In a fascinating recent study, LSE Assistant Professor of Sociology Sam Friedman explores a curiously British phenomenon, middle-class professionals insisting they are working-class. In the most recent British Social Attitudes survey, 60% of people identified as working-class, whilst 47% of those in professional and managerial jobs consider themselves working-class, despite the actual estimate of the working-class to be around 25% of the population. What is going on here? Why are Britons, unlike their European and American counterparts, set on maintaining a fiction of humble origins?
Upon reading Dr Friedman’s study my mind was immediately cast to a now-infamous Question Time segment in Bolton involving a certain Mr Rob Barber. Protesting Labour’s new tax policy (higher taxes on the top 5% of earners), Mr Barber claimed the policy won’t be affecting billionaires but people like himself, who ‘aren’t even in the top 50% of earners.’ His acrimonious speech didn't quite have the desired effect as it was revealed he earned over £80,000 a year, placing him in the top 3% of earners at the time! A short snippet of the conversation is attached below:
Here it is clear that being middle-class or being in the top 5% of earners is about perception. Most people don’t have a firm grasp of the different income percentiles, nor on strict definitions about what it means to be middle-class, if one even exists. Thus, perhaps charitably, Mr Barber’s claim that he wasn’t in the top 5% of earners was not a dispute about income but about perception: He did not feel like he was in the top 5%.
This could be due to several factors: Perhaps he lives in a well to do area or identifies with being working class, or maybe he he doesn’t see a lot of that money as a self-employed man.
Worse still, maybe it says more about the sorry state of inequality in the country, that a man in the top 5%, in terms of income, doesn’t feel wealthy, doesn’t feel that he has got ahead. Perhaps the crucial difference then isn’t between the bottom 50 and the 5% but between the 5% and the 1% or the 0.1%.
Whatever the case, survey’s and Dr Friedman’s recent study revealed that many of us aren’t comfortable with calling ourselves middle-class, even when we are. Dr Friedman’s interviews for example found that for those with middle-class origins who professed a working-class background, they often relied on the story of working-class grandparents, telling a story of hard work and upward mobility that got them to where they are now. Yet in telling this story, no matter how truthful, the participants were masking the privileges they had received from their middle-class upbringing, from private schooling to getting onto the housing market. A telling example is Ella who claimed to be working-class based on her grandparent’s working-class origins, despite going to private school and her parents comfortable jobs. It is interesting to note that Ella focused specifically on her parents and grandparents work ethic and downplayed the fact that she went to private school by saying it was one of the ‘really small ones which are quite cheap’.
Perhaps then the worst part of this misidentified class identity is the way they reinforce popular notions of meritocracy. If a middle-class person can convince themselves they are working-class then they will more easily believe that they earned their success through hard work alone, ignoring the structural privilege's in their life. This, despite the large body of research which shows several factors including income, whether your parents attended University, where you grew up etc. has an enormous effect on your life chances. To ignore this for the sake of a meritocratic dream where everybody gets what they worked for is a terrible illusion, ignoring the many privileges that enable middle and upper-class professionals to overestimate their abilities, and underestimate their endowments at birth.
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