A half empty glass
Laura Barton Saturday January 10, 2004 The Guardian
I've been keeping a weather eye on it, and it seems that a working-class hero is still something to be; an observation, perhaps, on a par with realising that that pot still hasn't boiled. At the last tally, 60% of Britons said they believed themselves to be working class, which makes it a fanclub rivalled in size only by those of Manchester United and Westlife.
People often mistake me for a member of the working classes because I am northern. To my mind this is a little like mistaking a zebra for a bicycle because in your mind they are about the same shape.
Admittedly, it is generally soft-soaped southerners who make this assumption, largely because they dwell in this soggy-brained world in which everyone north of the Watford gap is a grime-coated ragamuffin who lives on cough drops and bones. That I believe everyone south of Watford to be a lily-livered ponce who takes their tea and their ale weak is very different because, crucially, I am right.
Now, I appreciate that anyone who was born working class might wish to describe themselves as such, even if they're earning 50k and know what marrons glacés are, much as I would still describe myself as northern, despite having defected to the south three years ago (in truth, I am here only on an information-gathering mission, shortly I shall return and we shall use my findings to continue our development of a master race. Then you will be sorry).
What irks me, however, is the readiness of every man, woman and, quite possibly, child, to claim to be working class, even though they patently aren't. Honestly, I would not be surprised if Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II suddenly purported to have iron-cast familial links to Grimethorpe colliery, and had in fact been raised in a two-up, two-down terrace house on Carlton Street. "Them? They're not corgis, love. They're very small pit ponies."
Such working-class pretenders proceed to cling, white-knuckled, to any painfully tenuous link to the working classes - once visited mill/ate dripping/smelled actual working-class person - as if this serves as some sort of bolstering argument. It's like the six degrees of Kevin Bacon (visit cs.virginia.edu/oracle), except instead of being able to claim relation to a snub-nosed Bratpacker, you get the glittering prize of being among the poorest people in the land. Bingo!
Furthermore, they insist upon mentioning their "class" at every available opportunity - you've barely shaken hands before they've slipped it into the conversation with all the stealth of a sooty-cheeked urchin, freshly graduated from the Mr Fagin School of Pocket-Picking. Inexplicably, they seem to think this revelation will have precisely the same effect as if they had nonchalantly slid in a line such as "When I was out boozing with Dame Judi Dench last week..." Which, quite frankly, it doesn't.
I couldn't give a monkey's about what class someone is. My parents were working class, but you don't see me haul that fact out as if it were the best cruet, just because we have company. In my opinion, to describe myself as working class would be a knee in the proverbials to my parents, who grafted so their children could have the sort of opportunities that would mean we never had to describe ourselves as working class. Do you see?
To some degree, it's understandable: the Middle Class has the Daily Mail, Hyacinth Bucket and David Gray - an altogether air of Margot Ledbetterishness about it, while the Working Class offers the comparative glamour of, ooh, DH Lawrence, Terence Stamp and Jonny Rotten.
To be working class additionally acts as some kind of antidote to our pervading suspicion of our own phoniness. Such have been the considerable increases in our standard of living and access to desirable employment over the past 50 years, that we all harbour the nagging feeling that we have had it too easy. That unless we have actual oily dirt under our fingernails and a tin bath in the back yard, we're freewheeling fraudsters. Claiming to be working class is shorthand for saying that we have worked for our job, our home, our cushty, Staropramen-drinking lifestyles. That our journey to where we are today has all been uphill in inappropriate footwear.
But this sticks in the throat a little. It saves them from trying at all, buffers them against any allegations of failure or slacking, and has all the clout of peddling that sorry old "I forgot my kit, sir" excuse on the day of cross country. Well, I say do it in your vest and pants, sonny, because fundamentally, this shammy working-class act is most insulting to the people who really are working class. People who genuinely do struggle to hold down three grizzly jobs and put food on the table. I'm pretty sure if they heard some milk-skinned media type swanning about in a fancy London cocktailery, mincing about the trials of being working class, they'd have a few spicy words to say about it. Such knavish behaviour surely perpetuates the very class system they claim to detest. So the upper classes get mansions and Rembrandts and the key to daddy's trust fund? Well the faux working class get kudos, exoneration, and a dollop of hero-worship on the side.