An English market town on a Friday night. A teenage girl, sprawling plumply on a bench, puts an unopened beer bottle between her teeth. With one practised bite, she pulls off the metal cap and spits it on to the pavement. A middle-aged woman walks past, taking in the girl’s crop top and the fat overflowing from the top of her jeans, and turns disapprovingly to her husband. “Why do we allow fat, idle people to live in this town?” she asks icily. An isolated confrontation or Middle England’s front line? It depends whom you believe.
We know instinctively what Middle England is. Don’t we? It’s not a synonym for middle class, but a more pernicious and pejorative description than that. Ask yourself precisely what and where Middle England is. What’s on your list? Sunday car-washers and lawn-trimmers? Conservative voters? Neat, small-minded xenophobes with neat, small-minded gardens? Yes, if you believe the propaganda. The real truth is that Middle England is a political construct, devised by partisans from both left and right. They need Middle England to exist. It suits their purposes to bind a clump of the population together and place a self-satisfied, self-interested and conservative banner in its unified fist. Yet when Mary Loudon wrote her book Secrets and Lives: Middle England revealed, most critics assumed that her dissection of the Oxfordshire market town of Wantage would reveal a glass slide teeming with the DNA of stereotypical welly-wearers. The reality was that three years of research produced discrete portraits of people who sell shoes, take drugs, contemplate suicide, turn their sons in to the police and get divorced. In other words, it didn’t produce a homogeneous mass of anything. It produced individual human beings. To define anything by the broader group from which it comes is always foolhardy and sometimes dangerous. Try it. All Germans, all women, all football fans, all Muslims.
The interesting question to ask yourself is why the propagandists have been so keen to bring this Brigadoon of the middle classes to life. The most recent attempt to persuade us that Middle England is an energising, moral force now dying a catastrophic death comes from Digby Anderson, former director of the right-leaning think-tank the Social Affairs Unit. In his crass and patronising pamphlet All Oiks Now: the unnoticed surrender of Middle England, he argues that
the old ME was obsessed with the virtues of patience, waiting and saving. It was not only prepared to wait for what it wanted, it made a virtue of it, even in some cases enjoyed it. Waiting and saving were part of that discipline that made civilised society . . . ME child-rearing was organised around the central concept of learning to ‘defer gratification’. This was what separated them off from the feckless lower classes and criminal classes who could not control their desires.
There’s his real thesis. Anderson’s pamphlet is a rearguard but doomed action to build barriers around “nice” people and protect them from the “feckless lower classes”, or the “lower orders”, as he goes on to describe them. It is the mantra of the snob, the sales pitch of the person who approves of the social apartheid that kept the “lower orders” and the middle class apart. This is Anderson’s analysis of the nation’s drinking habits:
My father always taught me that ‘they’ went home immediately after ‘their’ factory work, had tea and emerged at 8pm to drink. ‘We’ drank from six, when the ashtrays are clean and the landlord sober and returned home to dinner at eight. This had the advantage for us, that ‘we’ missed meeting ‘them’, and no doubt for them that they missed meeting us.
As the book progresses, an element of panic creeps in. Take the section on university education.
Even the most extreme socialist would not claim that all students are middle class. So the more pertinent question is: in what ways do the middle-class students differ from the others? They certainly look the same. It is difficult to tell the daughter of a doctor from the daughter of an unemployed miner, indeed sometimes from the son of an unemployed miner. There is now a student or young person’s uniform which overrides class barriers. It is the Middle-England-origin students who now dress down to the lower-class style.
It must be terrifying for defenders of the “old ways” that those “lower orders” no longer wear a uniform that marks them out.
Labour politicians, too, cling to the ghost ship of Middle England. As Leader of the House of Commons, Peter Hain has warned of the dangers of Labour appealing to Middle England voters. As junior Welsh minister, he told the NS that
the government wants to give the impression that all its policies are targeted at Middle England, that relatively affluent part of the coalition Tony Blair brilliantly built up before the election . . . We have got ourselves into a dangerous situation where a Labour government appears as if it is being gratuitously offensive to its own natural supporters.
Hain’s attack on Middle England is the reverse side of Anderson’s coin. Each camp is desperate to breathe ME into life, one because he loves it, the other because it is useful to demonise it.
