Towards a Classless Society?

Helen Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415153317
• eBook ISBN: 9781134742103
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Social Sciences

An alternative to the right-wing paradigm which has hijacked discussions of class, this book focuses on the specific ways in which class inequalities manifest themselves in Britain and exposes the hollowness if politicians' rhetoric over the classless society.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Helen Jones

POPULAR PERCEPTIONS AND THE
POLITICIANS

In 1996, when John Prescott, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, announced on the radio, ‘I’m pretty middle-class’, not all, including his father, agreed with him, and his throwaway remark fuelled a debate in the media over what it meant to be middle-class or workingclass (see, for instance, the Daily Telegraph, 13 April 1996). Ideas of what determines a person’s class position varied: was it ‘breeding’ or ‘manners, courtesy and behaviour’, as two callers to a Radio 4 phonein programme, Call Nick Ross, suggested? While there are popular disagreements over definitions and classifications, it is still widely accepted that class exists in Britain; indeed, according to Gallup Poll surveys, an increasing percentage of the population think that there is a class struggle in progress (1961 56 per cent; 1981 66 per cent; 1991 79 per cent; autumn 1995 81 per cent).

Yet, from the time of his successful bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1990, John Major portrayed himself as the classless Prime Minister, with a mission to create a classless society. He presented himself as the role model par excellence for a classless society as he personalised the political by trying to make political capital out of his humble origins: for instance in a party political television broadcast during the 1992 General Election campaign, which showed him driving past his childhood haunts in Brixton. He has been portrayed as a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and this fits well with his vision of a classless society, for effort and reward play an important part in it. One of his biographers claimed that it was Major’s own experience that prompted his desire for everyone to have the chance to rise from any background: what he achieved he wants to make possible for others (Ellis 1991). His call is therefore for class mobility, not classlessness. The way in which John Major equates ‘classlessness’ with opportunity within a class-structured society was underlined at the 1996 Conservative Party Conference where he spoke, under the slogan ‘Opportunity for All’, of creating an ‘opportunity-owning democracy’ in which all people would have the ‘opportunity and choice, to open up an avenue of hope in their lives’.

Major’s vision of a classless society is not one in which structural class inequalities are removed, or resources distributed more equally. It was not the prospect of a radically different future that he held out, and indeed he went to great pains to emphasise the continuity of his vision with traditional conservatism, looking back to Disraeli rather than his immediate predecessor (Major 1993). (He had, of course, to establish himself quickly as his own man, with his own brand of Conservatism, if he was to avoid disappearing into the shadow of Mrs Thatcher.) Indeed, at first glance prioritising the goal of a ‘classless’ society would seem to represent a drastic departure from Mrs Thatcher’s rhetoric; she did not believe in society, let alone a classless one.

Yet the shift was not so stark, for, along with his talk of a classless society, much of what John Major said was very much in keeping with Mrs Thatcher’s Britain. He spoke of continuing to make changes in order to transform society into a classless one within a decade. Both he and Mrs Thatcher repeatedly referred to the importance of creating and sustaining an enterprise culture, one in which business acumen and hard work were rewarded. In the 1990s the priority that Mrs Thatcher had accorded to private business, to selling off state-owned concerns and injecting business methods into those areas that remained under the state, to a mixed economy of welfare, to reducing the powers of local authorities and trade unions, and to reducing the poor’s alleged culture of dependency on the state remained unchanged. These were also the themes of John Major’s colleagues, none of whom appeared interested in a classless society. Peter Lilley, for instance, chided the Church of England for speaking out on poverty, a subject which he considers to be no business of the Church. Nor does he accept that poverty is a problem in Britain; he sees it primarily as a problem of water and food supply in the Third World, and for this reason he saw no role for the British Government in the 1996 International Year for the Eradication of Poverty (Guardian, 17 April 1996, 14 June 1996).

Major has spoken of everyone having a stake in the future, of effort being rewarded and of people having more choice in the way they spend their money. His classless society is one in which people have the opportunity to spend more in a consumer society. (Since the power to choose to spend money requires having enough of it to participate in buying the same range of goods as the bulk of the population, it is illogical to suppose that one can create a classless society simply by creating more wealth, without redistributing it.)

Major sees young people playing a central role in creating a classless society. He has spoken of every youngster aiming high, and of making this possible by raising the esteem in which vocational qualifications are held; by removing prejudice and the hidden barriers to success; and by having successful women or people from ethnic minorities as role models.

