Social class make-up

Britain has a deeply individualistic society, also described as a class-ridden one.

Undoubtedly Britain is a class-conscious society but this does not mean that society is more divided than, for example, in France. It is true, that there is the love of hierarchy and sense of deference in Britain and due to it not only the Royal Family, but also the surviving titled families and old land-owning families are treated with greater deference than might be expected in a democracy. There can be no doubt that this class of people enjoy special status.

But such people are a very small minority of the population. Most people are classified according to their work occupations, falling into two broad groups, as in other industrialised societies, the middle class (or white-collar workers) and the working class (or blue-collar workers).

The peculiarity of the British class make-up is that there are no peasants at all. There are farmers and their hired (mostly for a season) labourers, which make a part of the working class. Less than 2 per cent of the working population work on farms though over three quarters of Britain's land is used for farming.

The working class is rapidly declining. In 1911 three of every four employed or self-employed people were manual workers. By 1950 that proportion had fallen to two out of three, but since then has fallen to only one in three. Since the 1950s there has been a massive growth of the middle class.

The middle class embraces a range of people from senior professionals, judges, senior medical specialists and senior civil servants, to clerical workers — in other words, almost all people who earn their living in a nonmanual way.

The middle class is the engine room of the economy. Unlike the working class, the middle class has great mobility. During the twenty years 1971-91 approximately two million jobs were created in the professional and managerial fields alone, and the whole middle class is constantly expanding. Over half of today's middle class started life in the working class.

Beyond the middle class lies a small but powerful upper class, which survives from one generation to another. It is characterized by three things: property, networks and power. For example, the top 1 per cent of wealth holders probably _{own a}b_out one quarter of the nation's wealth. (In 1914 they possessed two thirds, so the drop is considerable.) The core of the class is probably only between 25000 and 50000 people, but they control key areas of capital in the national economy.

Members of the upper class share a very specific identity. The sons all go to public schools, usually the more famous ones. As one sociologist has noted, «The ruling minority has survived all the transformations from medieval to modern society by a long series of concessions and accommodations in return for retention of privileges and property*.

Those who think that Britain has a class-ridden society usually think of the contract between this small group, maintained by its great wealth, property and privileged education, and the shrinking unskilled manual working class, which has been characterised by significantly higher unemployment tax other groups. But these two extremes are where there i_s the least social mobility. Almost half those born into the upper class remain in it, while 40 per cent of sons of unskilled manual workers themselves remain in that class. But among the intermediate categories _of people, skilled manual workers, clerical workers, supervisors, managers and professionals, there is a high degree of social mobility.

The weakest group economically are retired people, single women and people belonging to ethnic minorities.

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