The Gulf in Society : In Britain, Social Class Still Counts

Prince Edward, Queen Elizabeth’s youngest son, and a trio of royal cousins celebrated their 21st birthdays last month at a lavish bash at Windsor Castle. The party, hosted by the queen, reportedly drew 600 aristocratic guests and cost close to $100,000.

Pictures of the guests sipping champagne were splashed over the pages of the popular press, but there was little public criticism of such extravagance among the queen’s subjects--evidence that, in Britain, both the upper and lower classes still know their place.

The ossified British class system, in fact, is still alive and well despite pleas from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher--a grocer’s daughter--for a country “free of class distinction,” with privilege replaced by an “enterprise culture.”

Two Nations Foreseen

In saying this, Thatcher was echoing the sentiments of an earlier prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who warned a century ago that Britain was in danger of becoming two nations “as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding; are fed by different food; are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”

To be sure, not everyone believes that the British class system is entirely bad. Some argue that the rigidities inherent in the system have given Britain an uncommon degree of social stability, despite periodic eruptions of labor unrest.

But those who defend it are in the minority. While the Royal Family is usually excluded from criticism, most observers find fault with the class system and argue that it has contributed to Britain’s decline as a world leader.

Work Is Bad Form

More than one critic has pointed out that Britain’s upper class has set the tone for the rest of the country--and that this has caused considerable damage. They draw attention in particular to what they see as an upper-class notion that hard work--particularly in commerce and industry--is just not good form.

“The essentially static views of the old British upper class have won the day in Britain,” said Ralf Dahrendorf, a former director of the London School of Economics. “They have spread, first to the working class, then to the middle class, or perhaps the other way round. But they have not been diluted, let alone replaced, by the ambitions and achievements of the industrial middle class.”

And the values of the upper class are not worth emulating, Dahrendorf contended. “Really hard work is simply not done (among the upper class),” he said. “Work is a combination of dabbling in the running of things, whether as non-executive directors, members of boards, or gentlemen farmers, and of voluntary work for charities or other benevolent purposes.”

According to novelist Anthony Burgess, author of “The Clockwork Orange” and “Earthly Powers,” classes are so static that financial success alone cannot qualify someone as a member of the upper class.

Britain’s ruling class “rules through prestige, not money,” Burgess said in a recent commentary in the Daily Mail. “No amount of financial leveling will ever liquidate that class.”

The upper class is “best defined in terms of the kind of education it has had and the kind of English it speaks,” he said. “It is easily imitated by comedians who wear old Etonian ties and speak with a hot potato in their mouths.”

Indeed, almost anyone can tell a Briton’s background by the way he dresses and the way he talks. George Bernard Shaw, in his play “Pygmalion,” astutely showed just how important speech, diction and accent are in English life.

Class distinctions begin with the Royal Family, and as novelist Burgess pointed out: “There is a fine stratum of useless, elegant retainers surrounding the Royal Family. Out of this climbs into the bosom of a family a personage like Princess Diana, whom all the world loves.

“She bakes no bread, paints no pictures, reads no books above the level of Freddie Forsyth, contributes nothing to the world’s work; she merely proclaims the purely decorative function of her class. And this is altogether admirable. This is what the gruffest unemployed miner accepts as a part of a heaven he will never reach.”

Not only is there little envy of their betters among the lower class but, curiously enough, author Jilly Cooper has noted, there may be certain similarities between the extreme upper and extreme lower classes--their xenophobia, their indifference to public opinion, their passion for racing and gambling and their fondness for plain speaking and plain food.

During the Falklands crisis, for example, public opinion polls indicated that the upper class and the lower class were supportive of the British recapture of the islands from Argentina, while the middle class favored a diplomatic solution.

Stratified Educational System

As many see it, class distinctions in Britain are fostered by the stratified educational system. Lower class children attend state-run schools and often drop out early. Middle class kids go to local grammar schools or minor prep schools. And, despite growing pressure to award scholarships to worthy but poor scholars, the expensive boarding schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester remain largely the preserve of the upper classes.

What happens at school also makes a difference. The brightest students at Eton, one finds in talking with boys there who are about to graduate, are looking forward to careers not in industry or business but in banking or finance, where they hope to make some money and then possibly go into politics.

Traditionally, too, education at prestige universities such as Oxford and Cambridge has concentrated on producing generalists, not specialists. In the past, Oxford and Cambridge men were expected to take on the mantle of empire, to go into government, the armed services, the clergy, or teaching.

The so-called Oxbridge system, according to those who have gone through it, has a heavy bias against the kind of education that in the United States, West Germany and France produces leaders of commerce and industry.

Victor Keegan, a financial journalist, has observed: “At a recent college reunion, not a single one of my immediate contemporaries had gone into industry. We were all stockbrokers, lawyers, civil servants, academics, accountants and journalists.”

