Upper 0%
Upper Middle 5%
Middle 39% Total Middle 66%
Lower Middle 22%
Working 30%)
The detached homes had a certain type of name – “Tall Trees”,
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Lost in Translation The Peddling of Party Politics Oliver Duggan Independent Notebook Blogs, if only because we enjoyed removing the “L” from time to time.) Ours merely had a number, one of many signs that you had not quite “arrived”.
There may be an element of what Peter York calls false consciousness in this, in his commentary, but if people call themselves middle class, who are we to argue?
The top line of our report (apart from the importance of real coffee) was that 71 per cent of people now describe themselves as middle class (7 per cent upper middle, 43 per cent middle, 21 per cent lower middle) and only 24 per cent as working class when asked to choose.
Most people say they belong either to the middle class or to the working class. If you had to make a choice, would you call yourself middle class or working class?
1986
Middle 28%
Working 66%
1989
Middle 30%
Working 67%
1996
Middle 32%
Working 61%
2000
Middle 35%
Working 58%
2005
Middle 40%
Working 57%
2008*
Middle 44%
Working 52%
The findings cast a new light on the debate about social mobility. Some studies have suggested (pdf) that social mobility decreased during the Thatcher years, in that people were more likely to end up in the same class as their parents. Those studies defined class by job category. This research suggests that, defined by how people see their own class status, the middle class has expanded hugely over the past two decades.
*“Which of these best describes you,
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Most people see themselves as belonging to a particular social class. Please look at this card and tell me which social class you would say you belong to.
Upper Middle 1%
Middle 26%
Upper Working 21%
Working 46%
Poor 3%
We reported the massive study of Britain’s new middle class by BritainThinks, Deborah Mattinson’s new research company, in The Independent on Sunday yesterday.
Tagged in: class, social mobility
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The coverage included Mattinson’s account of her experience of talking about class in focus groups since the late 1980s, and three memoirs of being brought up in different classes, by an alarmingly thin looking working-class Kevin Maguire, a middle-class David Randall and a posh Matthew Bell.
And it compares with the British Social Attitudes average 1983-89:
It also included a quiz by which the reader can decide if he or she belongs to any of the six middle classes identified by Mattinson’s research. It is not on the website, but I have put a pdf of it here (with apologies for the quality: it takes a little while for the maximum zoom to load).
Randall’s account of the semiology of suburban Worcester Park is a gem:
Some of the expansion of the middle class found by BritainThinks may be attributable to people who would in the past have described themselves as “upper working class” – an option not available in the BritainThinks study – now defining themselves as “lower middle class”. But most of it is clearly a real and significant change in attitudes over the past quarter-century.
(YouGov used same question as BritainThinks in January 2010:
There is no directly comparable time series, but it compares with a MORI series from 1986 to 2008:
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