A working class person
I recently went to a literary event at my local book festival ( Queen’s Park in NW London) where two esteemed journalists - Kenan Malik and Tomiwa Owalade - were discussing the intricacies and challenges of identity politics. Both of them agreed that the current obsessions with race and gender overshadowed and distracted from a more important issue - that of class. I found it hard to listen to them both, however, because the voice of the person who was interviewing them - I never took the trouble to find out his name - was so provoking to me that I could barely concentrate.
It was so drenched in upper-class white privilege - rather like those BBC news announcers of the 1950s - that I just sat there wondering how this geezer got this plum job of running a literary event and whether it had anything at all to do with the handy connections he had made at Oxbridge which he had got into having been tutored within an inch of his life at an expensive public school.
Or that’s what I imagined anyway. He may have been a poverty-stricken haulage contractor from Tower Hamlets as far as I knew, but I created a story around him, provoked by my hostility to the timbre of his voice. At the end of the event, I asked the two panel members a question - ‘you’ve talked a lot about race hatred during this event, but what is to be done about class hatred?’. They didn’t have any answers, except that Kenan Malik said, refreshingly that he was all in favour of it.
The friend who attended the event with me, as it happened, was (like many of my current friends) the recipient of an expensive private school education himself, and after I mentioned to him how difficult I found it listening to the interviewer, he was simply puzzled. He didn’t see any problem at all with the man’s voice.
And there we have it - all the irrationality and base emotion of class hatred. George Orwell, possibly my favourite writer of all time ( even though he was a proper toff) approvingly quoted George Bernard Shaw - “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth,” thought, Shaw, “without making some other Englishman hate him.”
All this may sound ridiculous in supposedly classless modern Britain. Perhaps it is. I can only record my own gut reactions honestly. And it’s all the more absurd because I’m not even working-class anymore, if I ever was. Yes, my dad worked in a greengrocer’s shop all his life, but we owned our own tiny house in London’s remote suburbia and I went to the local grammar school. Yet our culture was working class (albeit ‘respectable’ working class) . I often worked in my dad’s shop and served the proper middle and upper classes their fruit and veg. They seemed like a different species entirely. My local youth club was heavily populated with skinheads, and I spent a fair amount of time wondering local council estates with friends who lived on the estates, bemoaning the sheer boredom and frustration of having no money, no culture and most significantly of all, no means of getting girls interested in us.
Fast forward 50 years. I have spent most of my adult life living a ‘metropolitan elite’ existence in North West London - going to dinner parties, theatre, art galleries and all those signature activities of class membership. In my bones, though, I still feel different to those wealthier friends and neighbours who surround me - who invariably are expecting in the not too distant future an inheritance that will make their sunset years more pleasant, and who more often than not have second homes in France or Tuscany. Do I resent them? Not in any significant way, but there is any underlying annoyance, I would put it no more strongly than that, given that my family inheritance was my dad’s sports top given to me in a plastic shopping bag.
Anyway, here’s the rub. Last year I bought a house in Whitstable - which is largely a white working class community. In a sense I was returning to my roots. And I discovered something which actually I already knew.
I don’t much like the working classes either.
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