How Does the British Class System Work Today? We Asked an Expert

Like the North Atlantic weather that’s shaped its topography and climate, Britain’s social fabric has been formed in large part through the long historical effects of its class system.

From the feudal world of serfs and nobles to the urban upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, and as the powerful but rigidly divided nation at the center of a world Empire, it was the accident of birth that dictated most people’s lives. For centuries, that hierarchy was reinforced by a complex set of social codes that taught people to know their place. And while the 20th century saw democratic reform and deindustrialization, the class structure continues to shape British attitudes and determine life chances.

So how should we understand social class in Britain today in the age of gig workers, downwardly mobile graduates, and footloose global elites? And why is it a key force in British politics once again? To find out, we spoke to Dan Evans, a university sociology lecturer and the author of A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie.

VICE: When we think about social class, we mainly think of a combination of economic and cultural factors. How should we define it? What’s most important?
Dan Evans: I think you have to have a holistic view of class, which focuses on economic circumstances, your relationship to the means of production, whether you own property, whether you own your own business, or whether you have to work for a living. But I also think you need cultural aspects because that’s really how people do understand class in everyday life, in terms of things like your accent, how you dress, how you talk, how you hold yourself, your general mindset. 

And then the other aspect which I think is important is social. Who do you know and hang out with? Who do you mix with? Who did you go to school with? If you read Social Class in the 21st Century, the [2015] Mike Savage book, they tried to hit all these different dimensions in The Great British Class Calculator. I think they’re all important.

Why is class such an enduring concern of the British, in particular?
I think on the one hand it’s because since the collapse of the welfare state it’s a country in which the class divide is so jarring. Almost every field in the UK is dominated by elites. Working-class people have been forced out of almost every aspect of life: politics, culture, the arts, journalism, academia. And wherever you are in the world, class determines your entire life course. It determines your career, where you live, what type of housing you’re going to have, how long you’re going to live, whether you’re going to have a healthy life, whether you’re going to know people who die young.

In terms of the UK, specifically, despite the fact that working-class people have been excluded from everything, there’s this strange enduring quirk where everyone wants to be seen as working class. It’s seen as something that’s worthy. Almost like identifying with being working class is really all that’s left of the working-class experience.

“The idea that going to university guarantees you have more income over your life has disappeared.”

So that’s a recent phenomenon?
I think it’s got something to do with the destruction of the old manual class. Because it happened so rapidly—the decline of manufacturing, the decline of heavy industry, and the transition to this world of services and white-collar work in which everyone is sort of atomized—maybe that is behind this enduring nostalgia for an old working-class life.

And the other reason is that it’s used as a narrative to deflect privilege. I hate that word but if you can tell yourself that you are working-class, or you’ve got working-class roots, then all the advantages you enjoy by being middle-class, well, you don’t have to feel so bad about them. It’s this narrative of ‘I deserve everything I’ve got.’ It’s almost like a narrative of meritocracy, even when it’s not true. It serves up an important function in people’s sense of self.

We live in this strange time where on the one hand we’ve got ‘liquid modernity’—things are fragmented, and the social order feels fluid and uncertain—but in another way, things have become more static and hierarchical again when we think of the decline of postwar upward social mobility. Why’s that happened?
I think that’s a really important point. We’ve had this brief period of social mobility in the UK, which has now finished. I’ve been working on graduate outcomes and graduate trajectories, recently, and university does not guarantee social mobility. The graduate premium—the idea that going to university guarantees you more income over your life—has disappeared. In some areas of the UK, that’s now going backward. And we haven’t really caught up with that reality. There’s still a narrative in schools and universities: you have to go to university and then your life will be better. The reality is we’ve got a massive oversupply of graduates for the economy, and most people will end up in some form of low-paid white-collar service job if they’re lucky.

And at the top of the social scale in the UK today, the actual aristocracy has made a comeback. The return of a rentier economy has suited them financially very well.
We’ve gone back to neo-feudalism—that’s what David Harvey says about the welfare state period. When you look at it in broad historical terms, it was really just a period of class compromise where the power of the trade unions put a break on the power of the elites temporarily. And since the 70s, the gains of the welfare state have been destroyed, and that mega-rich class has just made hay. We’ve gone back to this more parasitic, as you say, rentier economy. There’s not even a bourgeoisie because the bourgeoisie used to be productive. They used to want to make things. And now that’s not how the economy is structured.

In your book, you look specifically at the petty bourgeoisie, the class that sits between the middle class and the working class. You identify an old element and a new one. Who are they and why do you think they’re important?
Obviously, loads of class theorists have been trying to make sense of this collapse. If you go back to the 50s, when manufacturing was still in the ascendancy in the UK, something like 70 percent of British males did some form of blue-collar manual work. And the class structure was pretty simple. You had quite a big working class, a very small professional class, a very small petty bourgeoisie of small producers, and then you had a relatively small owner class. And obviously, since the 70s, we’ve had neoliberalism, massive globalization, deindustrialization, and the type of work people are doing has changed. My book is about trying to make sense of this sort of fracturing and fragmenting and collapse of the old order. The main thesis of the book is that the one class that has emerged and grown is the petty bourgeoisie, which is really bringing back an almost anachronistic Marxist term in a way.

