We are, it is routinely said, a class-ridden society. Americans sneer at our insidious, divisive rituals, the progressive left damns us for our failure to
escape from an imperial past, and the economic right plots against our class-based institutions, the better to project us into a globalised, free market culture. In fact, nobody ever says anything good about class - the system is universally agreed to be a bad thing.
But, somehow, class survives. One reason for this is our infinite capacity for hypocrisy. We practise class distinctions even as we mouth our socially
acceptable disgust. Snobbery courses through the leftish, bien pensant publishing party as surely as it does through Ascot or Henley. The wrong accent, the giveaway clothes are patronised and then avoided as rigorously in Bohemia as at Court. And the same process works in reverse - the working or under classes are just as suspicious and resentful of the middles and uppers. Something here seems to be just too ingrained, too fundamental to dismiss with a few airy phrases about social mobility and the culture of opportunity.
And this is the real point - even in contemporary Britain, class is destiny, not circumstance. Both Prescott and Prince Edward are being simple-minded. They seem to think of class as contingent, a kind of accident that can be corrected. The Prince thinks social mobility disproves the class system and Prescott thinks because he sits in a Jaguar and works in an office he has become middle class.
[...]
So we arrive at the curious cultural moment at which the latest science appears to be confirming an ancient superstition, confirming, indeed, the most local and resilient form of that superstition - the British class system. This is not a remote, intellectual observation. Genetics has already changed real people's view of the world.
After the war, in revulsion against the Nazi abuse of genetic theory, we all swung towards the view that character was formed by nurture not nature. Never again, we thought, would we make the mistake of consigning people to hell because of their natural inheritance. But now the popularisation of molecular genetics has swung us back. People are bad because they are made that way, people are upper, middle or working because it's in their genes - the rich man is back in his castle, the poor man back at the gate. Of course, geneticists themselves would not go that far, but the almost daily stories they inspire and encourage about finding the gene "for" this or that makes that kind of popular assumption inevitable.
And genetics is global so, in world terms, this could mean a new scientifically underwritten class system in which deviant genes make you either a hopeless degenerate or a suitable case for treatment. The British belief in class predestination, meanwhile, can only be sustained by the swing from nurture back to nature. The progressives, the communitarians and the anti-deference constitutional radicals are now, therefore, swimming against the tide. The layered, hierarchical society is once more in tune with the convictions of the people.
[...] All human societies seem to form themselves into some kind of class system. Hollywood and communist China are class-based as surely as White's club and, in their operations, are a good deal more savage. But the oddity of the British system is that it has retained both institutionally - in the Monarchy and the House of Lords - and psychologically the belief in class as inheritance or destiny. This belief has proved astonishingly resilient in the face of modernity and is now stronger than ever. It is, therefore, likely to be with us for some time.
This may be bad news, but it need not be. And here, at last, is something good to be said about class. If we regard ourselves as predestined to be upper, middle or working, then it only becomes a problem if you seriously want to change. But why should you? The one achievement of social mobility has been not to destroy the class system, but to remove its moral stigma. Everybody knows that working-class David Hockney is a greater Englishman than royal Prince Andrew, so what's the problem? Class persists but its moral depth has gone. It is now a set of mannerisms and rituals, of going to the pub or watching polo. Class is simply culture. Nothing, in fact, to get upset about.
Indeed, once we erase the moral stigma, class becomes something to celebrate, a precious expression of human variety that ought not to be eradicated by either illiterate egalitarianism or the globalised economy. I don't want East End pubs to become like Chelsea wine bars; I don't want Ascot to become like the White City. I want difference because loss of difference is death and, ultimately, the classless society is the dead society.
