There’s been a lot of discussion and debate in recent years about Britain’s class structure. Most of the focus has been on analysing and understanding the phenomenon of a working class in society. This is to some extent for two main reasons. First, that much of the discussion happens in academic circles, and by definition, those studying, writing about and debating class structures tend to be middle-class. I think the consequences of this are that:
- There tends to be greater interest in those perceived as different to you. The working classes become an interesting subject to study.
- Often those engaging will see themselves as having working class roots and this will lead to both curiosity and guilt.
The second issue is that there tends to be a political dynamic to the studies and especially a left wing interest. Indeed, there is even a paternalistic element to this. The working classes are seen as those who need things doing for them, they need to be rescued.
There has also been a lot of interest in the working classes from a missiological perspective as churches seek to reach urban contexts. We may run the same risks in our approaches that the secular studies do.
However, my aim here is not so much to revisit the question of “Who are the working classes?” as to think about the middle classes. We can make some assumptions about them too and that may be just as detrimental to urban mission as mistakes relating to working class people. In fact, at times it seems that we end up with an excluded middle as we divide our country up between ultra prosperous areas and ultra deprived. However, neither category fits much of our towns and cities.
So here are some initial thoughts to get us thinking. They were prompted a little by someone’s commentary on the higher education debate via Twitter. They were bemoaning a new set of proposals from the centre right which presumed that the extension of university education with a target of getting over 50% of people through higher education was a bad thing leading to a growth in so called mickey mouse courses. The person was questioning those assumptions and arguing that the problem was that middle class people looked down on the newer universities because they looked down on working class people considering their children to be entitled to a degree whereas working class youngsters were not really up to it.
A few things struck me. There may be some truth in his assessment but I thought that he hadn’t given enough attention to a few other factors. First, some of the concerns and even resentment towards the expansion of higher education. The message they’ve heard is that if you don’t have a degree then you don’t add up to much. Skilled labour has been seen to be devalued as have other routes such as apprenticeships into working life. Secondly, if you were from a working class background and you had worked hard, achieved good grades and got into a traditional university, then you may well see the expansion as devaluing your achievements.
But this got me to thinking. There will be families where you would have identified them as middle class for generations. They will have been reasonably comfortably off and their normal career routes would have been into professions or commerce. Some of those professions will have historically been protected by the “who you know”. However, that isn’t the story for everyone. For a lot of middle class people, they are labelled as such because either they, their parents or their grandparnts were working class, maybe even struggling and they progressed in life. Consider the lad from the children’s home who develops a trade and is successful. What about the young man from the council estate who passed their 11-plus, got into Oxford and went on from there (my dad). Or what about the boy who left school at the earliest age possible with few qualifications but a gift for numbers and worked their way up in finance and insurance (my father-in-law).
I grew up in a church where there were lots of middle-class people, businessmen and professionals but most of them were in effect first or second generation middle-class. It was in fact because of the Gospel that their families had escaped from addictions and debt.
It’s important that we don’t just have a blanket, stereotyped view of the working classes. The same is true of the middle classes as well.
Faithroots 