Class warfare is just not classy

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By Jenny McCartney
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 17/08/2008

Although it is still August, there has been a distinctly chilly feeling in the air, particularly when the Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, warned last week of an economic period of "painful adjustment".

Mr King explained that the adjustment would involve an unpleasant stretch of stagnating incomes, falling house prices and rising unemployment.

The "rising unemployment" bit caught my eye. For more than a decade, we became used to the notion that jobs were generally available to anyone who wanted one. Now, the possibility of involuntary unemployment is everywhere, stalking shopkeepers and City workers alike.

advertisementBut something fundamental happened to our thinking during the boom years: because work was plentiful, it became respectable to sneer at those who didn't work.

The absence of regular, paid work in a citizen's life was linked to a host of other problems, from alcoholism and drug addiction to a state-dependent mindset and a lack of educational achievement in their children.

To some extent, of course, this was true. And because the term "working class" couldn't be applied to a group whose defining trait was that they didn't work, the term "underclass" became popular. It became accepted wisdom that Britain had an "underclass" which was the feral, unpredictable source of all our ills.

We all know what we mean by "underclass", but the trouble is we all mean slightly different things.

When I say "underclass", I suppose I mean those who have become dangerously disconnected from the foundation stones of work and social co-operation upon which the working-class communities traditionally thrived.

The defining characteristic of its members would be a notable lack of any educational or other aspiration, coupled with defensive aggression. It's the bloke who threatens to punch you for asking him to take his feet off the train seat, and the teenage girl who brags about her sexual exploits in a mobile phone conversation that the whole bus can hear.

It's been a useful shorthand, I suppose, but now I'm thinking of ditching the word entirely.

One reason is that the notion appears to have been co-opted, with increasing vitriol, by commentators who are simply incensed by anyone who doesn't share their aesthetic values.

Jeremy Clarkson, the presenter of Top Gear, wrote last week of his experiences driving the new Rolls-Royce coupé around town: "It's been a genuinely alarming insight into the bitterness of Britain's obese and stupid underclass."

When he drove past a bus queue, he said, he realised that "hate is something you can touch and see and smell."

The "obese and stupid" people at the bus stop hadn't done anything specific, it seemed: presumably they had simply failed to light up with sufficient admiration as Clarkson coasted by in his swanky car.

Still, you don't have to be Karl Marx to reflect that if you were waiting for a bus while fretting about the rising cost of heating the family home, the sudden appearance of Clarkson in a £296,500 vehicle might not fill the heart with unalloyed joy.

In July, the Sunday Times and Spectator columnist Rod Liddle saw a fat woman and her plump children in a supermarket.

She didn't say or do anything discourteous, it appeared, nor did the children, but the mere glimpse of "this hag", her "vile lardy brood" and the contents of her shopping trolley prompted the writer to a bizarre rant which culminated in the fantasy that "I set the fat mother on fire with my Zippo lighter, and on the way out I kicked the smallest fat child hard in the gut."

It is worth pointing out that while both Clarkson and Liddle are normal-looking men, neither would exactly be in line to win the Weight Watchers Slimmer of the Year Award. But then middle-class fat is, for them, texturally different from underclass fat. Good things have poured into middle-class fat, you see: steak, Roquefort, red wine and a heartily robust enjoyment of life. Underclass fat, however, being composed entirely of chicken nuggets, chips and wilful idleness, is a mark of moral degeneracy.

The people who are quickest to sneer at "chavs" and the perceived physical shortcomings of the "underclass" often seem to be those most obsessed with flaunting their own "bling" and extending their unprovoked rudeness to those with far less social and financial clout. Odd, that. It does sometimes leave you wondering, though, just what the term "to behave with class" really means.

Hooray for the people's prince

The heavy ire of the supporters of genetically modified crops descended on Prince Charles last week, following his interview with The Daily Telegraph in which he lambasted GM technology and a vision of a global farming economy controlled by "gigantic corporations".

Johnjoe McFadden, the professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey, rather confusedly accused the prince of "telling the poor to eat organic cake while he pours wine into the fuel tank of his sports car", while MPs accused him of being a Luddite who would condemn millions to starvation.

The general idea was to lampoon Charles as some silly old posh buffer, who secretly yearned for the days when forelock-tugging peasants hand-tilled the land.

This characterisation is grossly unfair. Despite the somewhat rarified nature of Charles's life, his organic farming and food businesses do a roaring trade, and he often appears more in touch than his critics with the concerns of ordinary people.

His previous foray into public policy was on architecture. He was pilloried for outspoken criticism of the "carbuncles" created by modern architects. Yet there is little doubt that many more people would like to live on the prince's model Poundbury estate in Dorset - which mixes private and public housing and is built in keeping with the traditional architecture - than the high-rise tower blocks of the 1960s and 1970s or the Barratt homes of the 1980s.

Rather like architecture, science is an area with the power fundamentally to affect the lives of innumerable people, over which the vast majority of us have almost no control.

When the British public has been asked for its view on GM crops, it has repeatedly rejected them. Now there are signs that our Government is softening towards GM crops as a perceived solution to the global food crisis.

But often things that are perceived as handy short-term fixes - such as corn-based biofuels - create huge long-term problems. Science has given mankind many boons, but its assurances are far from infallible: it also gave us thalidomide, BSE and Agent Orange.

If Prince Charles has focused public attention on the real arguments around GM crops, he has done us all a service.

Peaches plays for high stakes in Vegas

The whirlwind wedding of Peaches Geldof, aged 19, to an American musician in a Las Vegas chapel last week was a reminder of the specialised circumstances in which flippancy can operate successfully.

When her parents, Bob Geldof and Paula Yates, got married in a Las Vegas wedding chapel in 1986, they had already been together for 10 years and had a baby.

There was little doubt that they were a committed couple, which was why the style of wedding, with Yates clad in scarlet, seemed fresh and witty and chic.

One can only get away with treating a wedding lightly, however, if the relationship beneath it is intensely serious. The alternative - an instant marriage to a near-stranger in a city famous for gambling - feels obscurely depressing.

Celebrity sightings: Photos and paparazzi snaps
It can't be very easy being Peaches Geldof, a clever girl who has been acting a bit silly in her pursuit of high drama. Yet for many people of my generation, her parents were a source of fascination as much for the apparent stability of their life together as their rebelliousness.

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They offered an unusual model of a relationship that seemed to be fun as well as enduring: that is partly why so many people who never knew them felt genuinely sorry when it ended.

For teenagers, impermanence has its own glamour, although it might be wiser not to mix it up with Las Vegas chapels. It is only when you get older that you realise that impermanence is so tragically easy to achieve.