A class act

The civil service is to introduce a new question for job applicants, asking them whether they think that they come from a lower socio-economic background.

Of course the popular image of a civil servant is a bowler-hatted, rolled-up umbrella-wielding Sir Humphrey strolling along Whitehall with a copy of The Times under his arm, but in reality the term spans a huge spectrum, from the relatively small ranks of senior civil servants with their high pay and pensions to a far larger number of junior ones earning not much more than the minimum wage.

I worked in the administrative grades of the civil service for just over ten years, from the beginning of 1997 to the end of 2007, in what was first the Department of Social Security and then Department for Work and Pensions, and was also a trade union activist, briefly in the admin grade CPSA and then, following a merger with another union, the current, multigrade, union, PCS.

I'm not sure what I would have answered to the question, probably "No", but that's one of the problems with this idea: most people, whether they are rich or poor, think of themselves as average, because that is their and their friends' and family's experience, and because they wrongly estimate (poor people slightly underestimating and rich people wildly overestimating) what an average income actually is. There is also the problem of non-manual workers, some of them low-paid, seeing themselves as middle-class because they wrongly associate being working class with manual labour.

I'm also not sure what the civil service intends to do with the data. Two long-term studies, Whitehall I and II, have linked pay inequality and lack of job control in the civil service with a reduced life expectancy amongst lower-grade workers, and at the other end of the scale the Fast Stream graduate entry scheme continues to channel a disproportionate number of white, privately-educated men from elite universities into the top jobs rather than promoting people within departments.

Making a meal of things

The market research company YouGov has published a report on that most fascinating of sociological subjects, what you call your main evening meal.

The basic answer is that north of the Trent it's tea and south of it dinner, but there are lots of class and other differences beyond that.

As you'd expect, I'm a breakfast dinner, tea man, but Northern people who are trying to sound posher than they actually are occasionally called their midday meal lunch, and in the South there's a tendency for middle-class people to call their evening meal supper, an aping (unconscious or not) of the aristocracy who apparently call a formal evening affair with guests served by the staff dinner, but a simpler meal without guests prepared by the butler for them in their kitchen, rather than the dining hall, supper. Supper to me is a light snack - crisps, cheese, toast - just before bed so I'm not sure what people who call their main evening meal that call it, a late supper maybe.

And then there's brunch, a cooked or cold meal eaten later than breakfast (the only meal name incidentally which everyone can agree on), either in the late morning or early afternoon, although I'd call the former a late breakfast and the latter an early dinner (a name which also extends to so much else: school dinners, dinner money, dinner hour, all referring to the midday meal, whether a hot main meal or a substantial snack such as sandwiches or something cooked on toast).

Afternoon tea falls between meals, ranging from that beverage with biscuits or cake to a more formal event with sandwiches, scones (however you pronounce that!) and even smaller cooked items like crumpets or toasted teacakes (another linguistic minefield), eaten between dinner and tea at around three or four o'clock.

Much of the confusion around this question stems from the fact that originally everyone, of whatever class and whether they lived in the countryside or the city, ate their main meal in the middle of the day and called it dinner, a tradition which persists in schools and was once prevalent in factories with subsidised canteens, especially in wartime (I'm not sure why in the South the name of the main meal has followed it to a much later hour, and in the North become tea, which would once have been a simpler repast between five and seven o'clock). As Christopher Hibbert says about a country house in the early eighteenth century in his 1987 book The English: A Social History 1066-1945:

"Breakfast was served at about half past nine or ten, and usually consisted of tea or chocolate and hot buttered bread, perhaps with cheese, or toast...

Dinner was served at about four or five and supper at ten, though by the early nineteenth century the hour of dinner had moved on to nearer seven o'clock, and luncheon was served as an additional meal in the middle of the day....In simpler homes dinner was still served in the middle of the day, although the provincial family with pretensions might sit down at two or three o'clock".

Sweetness, sweetness I was only joking when I said

I watched a bit of a programme on BBC1 last night in which TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall launched a personal crusade against obesity, starting with a missionary trip to the frozen North (Newcastle-upon-Tyne to be more precise) to shame educate the fat-guzzling plebs there into eating more healthily.

