classlessness

A few months ago, I was sitting in Abu Dhabi International Airport, feeling tired and dazed by several days of mentally draining work. I was waiting with equally drained colleagues for a red-eye flight. Abruptly, I was dragged out of the here and now and back to the 1990s by the arrival at the gate of none other than our former PM, John Major. I was not inconsiderably surprised to see him.

My strongest abiding memory of Major is the remark he made in 1990: "In the next ten years we will have to continue to make changes which will make the whole of this country a genuinely classless society." I was a confused young man at the time, paying scant attention to the nuances of public life. So I can't even speculate about whether the then Prime Minister believed a word of what he was saying. But his prediction certainly hasn't come true. Looking back, Major's assertion seems as ridiculous as John Prescott telling us later that "we are all middle class now".

A lifetime of experience, recent experiences included, tells me that Blair was wrong and that Major's prediction (if it was a real prediction made in good faith) was way off the mark.

A change that I have been able to observe, however, is the ever more common notion of conflating of  the entire (white?) British working class with a putatively widespread 'chav' underclass of feckless and toxic criminal scroungers. This is poisonous nonsense.

So I look forward to reading the book which arrived yesterday: Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones. I daresay I'll get around to some sort of review/summary on these pages in the near future.