Britain isn’t classless but it’s time we all stopped worrying about it

WHAT does a classless society look like? Is George Osborne its emblem – heir to a seventeenth baronetcy, but willing to drop his crystalline intonation to find common ground with a bunch of Morrison’s shelf stackers? Or is it only found in particular places? Perhaps class first died in London’s Docklands, gutted by war and rebuilt in the image of individualistic consumer-driven capitalism. Or maybe we just forgot about class altogether? This is all rubbish, of course. Class never died. But it has become irrelevant and it’s time we stopped worrying about it.

We’ve spent the last 30 years willing Britain to become classless. Margaret Thatcher successfully traded on her background as a provincial Tory grocer’s daughter. Tony Blair declared the class war “over” and gloried in projecting an indistinct English blandness. David Cameron wears Boden, not Barbour, and it’s only partly because he was never an aristocrat, just the son of an upper middle class stockbroker.

The family you’re born into still affects your prospects, of course. Sutton Trust research suggests that having a father who makes twice as much as the average wage buys you 50 per cent more earnings in adulthood. And comprehensive schools haven’t helped. In 2007, 98 per cent of judges, 87 per cent of journalists, and 80 per cent of chief executives were educated at either independent or selective schools.

But class is different to economic position. What’s surprising about a penniless toff, with an ancient pedigree, driving a battered old Volvo? You wouldn’t call Lord Alan Sugar upper class, despite his millions. Although social mobility is still sluggish in Britain, old class loyalties are unimportant. People may grumble that the coalition is dominated by Old Etonians but, according to Ipsos Mori, 31 per cent of voters in the lowest social category still voted Conservative in 2010.

Yet now it seems we’re meant to worry about class all over again. A new survey, with 161,000 participants and run by BBC Lab UK, has rejected the old class measures of occupation, wealth and education, and considered three types of “capital”: economic (income, savings, and house value), social (the number and status of the people you know), and cultural (the extent and nature of your cultural interests). The traditional categories of working, middle and upper class have been judged redundant. Only 39 per cent of people found a home in them. We’re now Established or Technical Middle Class, or Traditional Working Class.

I’ve taken the test myself, and I’ll hold my hands up. My father has worked in the City for 40 years, I grew up in leafy North London, went to public school then Oxford. I was born into a prosperous segment of the middle classes. But now I’ve been recategorised. The test says I’m Elite. The fact that my cousin is an artist, I like the occasional trip to the theatre, and my household income is buoyed by my partner’s job at JP Morgan means I can look down on my colleagues – only Emergent Service Workers, you realise – with smug superiority.

Sociologists have devised fresh means of putting us into boxes – New Affluent or Elite

I should be happy with my new situation, but it’s all a little ridiculous. We glory that class barriers have been broken down – that the duke of Manchester can become a crocodile wrestler in Florida while a grocer’s daughter can serve as Prime Minister. But when our determination to destroy traditional class identities becomes self-fulfilling and class does become relatively unimportant, sociologists and researchers devise new means of separating and categorising us, and we become New Affluent or Precariat, or Emergent Workers or Elite.

Studies like this also become worryingly political. What’s the point of unpicking and waffling over differences in society unless we expect some sort of policy response? No doubt we’ll hear cries on the left about how the Technical Middle Class (prosperous, but lacking in social and cultural capital) is being left out from government schemes designed to support the arts. Can we look forward to a dictatorship of the Precariat? Will Ed Miliband launch an emotional appeal to save the squeezed Emergent Service Workers?

The creation of division within society only serves the purposes of those who seek to exploit that division. Britain may not be classless, but the fact these researchers felt the need to recategorise us all into neat little boxes suggests that we’d gone some way to ending our old loyalties. It may just be a bit of fun, but it’s time we finally stopped worrying about class.

Tom Welsh is business features editor at Morning Wire