The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis

“I am no child of privilege, yet I mourn the passing of noble aspirations. In the place of nuanced ambition is naked greed”

Andrew Martin
The Guardian, Tuesday July 29 2008

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights
Commission, wants to extend that body’s remit in order to tackle the
class divide. Yet the cover story in the New Statesman this week
contends that, in our deregulated world, cash has displaced class.
In the piece, reprinted from the summer edition of the Fabian
Review, Danny Dorling writes that the social nuances have faded;
that style, profession and “acquired airs” are now irrelevant, the
sole determinant of status being wealth.

Both Phillips and Dorling are right, given their slightly different
definitions of class. We have clinched a double defeat. Our society
is inegalitarian and polarised, yet its tone is demotic to the point
of yobbishness.

Dorling argues that all men now tend towards the profile of
the “ubiquitous bloke”. I agree, and it was the triumph of
blokeishness that stopped me writing a column about class a couple
of years ago. There was no mileage in talking about which way the
spoon ought to move through the soup. Nobody gave a stuff - and
besides, at a lunch with journalists in 2006, Tony Blair lifted the
soup bowl to his lips and glugged. One evening at about the same
time, I was walking past the window of an elegant Mayfair tailor’s
shop, and I saw a pinstripe jacket (or suit coat, as one would say
if point-scoring by the old rules) displayed in the window. It was
shown inside-out, and written into the beautiful silk lining
was “Rooney” and the number eight, which was then the lad’s squad
number.

Hackett, the clothes shop for thrusting young men, now sells its own-
brand baseball caps. Church’s, the refined shoe shop chain, offers
trainer-style shoes branded “Rik” and “Rudy” - names that instantly
and brilliantly conjure up the images of men you wouldn’t want to
meet. In the world of the ubiquitous bloke, such maxims as “never
wear brown in town” are, according to Dorling, irrelevant. Right
again - not that we couldn’t use some less genteel maxims, such
as: “If you’re fat and ugly, don’t wear football shorts and a vest
imprinted with the word Vodaphone.”

If readers detect a note of snobbery here, that’s because I find
that I regret the passing of some of the old subtleties. I speak as
a Labour voter and a victim, as I like to think, of the class system
(believe me, as a northern, working-class 11-plus failure I could
have held my own with the four Yorkshiremen of the Monty Python
sketch). But it seems to me that the old nuances allowed one to
steal a march on one’s wealthier rivals. They mitigated the power of
money. My mother couldn’t bequeath me a big house, but she could,
and did, tell me not to make a fuss, to stand up straight, not to
say “innit”, to move the soup spoon away from me, to keep my voice
down and above all not to be “vulgar”.

To her mind anyone might aim for these values, but their particular
guardians were the old-fashioned upper classes. I was thinking of
this when Simon Mann, the old Etonian adventurer was sentenced to 34
years in what may be the worst prison in the world, in Malabo,
Equatorial Guinea. It was widely noted that he “did not flinch”. He
did not “make a fuss”. I found Mann’s demeanour impressive, and out
of kilter with the times. I also enjoyed seeing Max Mosley staring
down the vulgarians of the News of the World. The aristocratic
Mosley never says “innit”, and he’s one of the few people in formula
one who doesn’t say “for sure” when he means “yes”.

People who aspire to speak well are, insofar as there are any still
left, the targets of satire. But it’s surely more noble to aim at a
vocal style you admire than to talk down just for the sake of being
matey. Most broadcast voiceovers today sound not so much lower class
as low life. On Radio Five Live, the man who says the often-repeated
slogan, “… On DAB digital radio, digital TV, downloads and online”
sounds like Ronnie Kray, or did, but the tone has recently been
modified as though the station knew it had gone too far in its
disavowal of elitism. Either way, the message is: “Don’t worry, we
at Five Live are not going to intimidate you intellectually” , which
I would have thought was sufficiently evident from the content of
its programmes.

Of course Tony Blair suppressed his accent, just as dressed-down
David Cameron does. As he bends with the wind, Boris Johnson’s prose
style has become a queasy mixture of Latin tags and streetwise
slang. Well, I’m not in favour of making it easy for the old
Etonians. It was an OE who helped stoke my own class consciousness.
One chilly September evening, two days into my university career, he
said: “I wouldn’t put your shoes too near the fire, they might
melt.” They were moccasins from Clark’s - faux moccasins, as I now
realise.

The trouble with that chap was that he was not only richer than me,
but better educated, better read and more stylish. I admit that, on
balance, I would prefer to be steamrollered by the “ubiquitous
blokes” of today because my schooling in the old class system allows
me to look down on their City bonuses, their wraparound sunglasses,
their 4×4s and their Coldplay CDs. My sons, however, have received
no such training. So, as I repeatedly advise them, they’d better
make a lot of money, and fast. Because that is now the only game in
town.

· Andrew Martin’s novel, Death on a Branch Line, was published last
month
andrew.jmartin@ virgin.net

http://www.guardian .co.uk/commentis free/2008/ jul/29/britishid entity.t
hinktanks/print