Industry, then, is viewed by some of the best minds in Britain as a decidedly second-rate choice, and this is reflected in the quality of Britain’s corporate executives.

As an executive recruiter put it: “The higher up you go in British industry and commerce, the worse it is in terms of ability and competence. I think British middle management would compare favorably with any middle management in the world.”

But, he added, “in Britain, you have the tradition of the gifted amateur at the top. The problem now is that the amateurs aren’t that gifted.”

Some experts believe that class differences are a key factor in the industrial disputes that have plagued Britain. Most British executives are uncomfortable with the workers, and the workers take pride in not mixing with managers.

The two rarely meet except across a bargaining table, and few British companies have a full-time labor relations specialist to find out about worker grievances before they become serious problems. Thus, there is a wide gulf between the “lads”--the workers--and the “chaps”--the managers.

Tightly Knit Working Class

There is also markedly less occupational mobility here than in other industrialized countries. The Economist, the weekly newsmagazine, has pointed out that in no other developed country is the working class as tightly knit as it is in Britain, where three-quarters of the workers are second-generation blue-collar, compared with less than half in the United States.

“The British worker remains class-conscious because the great majority of working-class men are the sons of working-class fathers,” the magazine said.

This attitude is fostered by militant left-wing officials and politicians who, Dahrendorf said, advocate the kind of class warfare that would lead to an ideal “classless” society, as advocated by traditional Marxists.

“They like to glorify the working class, though not without making sure that their distance from it is never forgotten,” Dahrendorf said of political leftists.

For its part, the middle class appears to have accepted the values of the upper class, and it poses no threat to the aristocrats. Thus it is the middle class that gives Britain the stability that is envied by other countries.

And from the middle class, it is possible to rise: Prime Minister Thatcher, who grew up in a flat above her father’s store, is a major example. She worked her way out by winning a scholarship to Oxford. Her accent, too, changed along the way.

Having made the climb herself, Thatcher seems to believe that the way is open to all, though many sociologists would disagree. And, curiously, though she has called for a meritocracy, she has reinstituted the practice of granting hereditary peerages, a practice abandoned in the 1960s by a Labor prime minister, Harold Wilson.

Wilson argued that while some high achievers should be honored with a peerage, there was no reason that their sons, grandsons or great-grandsons should inherit titles and privileges.

The social differences in Britain’s class system are being reinforced by geographical differences. The north of England has become poorer and the south has come to be characterized by the striving, upwardly mobile middle class.

The traditional industrial cities of the north--Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham--with a history of industrial strife, are beginning to fall into decay. Meanwhile, new industries--electronics, for example--are locating in the south, where life is easier.

The notion of “two nations” may be approaching reality. The south, with its prosperity and easy-going ways, sometimes does seem to be a different country from the north, whose miners, dockworkers and steelworkers have given the region a reputation for industrial disputes.

“It always astonishes me the number of people around here to whom Birmingham is the north and Clydeside (in Scotland near Glasgow) is a foreign country,” observed the dean of Chichester Cathedral, the Rev. Robert Holtby, a native Yorkshireman who now finds himself working in the south.

The differences of class and geography are clearly reflected in politics. The Labor Party has a bedrock vote of 20% to 25%, concentrated in the old industrial strongholds of the north. The Conservatives have taken over in the south. In fact, with the exception of London’s inner city boroughs, there is not a single Labor Party member of Parliament from below a line drawn between London and Bristol.

Unemployment is concentrated in the north, and this has led some observers, among them historian Michael Howard of Oxford University, to warn of a long-term threat to Britain’s social cohesiveness. Unemployed young people, Howard says, “simply do not feel part of society at all, and defiantly turn their back on it.”

These unemployed young people, Howard said, could be the victims of exploitation by “messianic visionaries dedicated to the destruction of the existing order.”

‘Outdated Class System’

Howard has urged Thatcher to be more aware of the difficulties and problems that affect the working classes, and to search for ways of reducing unemployment.

He shares this view with Anthony Sampson, author of “The Anatomy of Britain,” who said recently that the prime minister “has done little to change an outdated class system, a vestige from previous centuries.”

And he said that Britain has never developed an industrial strategy that would emphasize merit and enable Britain to compete with its rivals abroad; the British, he noted, must even import computer engineers.

“Must Britain continue to have an army of unemployed in its industrial deserts, while it subsists--after the (North Sea) oil runs out--on banking, insurance and services based in London and the south?” Sampson asked.

Despite the occasional outburst of criticism, there seems to be no real threat to the class system in Britain. As the novelist Burgess observed: “Abolish class and you put Princess Diana into the lineup at a supermarket. . . . Everybody would cry out against it.”