Modern Britain is Still a Class Society

Article by Emily Williams. Edited by Rose Colville. Additional Research by Helen Midgley. 

Modern Britain is still a class society. Although traditional markers such as occupation and income are no longer reliable categories for differentiating between classes, cultural and social codes still maintain traditional hierarchies of former eras. Anyone who has ever watched Little Britain, Harry Enfield or Shameless can see that popular culture maintainsstandardised class portrayals. For instance, although not identified explicitly by class, the figure of Vicky Pollard is comic because she conforms to the social stereotypes associated with council estates and lower income brackets. Harry Enfield’s Mr Nice but Dim similarly conforms to a view of the upper classes as rich, bumbling and incompetent. Contemporary language is similarly infused with terms that permit the speaker to assert their own social superiority over the subject such as chav, scroat, scally, pikey or snob, toff, posh, rah. Class ideologies are constructed by this type of criticism of an “other”, usually of those considered to be in the class directly below. Class ideologies are thus self defensive, spawned by an insecurity concerning one’s own value in society. However this relationship between social position and feelings of social worth has been a prevalent feature of human society for centuries, even before the advent of formal class categories and language. 

To understand this process we must ask why people seek to construct ideologies that create cultural and social rifts. Marxist historians focus on the idea of class conflict as the cause of class consciousness but in order to explain how and why different classes have constructed ideologies, we must look at cultural history and at a period much earlier than our own. The following discussion will be based upon the social changes that first took place in late medieval and early Renaissance Italian city states but it was a process that was to quickly replicate itself in varying degrees across Europe. 

In medieval feudal systems social hierarchy was rigid with a pyramid structure that placed the king at the apex of social order above a noble class, which came above a plebeian class. People had their place in a divine scheme and occupied the social positions that they were born into, which were difficult to escape. Family lineage largely defined your social position. Admittedly this is a generalisation but in broad terms this was the way in which social status was understood. However from the late medieval period onwards (the process of change was uneven across Europe) feudal systems began to break down and new forms of more differentiated and fluid social organization took its place. A number of factors stimulated change. Land shortages caused changes in labour patterns, which saw an increased number of artisans and labourers employed by, and settled around, feudal seats. An increase in production, trade and commerce accompanies this shift which further concentrated capital in urban centres accelerating the process of urbanisation. Moreover the rise of a cash economy that facilitated the expansion in trade made new types of people immensely wealthy but reduced the value of money affecting the feudal lords whose fixed incomes from land rent and whose personal fortunes were now worth less. The economic shift created a new class of urban merchants who were extremely wealthy and well educated (because of the need to be literate and numerate in order to succeed in business). Finally, as the state became more powerful and sought to extend its control over society, particularly through taxation, new administrative offices were formed to carry out these functions. These new classes of educated commercial men filled many of these new positions and thus occupied a new, middling position in society based upon their wealth and abilities. 

This change caused a shift in the way that class status was understood. Whereas in feudal systems, the family into which you were born mattered most, this new social type had been able to gain social status on account of their wealth and education. Social mobility had become a real possibility for middling families. However if the feudal definition of status by lineage had been abandoned, new ideologies needed to be created in order for the upper classes to maintain social superiority. Men from mercantile and noble backgrounds shared similar positions of economic and political power and therefore needed a unifying identity that was not reliant on heritage. This social change had created not so much a Marxian model of class conflict but more anxiety among the upper classes. This anxiety was expressed by a new level of preoccupation with demonstrating social superiority in order to give themselves an aristocratic identity that covered up their humble origins and therefore secured their privileged social position. They had attained elite status through commercial success but their attention would now focus on disassociating themselves from their origins and on presenting themselves as an aristocratic, hereditary elite.

This concern for demonstrating one’s elite social status generated new class ideologies. More rigid forms of social behaviour were developed by elite society in an effort to protect their position from the threat posed by social mobility. New ideas about what made someone noble and refined sought to create an elite ideology that posed the upper classes as culturally as well as economically superior. As a result, behaviour, culture and spending habits increasingly became important categories for asserting class status. In an effort to make elite status more exclusive against upwardly mobile middling orders, the upper classes created a more strictly regulated set of social codes that emphasised self-control, elegance, refined speech, table manners and forms of address. Art, music and fashion became areas in which taste could be exercised. Taste in culture was a way for an individual to show off a liberal education, which remained a privilege of the upper classes and was associated with notions a being “civilised”, refined and cultured in contrast to the crude, uneducated masses. Manners, dress, taste, refined speech and so forth meant that you belonged to the upper classes. Whereas feudal societies valued the length of time a family had held noble status, social value was judged by these cultural and behavioural markers. The man who controlled himself and conformed to the rigid rules of high society, who suppressed natural animalistic urges and who was liberally educated was considered to be a natural leader and thus worthy of his social position. The behavioural standards of the elite were presented as evidence that an elite were of superior quality, a higher state of civilization in contrast to the masses below. 

Returning to the twentieth century, there remain some strong consistencies. For example the focus of the 1980s Thatcher government on private enterprise created a culture that claimed that everyone had an equal opportunity to better themselves. By implication, those who remained among the bottom stratum of society were considered lazy compared to the ambitious entrepreneurial middle classes and therefore deserving of and blamed for their social position. Although this is a generalisation and there has been substantial change in government policy since then, it is still common to hear this social group called “scroungers”, described as leeching off the hard earned money of others. Typical stereotypes for those on benefits and state housing range from teenage single mothers who have children only to claim more money, to drug dealers and alcoholics. This represents the same ethos evident in the early modern period, a discourse that links social position with personal qualities and feeds into a discourse about natural superiority. Moreover, behaviour and notions of taste are still used to maintain class separation in our society where economic indicators no longer describe the boundaries of class. For example Essex is held by popular discourse to be tacky, rich but lacking in taste; an example of social but not cultural mobility. The series Footballer’s Wives is a classic example of this. Behaviour and cultural codes are still used to criticise and suppress the nouveau riche by those who feel threatened by the upwards mobility of the lower orders. 

Class ideology is still derived from a fear of losing social superiority to the forces of social mobility. Where economic opportunities allow people of different backgrounds to obtain similar levels of wealth, different social groups create class ideologies in other to disassociate themselves from other groups that they feel to be a threat to their own social superiority. This was true for the non-feudal aristocratic elite of the early modern period who sought to create a cultural identity that maintained their social exclusivity as it is true for contemporary criticisms we see in popular culture today.

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