The best place to look for rubbish written on social class is in the Daily Mail. When the BBC released its Great British Class Survey in April the Mail cited a pundit, the “author and social commentator” Jill Kirby, willing to claim that “there is plenty of social mobility – even the Precariat can escape more easily than the working class of 50 years ago”. In fact, the survey revealed nothing of the kind. The socalled Precariat, the lowest social class in the BBC’s research, is stuck at the bottom.
Class matters and it matters most at the top. The greatest number of social divisions occurs in the top 1 per cent of the population, so, to understand class, you have to spend a great deal of time looking at divisions among the elite. Take the “grocer’s daughter” from Grantham who the Tory party took as coming from the lower orders, because all her father owned was two shops. To have a chance of standing as a Tory MP she had to marry at least a class above herself, and she started high. Margaret Roberts was born in 1925 into the best-off 10 per cent of families in Britain. By the time she went to university her father, Alfred, had risen to be a member (if a lowly one) of the 1 per cent. Margaret joined an even smaller proportion when she went “up” to Oxford, and she married into the 0.1 per cent with Denis and his money. But the grandees of her party were members of the 0.01 per cent, well above the Thatchers.
Content from our partners
