What about the workers

Do we still have workers?

When I say workers I mean those cloth capped, overall wearing, union card carrying, Player’s cigarette smoking workers that used to walk along my street, on their way to the factory at six in the morning when I was a boy.

According to that most ubiquitous of things; a new survey, seventy-one percent of Britons now regard themselves as middle class. Only a generation ago (that must be me then, or am I at two generations now?) it was around twenty-five percent and the other fifty percent or so considered themselves workers, or working class as we all called it back then.

These days only twenty-four percent of people describe themselves as working class and nobody at all describes themselves as upper class. Don’t worry, there are a few snobs still around, seven percent consider themselves to be upper-middle class (those will be the ones that went to public school then, mainly politicians I expect), twenty-one percent are lower-middle class and forty-four percent call themselves middle class – right in the middle of the middle or ‘stuck in the middle with you’ as Stealer’s Wheel once put it. Sorry, there’s no connection.

What a muddle the middle seems to be in.

If the well-known class sketch was shown today, Ronnie Barker would stand almost alone (despite the song saying the opposite) in his middle class ground, John Cleese would stiffly deny his own existence and poor Ronnie Corbett would become even smaller as his tiny, fading, working class voice would whisper: ‘I know my place.’

‘I know my place’. Well, we all used to.

So who are these new middle classes?

When I was a boy the working class man was everywhere and proud of it, it was the doctors, lawyers, teachers, bank managers and clergy who were the middle class. Shopkeepers and business people were suspect, as were general office staff and farmers; no matter how many acres they owned. If you worked in the council offices or were a district nurse you probably just edged yourself into middle classdom, but in the main the workers were everywhere; united and standing, never divided or falling.

Class seemed to be more prevalent back then, differences greater, but maybe it was just an illusion and we were all middle class all along despite the red flag flying high at the end of every labour party conference.

It never felt that way at school though, most of the other boy’s parents had a teasmade, some even had real maids, we just had a kettle and it wasn’t even electric.

Apparently when asked to bring along a symbol of their middle classness, a lot of people brought along their cafetières – well, that’s easy then. I wonder if the lower-middle class buy theirs from Argos, the middle-middle class from John Lewis and the upper-middle class from Fortnum and Mason?

So if we have all become middle class, even the plumbers (no surprise there really, they can all afford to drive BMW’s), the bakers who are all craft bakers now (what were they before then) and the lorry drivers whose cabs would put a four star hotel to shame, just who will man the barricades when the revolution comes?

If there is ever a revolution in this country I guess that’ll it’ll have to be led by the middle classes:

“What do we want?”

“Gradual change.”

“When do we want it?”

“Some time in the foreseeable future at a time convenient to all parties, preferably at the weekend before pilates.”

I think the cry of ‘what about the workers?’ has gone. These days those of us that do work (I’m not one of them currently) all have laptops, cars, flat screen TV’s, foreign holidays and expectations that the workers of two generations ago simply didn’t have. We’ve become middle class by a steady process of the acquisition of things, perhaps a little more education, but the feeling of where our root stock is from has almost vanished.

Even so and despite almost all of us considering ourselves middle class, Britain is the most unequal nation amongst the developed countries after the US and Singapore.

How can that be? I don’t know. What I do know is that if the revolution ever comes it will be caused by the have-nots rising up against the haves. Perhaps it isn’t so very far away after all.