There are of course many serious and overlapping issues when it comes to obesity - the amount of sugar and salt in processed food; the labelling of food by manufacturers and retailers; poverty caused by low wages and benefits making better quality food unaffordable - but the point that he doesn't seem to grasp is one that another upper middle-class, ex-Etonian, George Orwell, highlighted in his classic piece of 1930's social reportage The Road to Wigan Pier, and which came to mind as Hugh hectored the bemused populace of Newcastle through a megaphone:

"The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire might enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't...When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'...Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream!...That is how your mind works...White bread-and-marg and sugared tea doesn't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer.."

Later, Hugh drove a van onto a housing estate in one of the poorer parts of the city and tried to tempt its working-class inhabitants with fresh fruit. As Orwell put it later in the same passage, "In London..parties of Society dames now have the cheek to walk into East End houses and give shopping-lessons to the wives of the unemployed...First you condemn a family to live on thirty shillings a week, and then you have the damned impertinence to tell them how they are to spend their money."

The six tribes of Labour

At the end of the most interesting Labour Conference for a couple of decades, the media is focussing on divisions between the left and right in the party, mainly over Trident, but also to a lesser extent over Europe, Syria and the economy.

Those divisions are real and important but what's often overlooked is the differences in background and class that have shaped Labour politics throughout the party's history. I can think of half a dozen such groups in the party:

1. Upper middle-class Nonconformists, often from a Radical Liberal background: tend to the left and towards vegetarianism, teetotalism, pacifism and mild eccentricity. Tony Benn and Michael Foot are the classic examples.

2. Middle-class professionals, especially academics, journalists and lawyers: tend to the right. Current examples include Tristram Hunt, Gerald Kaufman and Keir Starmer, and in the past Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman, Jack Straw, John Smith, Bryan Gould, Paul Boateng, Jack Cunningham, Harold Wilson, Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins.

3. Working-class, former blue collar trade union officials: to be found on the right (Alan Johnson, and in the past Ernest Bevin) as well as on the left of the party (Ian Lavery, David Anderson, and in the past John Prescott, Eric Heffer and Aneurin Bevan).

4. Working-class, former white collar trade union officials or activists in local government, the public and voluntary sector or campaigns and pressure groups: tend to the left. Current examples include Diane Abbott and John McDonnell, and in the past Ken Livingstone, Tony Banks, David Blunkett and George Galloway.

5. Politicos/staffers/policy wonks: people who've never had a job outside Westminster, graduating straight from student politics to working for a MP or a left-of-centre think tank, in the party or an affiliated trade union's research unit or as a speechwriter or special adviser to a minister. Lots of current examples including Andy Burnham, Stella Creasy and Tom Watson, and in the past Ed Balls, both Miliband brothers and Denis Healey. Tend to be lower to upper middle-class, occasionally working-class, and on the right of the party. The network of ex-NOLSies (members of the National Organisation of Labour Students) who came from this background were key to creating the New Labour project in the early to mid 90's.

6. Business donors: not many examples, but, unsurprisingly, influential, at least in the recent past, given their ability to donate large sums to the party's coffers and access to other fundraising contacts and networks: Geoffrey Robinson, Lord Levy, Lord Sainsbury.

I'm sure I've missed a few people out and there are of course others who fit into more than one category: Corbyn is a mixture of 1. and 4. and both Benn and Foot worked as journalists too. Let's hope that in the future we see more of 3. and 4. and a lot less of 2. 6., and especially 5.

To look for America

Last night on Channel 4, Matt Frei travelled across the American Midwest ahead of next week's presidential election.

Frei was born and grew up in Germany (he did a very good BBC series on Berlin a couple of years back), was educated in England when his father worked here as a journalist and is now a foreign correspondent in Washington. He seems to have picked up the American habit of referring to pretty much the whole population as "middle class", including anyone who's not a millionaire or homeless. In England, someone like the guy he met in Minneapolis who has two jobs, one in a warehouse and one at night in a off licence, would never be called middle-class. I'm not sure how this started, whether it's working-class people aspiring to be middle-class or politicians thinking it best not to talk about a working class excluded from the American Dream.