Labour politicians took up the term ‘classless society’ as a stick with which to beat the Conservatives. ‘Why has the man who promised a classless society set his face against plans that will make a reality of that classless society?’ asked Tony Blair (Independent, 19 January 1996). Yet, Blair’s rhetoric of creating a stakeholder society appears on the surface to be very similar to John Major’s idea of a classless society with opportunity for all. Blair has spoken about the need for all to have a stake in society, of breaking down the barriers which hold people back, of building a meritocracy, and of creating the opportunities for wealth and power to be shared more widely. At the 1995 Labour Party conference he claimed that Britain was divided by an unfair class system, tattered social fabric and dogmatic politics. He spoke of unity, solidarity, and partnership. He emphasised the importance of education and of wanting to make Britain young again. His rhetoric has been concerned with giving more people the opportunity to share in wealth and power, creating economic and social stability and social cohesion which require that all citizens have a stake in society: his famous ‘stakeholder society’. He has argued that a meaningful stake in society comes through the ability to earn a living and support a family. So there should be education, employment and community initiatives to slash youth unemployment; for single parents there should be a job, education and training programme. He has spoken of ‘decent’ nursery education and child-care provision, smaller infant class sizes, broader ‘A’ levels and upgraded vocational qualifications (Renewal, October 1995; Guardian, 29 January 1996).

Labour Party leaders, using similar terminology to the Conservatives, have accepted much of the Right’s analysis of the causes of Britain’s ills. There is a distinct possibility that the current vogue among politicians for a moral crusade against Sodom and Gomorrah will divert attention from the socio-economic structural inequalities that have contributed so much to Britain’s social problems. On 15 October 1996, on the Radio 4 Today programme, Jack Straw, the then shadow spokesman on Home Affairs, would not admit that redistribution of wealth was part of the solution to the problem of pockets of high youth crime, but chose instead to reiterate Tony Blair’s views, expressed the previous day in a speech in South Africa in which he called for the re-establishment of ‘family values’.

In recent years, the Right has made all the running in the debate over class, with its rhetoric of a classless society coupled with the notion of an underclass—terminology now bandied about by politicians on all sides. It was not always so. ‘Class’ has been a longstanding tool of analysis for social commentators and historians of all shades of opinion, as well as an inspiration for fundamental social change.

THE ACADEMIC DEBATE

Current social classifications and ways of analysing the stratification of society all build on, refine or refute Marx’s and Weber’s nineteenthcentury analyses. For Marx, class position is determined by an individual’s or group’s relationship to the means of production, and class relations always involve exploitation and domination. The image is that of a see-saw: as one class goes up the other must inevitably go down. For Weber, the relationship between classes more closely resembles a sliding scale. He argued that class position was determined by a person’s place in the market, which is influenced by education and skills, rather than by their relationship to the system of production. Weber also claimed that a person’s class position was influenced not only by the economic system but also by status and group power within a hierarchical society. Whereas Marx saw the working class and middle class locked in conflict, Weber saw classes as separate, hierarchical structures, but not necessarily in conflict.

As Rosemary Crompton and others have pointed out, post-war writers, such as Dahrendorf and Lockwood, have focused on the occupational structure or, like Bourdieu, have argued that consumption and lifestyles are the key determinants of class. Various attempts have also been made to integrate gender and ethnicity into class schema (Miliband 1989). While there are those who argue that the working class has joined the middle class and become indistinguishable from it (the embourgeoisement thesis), or that a section of the working class has dropped out of the class system altogether and become a new underclass, class continues to provide the key tool for analysing stratification in today’s society. Neither Marx’s nor Weber’s image of a classless society has been achieved. For Marx, this would occur when the working class had overthrown the capitalist class and private property had been abolished; for Weber, it would occur when privilege, and differentiation based upon it, had given way to equality of opportunity (for general discussions of class see Crompton 1993; Edgell 1993; Kelsall, Kelsall and Chisholm 1984).

TOWARDS A CLASSLESS SOCIETY?

Popular and academic views on the continuing relevance of class are in close accord, as the contributors to this volume make clear. The following chapters provide an alternative to the right-wing paradigm that has hijacked discussions of class, and, by focusing on the specific ways in which class inequalities manifest themselves in 1990s Britain, they expose the hollowness of politicians’ rhetoric about the classless society.