Right-wing newspapers have taken to referring to those who attend private school as the nation’s “Middle Englanders”. And yet private school students account for only 6 per cent of the nation’s children. Middle England, if it exists at all, is tiny – a battered little Lilo floating in a huge ocean. But inflating the size of your constituency is a tactic as old as ancient Rome. Middle England is such a vague and inchoate concept that we are easily misled into thinking that it is ten times more threatening than it really is. Ask anyone if they’re a Middle Englander and they will deny it. It’s one of those phrases like “the blue-rinse brigade”. Everyone knows what it means, but no one will admit even to owning a bottle of blue rinse, let alone using it. To use the term Middle England is to attempt to reinforce Britain’s old class structure, and anyone who wants to do that is likely to have devious intentions at heart.
Let’s suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the Anderson/Hain axis is really on to something. Imagine that they’re right, even though one advocate believes ME is close to death and the other thinks it’s on the march. Would it not be a good idea to get rid of it, in the interests of social cohesion? The quickest way to go about it would be to march up its supposedly immaculate front path and tax its property. Just think how much all those houses must have appreciated in value by now. If Gordon Brown introduced a tax on that increase, it could have all kinds of beneficial effects. The south-east of England is oxymoronically regarded as the centre of Middle England. There are two local government districts in the whole of the south-east where a family earning less than £25,000 a year can afford to buy a home. Half the population earn less than £21,000 a year. In other words, 50 per cent of the country is excluded from the south-east, while those already ensconced merrily count their growing pile of cash. Restrictive planning laws and soaring house prices have done more to reinforce the differences between us than almost anything else. Taxing capital gains on houses would be one way to change the balance. To build many more houses on previously excluded land would be another, and we would all be better off for it.
The word “middle” has always been a loaded one. Middle age, Middle England, middle-of-the-road, middlebrow, middle ground: as I idly made a list, it suddenly dawned on me. Of course. Middle England has a prototype. It has a sanctimonious and class-obsessed parent called Middle Earth. J R R Tolkien complained endlessly about the rise of modernity. He idealised a feudal, rural idyll in which good people are handsome and bad people are ugly. Hobbits are natural Middle Englanders, who fret about keeping their houses tidy and baking cakes and being cautious and saving up. Orcs, those “lower orders”, to use Digby Anderson’s definition, do their best to take over, but in the escapist land of Middle Earth, the good old hobbits prevail in the end – with the wise counsel and munificent guidance of the aristocratic elves.
When Anderson spots an orc at the airport, aka a fat woman with a nose ring and tattoo, he recounts with horror that her trousers are too tight and she is “in her fifties”. And this is the crunch sentence. “Not only does she look repulsive and stupidly inappropriate for her age but she makes, in some small way, English women of her age in general look repulsive and silly.” No, she doesn’t. She simply makes Anderson look repulsive and silly.
Middle Earth is a fantasy. Middle England is a myth; a Muddled England, a Meddlers’ England. It does not have any real currency, whether as an ideology, as an imagined threat or as a way of life. So if someone offers you a ride to Middle England, say you don’t accept lifts from strangers.
Oiks, oiks, everywhere I look . . .
Jilly Cooper “There’s a big problem in Cheltenham at the moment with young drinkers in the middle of the town. Bath, too – wonderful place – seems to be being taken over by louts. I would blame the excessive, gratuitous violence shown on the television, in the name of entertainment. That’s one thing that definitely has changed. I grew up watching films all the time. Now I can’t even bear to look when I go into a cinema . . . Half of the time that I watch anything on the television, I have to sit there with a cushion in front of my face.”
Kenneth Baker “I think that the principles behind what made Middle England good are still there, as in neighbours looking out for each other. There are more people doing voluntary work and the numbers of people retiring in their fifties and sixties to do charity work are greater than ever before. The good thing about English society is that it adapts and changes – that’s why we’ve avoided revolution.”
Anne Atkins “I want to stand up for the oik. I think the biggest oik around today is the middle-aged, middle-class Mercedes drivers you see around.
“One should never be too hasty in believing someone to be an oik. I think it’s wonderful, for instance, that a lot of the taxi drivers who drive me around when I’m doing media work can afford a house in a village in Spain.
“Oiks have less to do with age, or even social class, and everything to do with the values they’re brought up with. They are too stressed, too focused on achievement and money. [I attribute this] largely [to] the break-up of marriage and family, and a loss of morality.”
Interviews by Will Brierley and Ewan Jones
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