That mythical working class

Ange Rayner, our deputy prime minister, knows how to ward off any accusations of misbehaviour. Wave the sabre of her class origin, and accusers flee like demons from the cross.

Photographed whirling drunk in a sleazy nightclub at 4 AM? “I’m working class.”

Accepted all-expenses-paid holiday with her intermittent lover at a billionaire’s penthouse? “I’m working class.”

Hired a personal photographer, on a £68,000 taxpayer-funded salary, to boost her online image? “I’m working class.”

Pushed an old woman under a bus? “I’m working class.” Sorry, I made this last one up. The idea is to probe the outer limits of that excuse, which seems to go far, although perhaps not quite as far as that yet.

Still, barristers routinely cite their clients’ humble origins as a mitigating circumstance. So perhaps my hypothetical excuse isn’t as fanciful as all that.

Actually, my problem today isn’t with Ange, that walking caricature of a Labour politician. It’s with the term ‘working class’, and I’ll be using her only as an illustration of its fatuity.

The term has two meanings, one English, the other Marxist. The English meaning is self-evident: ‘working class’ describes people who work. Those who don’t work aren’t working class, those who work are.

Now, anyone who has ever looked at the diaries of doctors, lawyers, farmers, teachers and dons will have to agree that they work extremely hard. So does that make them working class? In English, definitely. In Marxist, no.

According to Marx, only industrial labourers qualify as working class, aka the proletariat. But Ange doesn’t, not by that standard.

She has never worked at a factory and in fact has never done any meaningful work of any kind, apart from a short stint as social worker. She spent the rest of her career climbing the greasy pole of trade union politics all the way up to a safe Labour seat.

Specifically, Marx based his social taxonomy on a person’s relation to the ‘means of production’. Yet Ange has never produced anything other than an illegitimate child at age 16. Her means of production was her womb.

So how is she working class? I get it. Ange is a classical scholar who knows how to penetrate the etymology of words. The word ‘proletarian’ was coined in the 17^th century on the basis of the Latin root proles, meaning ‘offspring’. A proletarian was thus a person whose only useful function in life was to produce progeny.

If so, Ange’s illegitimate child indeed qualifies her as a proletarian, but somehow I doubt this is how she would explain it. Ange has a shaky mastery even of living languages, such as English, never mind dead ones. She is gobby without being eloquent.

Marx’s definition made little sense even when he concocted it, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. That was the time when industrialisation came to Britain, but it has since left. We now live in a post-industrial age, and no conveyor-belt definitions apply any longer, if they ever did.

Nor do any economic ones in general. Otherwise we’d have to argue that a train driver paid £80,000 a year for a four-day week is working class, and a teacher isn’t, even though he gets less than half that and still spends his weekends marking papers – and his evenings filling in endless forms on gender and racial equality.

I lived in the US for 15 years, and yet I never heard anyone describing himself as ‘working class’. I’m not saying that such Americans don’t exist, only that I never met any. My friends were mostly academics, my colleagues were admen, and neither group self-identified in class terms.

Suddenly, when I moved to London back in 1988, I met many advertising colleagues, all on princely salaries, describing themselves as working class. They saw that part of their identity as innate and immutable, like their height or the colour of their eyes.

That reinforced my belief that the definition of working class no longer has anything to do with economics. After all, I’ve met a few aristocrats with a lineage going back centuries who had less money than today’s train drivers. And in my professional capacity, I once even met Alan Sugar who despite all his billions still describes himself as working class .

If not economics, what then? I’d suggest a combination of culture and ideology as the defining discriminators of the working class. Sometimes culture is primary and ideology secondary, at other times it’s the other way around.

Here I use the term ‘culture’ broadly, to include not just education and aesthetic preferences, but also manners and conduct. All of these are given some bias by one’s birth and early upbringing, but they aren’t determined by such factors for life.

It’s possible for a girl with Ange’s social background to grow up with interests other than getting pissed at a night club and procreating behind a bike shed. I have among my close friends people whose start in life was no more auspicious than hers, but who as adults boast (figuratively speaking – such people never boast) broad erudition, refined tastes and impeccable manners.

By manners I mean so much more than knowing which utensil to use with which course at dinner or where brown shoes can or can’t be worn. The ultimate test of manners is intuitive knowledge of how to modify one’s speech and behaviour to take others into account. (A gentleman never offends unintentionally, as Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said.)

I’d suggest a supermarket-trolley test as a marker of class. When stopping at a shelf to decide which product to buy, some people try to place their trolley not to block access for others, and some don’t.

The former don’t make a conscious decision to be so accommodating – they intuitively adjust their behaviour to make other people’s life easier. The latter don’t decide to be boorish either, they just are. I’d describe them as proles, but I wouldn’t be talking about their wealth or living quarters at birth.

Neither education nor manners are innate, both can be acquired by conscious effort as one goes through life. Those whose beginnings are humble have to try harder, but that makes their achievement even more valuable and laudable.

But some people, and this is where ideology comes in, refuse to make that effort. They insist on screaming their proledom at the world, eternally staying in the gutter in any other than the practical sense. They may make billions or rise to the second highest position in government, while still flashing the tattoos and other cultural stigmata of their early life as some kind of badges of honour.

It’s not where people begin in life that matters, but where they end up. People can’t always choose to become rich, but they can always choose to become cultured and hence no longer prole. If they refuse so to choose, it’s often the pernicious Marxist ideology of class struggle that holds so many of them back.

Class (and also race, in any other than the purely chromatic sense) is as often as not a statement of ideological conviction. For some, such as Ange Rayner, it’s also a stepping stone on a career path. If she is expecting applause and compassionate understanding, she won’t find any at these quarters.