The key thing about class is...

The key thing about class is, it doesn’t change much: one does not yo-yo up and down Britain’s social scale because one has turned 40, or lost a job, or won the lottery, or gained (or lost) a taste for going to the opera or to football matches.

Although you can now enjoy both simultaneously.

Or so I thought.

That is, until Professors Mike Savage FBA and Fiona Devine OBE, abetted by the BBC, revoked the class system and replaced it with a new one.

Apparently, having for several hundred years been a matter of education, occupation and taste, class is now entirely a matter of age, personality, and mortgage size.  As such – and in stark contrast to the day before yesterday when we were all happily pootling along in the upper-middle class – my father, my uncle Porpy, my son and I are now members of four different social classes.

What balderdash!

If any of us were going to qualify as ‘elite’, I’d have said daddy, what with him being an earl, and indeed that’s how he came out in the survey.  After that, however, it gets rather complicated.  My son Alisteir, you see, is now the ‘emergent service workers’ (the absence of any actual job notwithstanding).  The factors that appear to have been decisive in assigning him to this class include that he likes playing rugby and listening to rock music, and that we have not bought him his own house, on the theory – in which Alistair himself concurs – that the East Lodge is perfectly sufficient.

Although, he really needs to let us fix the windows – or at least put some in.

Porpy, meanwhile, is something called ‘technical middle class’.  The mysterious term ‘technical’ aside – and they don’t seem to mean ‘nominal’ – this new class seems to consist of incurious puritanical gits who are ‘established middle class’ in all but opera tickets.  I would (and frequently have) gladly put Porpy in another room, or at the far end of the table, but hardly in a class by himself.

As for me?  I am now ‘traditional working class’.  This is apparently because I am friends with my cleaner, electrician, farmhands and postman but do not know any software designers.

This, Professors Savage and Devine, will not do at all.  If, for instance, I fired our housekeeper and had a falling out with Bill the postie, I would instantly become ‘established middle class’; and, if flushed with the possibilities implied thereby, I signed over the East Lodge to Alestair without waiting to die first, he would instantly become a ‘new affluent worker’ (any actual employment notwithstanding).

As such, I freely offer you…

The Great British Class Calculator Follow-Up Questions

1. You have stated that you are friends with an office manager, a call-centre worker, a secretary and an accountant.  How long ago did you hire each of them, and how many floors of the office-block that they work in is owned by you or one of your relatives?

2. Under cultural activities, you have answered that you ‘Go to stately homes’. How many nights do you usually stay?  How many weekends per year?  How much 20-bore ammunition do you typically get through?

Ah!  You almost got the cultural visitor!

3. You have answered that you have savings of £0.  Is this because you recently blew it all on cocaine and ski bunnies in Gstaad and have not yet asked your trustees for more?

4. You have said you listen to hip-hop music.  Has this ever caused you to be blackballed from White’s or the Reform Club, and/or thrown out of Blake’s Hotel, Mayfair?

5. You rent your house.  Is this because you expect within five to ten years to inherit a landholding in Dumfries and Galloway that is comparable in size to Dumfries and Galloway?

I had a few more but must dash.  There is loud hip-hop music coming from the East Lodge and I’m becoming concerned about the George III giltwood settee.

 

I may still be able to save the armchairs.