Frei's trip from Minnesota to Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky didn't reveal much new - guns, racism, poverty -  but the Republican pollster who told him that no president has been re-elected with unemployment over 7% makes me think Romney becoming president might not be as unlikely a prospect as it appeared a couple of months back.

Beer and votes

After the news that President Obama is home brewing at the White House, the US magazine National Journal has published a poll which suggests that the beer Americans drink is an indicator of how they'll vote in next month's presidential election.

The poll looks at beer drinkers' position on the left-right spectrum and also how likely they are to turn out to vote. Some of the results are quite surprising. Sam Adams, brewed in the Democratic stronghold of Boston, turns out to be the favourite beer of right-of-centre Republicans most likely to turn out to vote rather than the trendy liberals you might expect to be drinking "craft beer".

Turnout is also normally a reflection of class with better-off Americans more likely to vote than poor ones. On that basis, Sierra Nevada beer from California is drunk by well-off liberals, Miller and Michelob by slightly less well-off Democrats, Heineken and Corona by left-wing blue collar workers and Busch Light by right-wing ones, neither of whom are likely to vote in November. Swing voters are split between Budweiser, Fosters and Guinness.

Next week, how the wine and spirits vote breaks down...

Marx, money and straw men

I watched the final episode of the BBC2 series Masters of Money last night in which the economics correspondent Stephanie Flanders looked at whether Karl Marx has anything to say about the current financial crisis.

Flanders claimed to have "waded through hundreds of pages of Marx" - just as literary experts "wade through" Dickens and Shakespeare I suppose - but there wasn't much evidence that she had. I could have predicted most of the stock images and ideas she came up with: the fall of the Berlin Wall signalled the end of socialism, miners hacking coal for a pittance are workers, but not people who work in offices and have shiny new mobile phones, so the working-class which Marx described has disappeared, at least in Western Europe and North America, and unemployment is the inevitable result of new technology.

The main problem with the programme though was that Flanders, despite her degrees from Oxford and Harvard, clearly doesn't understand Marxist economics. She claimed that Marx thought the only way profits could increase is by workers' wages being driven down to the bare minimum needed to survive, a view that Marx actually spends a lot of those pages she claims to have "waded through" attacking. This argument was repeated by Madsen Pirie of the right-wing Adam Smith Institute who said that rising wages alongside rising profits showed that Marx had been wrong. In fact, Marx argued that technological innovation meant that workers could spend a lot less of the working week replacing the cost of their wages and that rising wages and shorter hours could go hand in hand with higher profits. She also seemed to be arguing that Marx would have been surprised at the role of credit in the current crisis, something he again spends quite a few of those "hundreds of pages" explaining.

The programme had the usual line-up of talking heads, from right-wingers like Pirie and Nigel Lawson to ex-Marxists Martin Jacques and Peter Hitchens. Tariq Ali and Slavoj Žižek came out with some pretty obvious remarks and the only person who could have given some real insights into Marx's ideas, the geographer David Harvey, got about five seconds on screen.

The programme concluded with Flanders and some of her economics professor and City trader pals agreeing that Marx has some interesting things to say about capitalism which could help the system "reinvent itself". Hopefully some of the people who watched the programme will be interested enough in his ideas to do what Flanders clearly hasn't and read Marx themselves.

Close the Coalhouse door

I listened to the Radio 4 play Close the Coalhouse Door by Alan Plater on Saturday afternoon.

Based on the writings of ex-miner Sid Chaplin, Close the Coalhouse Door is about the Durham miners' union from the strikes to achieve recognition in the 1830's through the Depression and post-war nationalisation.  It's also well known for the songs in it by Alex Glasgow which as well as Close the Coalhouse Door include As Soon As This Pub Closes and Socialist ABC.

Alan Plater wrote the play in 1968, before the coalfield battles of 1972, 1974 and 1984-5, so director Sam West brings the play up to the present day with an "alternate history" in which Thatcherism never happened. If only...

Going for a Burton

Melvyn Bragg presented a radio programme about Richard Burton on Saturday night based on diaries he was given access to when writing Burton's biography which are about to be published.