The chapters in this volume underline the key role played by the labour market in influencing an individual’s life chances, and the way in which labour-market position is closely linked to class position. While the interplay of class and labour market heavily influences young people’s life chances, Government policies operate on the assumption that young people’s culture, their behaviour and mores, determines how successfully they will step up the class ladder. Governments operate within the constraints of a false analysis of the root causes of class inequalities, as well as a globalised economy, and long-term socio-economic trends. If the analysis is fundamentally flawed, it is hardly surprising that Government solutions, at best, are irrelevant and, at worst, reinforce young people’s class-related life chances and marginalise broad swathes of Britain’s youth. Politicians have adopted a somewhat simplistic definition of a ‘classless society’, but—even judged on this narrow definition—there is no evidence that the next generation will find itself in a classless Britain. The links between poverty and class-related inequalities are underlined by various contributors. The pervasiveness of class inequalities are such that one in three children in Britain is growing up in poverty. Such children therefore have the double burden of living with the material and cultural deprivation of poverty, and also of struggling within a class society.

In Chapter 2 Tony Novak provides an overview of growing inequalities and the extent of poverty among children and young people, and addresses a number of the themes taken up in subsequent chapters. He points to the labelling of young people who are Black, single parents or unemployed (and, of course, it is possible to fall into all three categories at once) as an underclass living in a counter-cultural world into which they have supposedly voluntarily stepped, whereas, in fact, their mores are much the same as those of mainstream society. Novak argues that this false representation is an attempt to square the circle of growing class-related inequalities and extensive poverty in a society that is supposedly becoming classless.

In Chapter 3 Helen Jones continues the theme of class inequalities and poverty, reviewing the wealth of evidence that exists of the continuing importance of class position in determining a child’s or young person’s health and well-being, and of the negative effects of poverty on standards of health and well-being.

In Chapter 4 Andy Furlong demonstrates that, as with health, so with educational attainment, class inequalities are not diminishing. He argues that middle-class cultural capital is still important. Furlong, however, points to the weakening influence of class for the educational attainment of girls and young women, for whom participation in the labour market has grown in significance, and so, consequently, has the need for appropriate qualifications to enable them to compete effectively in it. The significance of the labour market for all young people, and the fear of unemployment, has meant an increasingly individualised (rather than a group) response to the education system, and more subtle challenges to that system.

Knuckling-down and working within the system does not, however, bring automatic success; in Chapter 5 Ken Roberts details the ways in which youth training schemes have been weakened by influences well beyond the remit of the schemes themselves and, in particular, by the absence of a policy of full employment.

Weaknesses in the labour market as well as in the housing market have hit young people disproportionately hard, according to Susan Hutson and Mark Liddiard in Chapter 6. Over many years a range of Government policies has reinforced the marginalised position of young people in society, and those already in a weak position have had their problems compounded.

In Chapter 7 John Pitts argues that socio-economic and policy changes have all conspired to throw the poor young (often young mothers) together on the most deprived council estates, where many young people have a criminal lifestyle that they do not grow out of. He contrasts British criminal and penal policy responses with French initiatives, which have tried to create a new social solidarity and new routes into citizenship.

Robert Page, in Chapter 8, focuses on young single mothers, who have suffered from a revival in centuries-old prejudices and remain marginalised as citizens. Government policies aim to change young girls’ behaviour in order to discourage young single motherhood, but this has had the effect of further stigmatising and marginalising them.

The problem of focusing on individual behaviour, rather than the structural causes of class inequalities and poverty, is also Chris Jones’s theme in Chapter 9. He argues that social workers, the professionals almost exclusively concerned with poor people, have failed to publicise the consequences of an increasingly unequal society. They have played down the significance of the material context of poverty while emphasising individual and family behaviours. When social workers did point to the systemic failures of society, they suffered an onslaught from the Conservative Government and the media, and public vilification and changes in social work training meant that they were...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 2: YOUNG PEOPLE, CLASS AND POVERTY
• CHAPTER 3: THE RIGHT START: POVERTY, HEALTH AND EDUCATION
• CHAPTER 4: EDUCATION AND THE REPRODUCTION OF CLASS-BASED INEQUALITIES
• CHAPTER 5: YOUTH TRAINING
• CHAPTER 6: YOUTH HOMELESSNESS: MARGINALISING THE MARGINALISED?
• CHAPTER 7: YOUTH CRIME, SOCIAL CHANGE AND CRIME CONTROL IN BRITAIN AND FRANCE IN THE 1980S AND 1990S
• CHAPTER 8: YOUNG SINGLE MOTHERS
• CHAPTER 9: BRITISH SOCIAL WORK AND THE CLASSLESS SOCIETY: THE FAILURE OF A PROFESSION
• CHAPTER 10: TOWARDS A CLASSLESS SOCIETY?