These are the British

by Drew Middleton

Socially, the new class is modern. Increasingly it is making use of new techniques in living which were out of the economic range of its fathers and mothers. The old family life built around the kitchen and the pot of tea on the stove has been replaced by one built around the television set.

For the first time in their lives the young people of the New Towns and the housing estates have enough room in their homes to plan and build. The three-piece bedroom suite is as important as the television set as an indication of economic status. The "do it yourself" craze that swept the United States did not "catch on" among the working class in Britain for the simple reason that its members had always done it themselves. A great deal of the painting and decoration and some of the furniture-making is done by the man of the house in his spare time.

The class is not notably religious. The Catholics and the Methodists support their churches, but the response to other faiths is not ardent. The British are not "a pagan people," as some critics have charged, but there certainly is little enthusiasm for conventional religious forms.

The working class is a definable class. Thus it takes its place in the graduated ranks of British society. Within the class, however, there is very little snobbery. I have mentioned one instance: the resentment of the dwellers in the New Towns when they are classed with the people of the housing estates. But in a community in which all the men work in the same or similar factories and in which everyone knows almost to the penny what everyone else makes, pretense of economic superiority is difficult.

Here is the new British workingman. He moved to a New Town or a housing estate from a slum or near-slum. If he is in his late thirties or forties, he fought in the war and his wife knows more about the effect of high explosives, flying bombs, and rockets than most generals. He is living in what is to him comparative luxury: a living room, a clean and, by British standards, modern kitchen, a bedroom for the children, a modern bath and toilet. He can walk or cycle to his work, and if the weather is fine, he comes home for lunch. In the evening there is "the telly" or the football-pool form to be filled out or the new desk he is making for the children's room. Some two or three times a week he drops in at the "local," the neighborhood pub or bar, for a few drinks with friends from the factory. Even here his habits are changing. The actually potent "mild and bitter" or "old and mild" that was his father's tipple has been replaced by light ale—"nasty gassy stuff" the old-fashioned barmaids report.

It is a quiet life but to our subject a satisfactory one. He reads the Daily Mirror rather than the Daily Herald, which was his father's Bible, but he is only occasionally aroused by international problems. He did get excited about the idea of arming "those bloody Germans," but when the leaders of both the Conservative and Labor parties accepted the necessity he went along with German rearmament. But he was never particularly happy about it. In general, however, he is not interested in world affairs. There are one or two fellows at "the works," he will tell you, who get excited about China or Suez or Cyprus. Here it should be noted that he is more nationalist than internationalist. He doesn't like it when British soldiers are killed by the bombs of Greek Cypriotes, chiefly because the Army is no longer a professional force but one composed largely of conscripts of National Service. Young Tom from down the street, a nice lad, has gone out there with the Green Howards.

There he is: content, complete, complacent. His contacts with the rest of the world, British or foreign, are limited, and this is especially true of his contacts with the old middle class.

The old middle class itself is intensely interested in this new kind of working class. Partly this is true because the new class is blamed for many of the reverses that have fallen upon the middle class. Partly it is because of political spite. Partly it is jealousy. Whatever the dominant reason, the feeling is there, and the middle class, harking back to the first Socialist boasts in 1945 about remaking bourgeois Britain, will tell you: "They started it."

This class (here we are talking about the professional men, civil servants, Army, Navy, and Air Force officers, the higher but not the highest ranks of business and industry, the clergy of the Church of England, and the retired pensioners of these groups) fights hard to resist the uniformity that the last fifteen years have imposed upon it. It finds itself unable to organize to win higher salaries, and it knows that the taxation of the last decade has closed the gap between it and the new class of industrial workers. Finally, its more intelligent members are aware that it too is being challenged from within—that there is arising in its ranks a new group which from the economic standpoint can claim to be middle class but which has very little in common now, socially or politically, with the old middle class. Yet, as both groups claim a certain superiority over the class of manual workers, it is safe to predict that the two groups will unite and make common cause in defense of their standards. Interestingly, this is already happening in the field of education, where the sons of the physicists, engineers, and scientists who are among the leaders of the new middle class are going to the public schools that were one of the solid foundations of the old middle class.

Such schools, incidentally, are one of the bones of contention between the political leaders of the Labor Party, which represents the majority of the working class, and the old middle class. This class has pressed the Exchequer for a tax allowance for public schools—i.e., private education. The Socialists replied that such an allowance would be a private subsidy to a system that spreads inequality. To this the Tories of the old middle class retorted that part of the British freedom was the right of the parent to decide how and where his child was to be educated. They added a reminder that if the new working class were to save a bit on installment payments for television sets and the football pools, it too could send its sons to public schools. The answer, of course, is that the new working class cares little for schools, public or national.