Burton was born Richard Jenkins in South Wales in 1925, the twelfth of thirteen children of a coal miner. and died in 1984 as a result of heavy drinking and smoking. He was one of the first working-class actors to become a film star in the 1950's, ahead of the New Wave generation that included Alan Bates, Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay. His voice is unique, a rich mix of the South Wales valleys and Shakesperian bombast, as heard here reading Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas.

This is Burton on a US chat show in 1980 recalling his South Wales mining background:

Private school prattle

The Education Secretary Michael Gove yesterday made a speech to heads of private schools in which he argued that the dominance of privately-educated people such as himself in business, politics, journalism and TV is a problem.

If he were serious about tackling the problem, there is a lot he could do. Most of it would not even need new legislation, such as ending the charitable status of private schools and setting quotas for privately-educated pupils in university admissions equivalent to the percentage of school students they represent (around 7% , compared to a third now and rising to nearly half in top universities).

Of course, Gove will do none of those things, pushing ahead instead with more state-funded but privately-run Academies and "free schools" that may get a few bright working-class kids to Oxbridge but will increase rather than narrow the gap between rich and poor in education.

Titanic tastelessness

A hundred years ago today, seven hundred surviviors of the Titanic disaster arrived in New York on board the SS Carpathia.

I've watched quite a few documentaries about the sinking in the last few weeks, as well as the still watchable 1958 film A Night to Remember starring Kenneth More as the ship's Second Officer Charles Lightoller. BBC North West's coverage has focussed on Lancashire's connections with the Titanic: the White Star Line had its headquarters in Liverpool, Lightholler was from Chorley, Carpathia captain Arthur Rostron from Bolton and Wallace Hartley, the leader of the band that famously played until the end, from Colne.

I'm always bemused when Liverpool and Belfast - where the Titanic was built - express their civic pride in a ship that sank on its maiden voyage with the loss of 1,500 lives. I suppose it's to attract tourists. Even more tasteless are the Titanic hampers and teddy bears and the £6,000 centenary cruise across the Atlantic.

A much larger proportion of third class passengers, many of them Irish emigrants, drowned on the Titanic compared to first class.  The idea that this reflects a class-divided society that disappeared in the First World War seems especially wide of the mark now when inequality - in income, education and life expectancy - continues to increase.

Apparently, there were fifteen thousand bottles of beer on board the Titanic. I wonder what it was and what condition it's in now.

Football from the North

I've just been reading a review of a new book about the 1879 FA Cup Quarter-Final between Darwen and Old Etonians.

The tie went to a second replay but all the matches were played in London as the Old Etonians refused to travel to Lancashire and the FA declined to intervene (no change there). Like other Northern teams, Darwen's players were working men and as amateurs had to find the money to travel to away matches from their meagre wages, unlike the sides made up of ex-public school boys who dominated the FA Cup in the first decade of the competition.

By the 1880's, Northern working-class teams had begun to compensate their players for expenses and lost wages and some also surreptiously employed professionals, many of them from Scotland where the "passing game" had been invented in the early 1870's. This led to the FA threatening to throw the Northern teams out of what was still officially an amateur game (there was also a proposal to ban Scottish players from English football in order to stem the tide of professionalism). Thirty-seven Northern teams responded by meeting in Manchester in 1884 and forming the openly professional British Football Association.

All this is of course an almost exact parallel with what happened in rugby football in the 1890's: the threat by the amateur Rugby Football Union to expel Northern working-class teams for paying players and the meeting in Huddersfield in 1895 that led to the separate game of rugby league. The FA headed off a permanent split in football by legalising professionalism in 1885 and in 1888 the Northern clubs met in Manchester to form the Football League as a league competition alongside the FA Cup. But what if the FA hadn't sanctioned professional football? Would amateur football in the South and professional football in the North have continued to be played under the same rules or would they have grown apart like rugby league and union? Would professional clubs like Arsenal and West Ham still have emerged in London and the South to challenge the amateur FA? Would they have eventually linked up with the professional Football League clubs in Lancashire and the Midlands as they did in the early twentieth century?

