POLITICS
If business has grown more open, many Britons express concern that an old upper class is reasserting itself at the top of politics. “No one would have imagined 20 years ago we’d be going back to Old Etonian prime ministers,” said historian David Kynaston, who is chronicling the way British society has changed since the Second World War in a series of books.
While Britons may focus on the aristocratic lineage of Cameron and his finance minister, George Osborne, they often overlook a new category of career politicians, many of them wealthy individuals with school connections. And while gender and ethnic diversity have grown, the participation of working-class candidates who enter politics after holding “real world” jobs has withered.
When Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, she was one of only 19 women in the House of Commons, three per cent of the total. Not one lawmaker out of more than 600 came from an ethnic minority. Almost half had attended private schools, while 36 per cent went to Oxbridge, as Oxford and Cambridge are collectively known. The lawmakers included 96 lawyers, 49 teachers and 138 businesspeople — but also 98 manual workers.
In the current Parliament, 22 per cent of MPs are women and 4.2 per cent are from an ethnic minority. Just over a third of MPs went to private school and 27 per cent to Oxbridge. There are still scores of lawyers and businesspeople, but only 25 former manual workers.
SONG AND DANCE
If the bastions of business, politics and the professions were hard for working-class people to storm, there was always entertainment, where a working-class hero, as John Lennon put it, was something to be.
You don’t need money or a degree to be a movie star or play rock ‘n’ roll. Or do you?
Britain’s leading actors appear to be drawn from a smaller pool compared to a generation or two ago.
In a list of actors with the highest cumulative box office earnings on website Box Office Mojo, there are 10 Britons in the top 50. The older end of the list includes actors from working-class backgrounds such as Michael Caine, son of a fish-market porter, and 55-year-old Gary Oldman, son of a sailor and a London housewife. The 74-year-old Ian McKellen and 61-year-old Liam Neeson both attended state-funded schools.
As the list gets younger, it climbs the social scale: Ralph Fiennes, 51, grandson of a wealthy industrialist; Helena Bonham Carter, 47, whose great-grandfather was a British prime minister; and Orlando Bloom, 37, educated at private school.
Of the three young stars of the Harry Potter trio, now in their 20s, Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson attended private schools; Rupert Grint went to a state school.