I think football would be broadly similar if the split between amateurs and professionals had continued and the Football League would still have expanded from its Lancashire birthplace to the Midlands and then the South in a way that rugby league didn't (apart from to Australia, and you can't get much more Southern than that). 

Bankers doing God’s work?

I just watched the programme When Bankers Were Good, presented by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop.

Hislop's argument is that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bankers were sober Quaker types like the Barclays who only loaned to respectable businesses and were generous philanthropists who made charitable donations to feed and house the poor, in contrast to the bankers who work in the deregulated, risk-tasking City of today.  It's a similar argument to Ed Miliband's about "predatory" and "productive" capitalism.

The problem with all this is that as a result of all kinds of complicated financial devices like credit default swaps and bundles of sub-prime mortgages, "predatory" and "productive" capitalism has become inextricably intertwined to the extent that even the banks themselves are unaware of their liabilities to each other.

Just as banks and joint-stock companies characterised the early development of capitalism, so the international finance system that has grown up since World War II characterises its current stage.  Attempts to turn the clock back and retreat behind national borders are neither possible nor desirable.  The answer is to bring international finance under democratic control.

Hislop also concedes at the end of the programme that the philanthropy of the Victorian bankers only had a marginal impact on poverty and that it was progressive taxation and the welfare state that began to narrow the gap between rich and poor in the twentieth century.

Peterloo and public school politicians

Along with about thirty thousand other people, I was in Manchester city centre this afternoon for the TUC demo outside the Tory party conference.

The conference is taking place at the Manchester Central Convention Centre (Manchester Central railway station until 1969), close to the site of Peter's Fields where in 1819 fifteen people demanding parliamentary reform were cut down by the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry in what is now known as the Peterloo Massacre.

A lot has changed since 1819.  Working-class men and women got the vote in 1918. In 1819, the Tory Prime Minister was the Charterhouse and Oxford educated Lord Liverpool; now it's an old Etonian...

There have been only been three Prime Ministers not educated at a public school or Oxbridge, two Labour (Brown and Callaghan) and one Tory (Major). When will we see the next one?

The photo shows the RMT rail union's Manchester branch banner depicting the Peterloo Massacre, ending with a quote from Shelley's 1819 poem The Mask of Anarchy:

"Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you-

Ye are many — they are few"

Dad's Army

The television writer David Croft who has died aged 89 is best known for co-writing Dad's Army.  I had a distant family connection to Croft - my mum's uncle was his cousin - but never met him.

That a comedy about the antics of a Home Guard unit in World War II was nearly not commissioned because some at the BBC thought it disrespectful to those who had served in the war seems strange now that it is rightly regarded as as a TV classic.

Comedies about army life had of course been done before and not just in Britain - another of my favourite shows is Sergeant Bilko - but what sets Dad's Army apart is the way it pokes fun at British class structures. The Home Guard unit in the fictional small town in which it is set replicates these - the bank manager is the captain, the butcher the corporal and the bank clerk the sergeant. The sergeant however is from an upper-class background and a lot of the humour derives from his effortless superiority over the pompous Captain Mainwaring:

Officer material?

I watched the first episode of the new BBC4 documentary series about the British Army's officer training college at Sandhurst last night. It confirms what you already knew: the officer cadets are almost all posh products of public schools and university. 

Yet the officers in charge of Sandhurst boast of their abilty to mould almost anyone into an officer capable of leading working-class privates into battle.  Those working-class privates as well as the equally proletarian sergeants who knock the Sandhurst cadets into shape are praised by their superiors for their loyalty, toughness, discipline etc. but are clearly not seen as people who could make the grade as an officer themselves.

It's interesting to think about what effect a wider recruitment policy for officers would have on the British Army. I would guess the most egalitarian armies are the Scandinavian and Israeli ones. Even the US Army doesn't seem to replicate class structures in the way the British one does almost exactly.

The Guardian review of the programme made me laugh:

"the moment mummy and daddy's Volvo disappears down the long drive, things change. You are stripped of your clothes, your dignity and your individuality...(you're stripped of your first name too)... 3,500 miles away, in Helmand province, men with beards are writing [your] names on IEDs. Surnames only, obviously."