According to Marx, the petty bourgeoisie is this small producer that owns his own small property. Think of an artisan or a blacksmith in the olden days. And then in the modern days that would be seen as a shopkeeper or a self-employed tradesman—although today the class is so big because there are so many forms of self-employment, from hairdressing to personal training. The theory went that with the rise of monopoly capitalism, small production would be destroyed by huge-scale manufacturing. And to an extent, that definitely was true. In the welfare state period, the class shrinks. But then with neoliberalism, Thatcher consciously drives the rise in small businesses. And that class has exploded to around 5 million people now, solo self-employed. So that’s the old petty bourgeoisie.

“It’s not just the class structure that has changed due to Thatcher, the whole ideology of Britain has changed.”

And then I tried to characterize this big sprawling mass of downwardly mobile, overeducated white-collar graduates. They’re similar to the old petty bourgeoisie in the fact that they’re focused on social mobility. And they’re cut off from the working class by virtue of possessing cultural capital, educational qualifications, and various other things. But unlike the old petty bourgeoisie, which has achieved a degree of social mobility through small property and small business, the general experience of this new petty bourgeoisie has been downward social mobility. And that, as a rule, has sort of split them off to the left politically while the old has gone to the right. So I argue in the book that this class taken together, both the old faction and the new, have a really important role in modern populist politics, both left and right.

So the contemporary British class structure comes out of Thatcherism, essentially?
I would say so, yeah. Deindustrialization, the rise of services, the rise of the self-employed. And obviously one of the reasons she pushed self-employment was to break the power of the unions. Thatcher herself said economics is the method, but the point is to change the soul of society. And Thatcher was the daughter of a greengrocer, she’s the petty bourgeoisie personified, so she sees in this group almost the personification of popular capitalism. These are the rugged individualists that are going to spread the new common sense of society. And they really do.

In terms of changing the culture of society, if you look at the values Thatcher was championing—thrift, self-discipline—there’s a real hostility to the scroungers or people who weren’t working hard and equally a massive hostility to the state bureaucracy. These are all petty bourgeois values. And I really do think that she made the culture and values of this class hegemonic. You see it today in Reform, in Farage. It’s no secret that Farage is a Thatcherite. He seems to be the only person that gets this worldview, which is so widespread in the UK. I think it’s not just the class structure that has changed due to Thatcher, the whole ideology of Britain has changed.

We’re living at a time when cost of living pressures keep intensifying, we’ve had a long period of austerity and stagnant wages—a much larger swathe of society is experiencing insecurity and status anxiety. Do you think Farage and Reform are best placed to speak to that anger?
Yeah, 100 percent. If you look at their manifesto, it’s basically a homage to the lower middle-classes. They know exactly what they’re doing. They’re very savvy and they’re so effective at that anti-system general message of frustration. Suffering and despair don’t necessarily translate into progressive political views at all. In fact, it can often be that downward social mobility can very easily translate into massive hostility against people who are perceived to be getting something for nothing while you are out working your balls off. And that sense of unfairness, and the frustration that comes with trying to do the right thing and not getting rewarded for it, I think that’s really the main worldview that is motivating almost everything in the UK at the moment. I mean, it’s really what motivates hostility to migrants.

Do you think that was ultimately behind the riots across England last summer?
There is racism, but much of this is rooted in what’s called ‘producerism’—which used to be about keeping what you made, but is today essentially about ‘the hard workers’ versus ‘parasites’. Migrants have fallen into that latter category. Housing is central to that idea of getting something for nothing—and being put up in hotels while the state lets ‘our’ people sleep rough; that’s a very powerful narrative. Obviously, the people pushing that narrative don’t care about ‘our’ homeless either, but the resentment is rooted in tensions over scarce resources caused by austerity. 

“[Keir] Starmer personifies this middle manager bureaucrat, the HR type that everyone hates.”

Do you think this anger will remain largely directed at immigrants or are we going to see wider class conflict too?
I think one of the main drivers behind right populism is the emergence of a growing underclass of ultra-marginalized, ultra-exploited people. Every city in the UK has an extremely visible homeless problem, with addicts, prison leavers, and increases in antisocial behavior, plus the general deterioration of areas with the rise of houses of multiple occupation. I think there’s everyday class conflict happening now with the remnants of the ‘respectable’ working-class and the lower middle-classes who are sort of horrified at the rise of this very visible underclass. If you look at right-wing narratives online, it’s all about litter, crime, anti-social behavior, migrants hanging around, the place basically just being a bit of a shithole.

We’ve had two Prime Ministers from Eton in the last decade but Keir Starmer’s cabinet has a strikingly higher proportion of state-educated politicians than ever before. Does this suggest some sort of shift is taking place?
The thing that all Starmer’s cabinet have in common is that they’re members of what Barbara Ehrenreich calls the PMC, the professional-managerial class. While many have gone to state school, their actual background in terms of their employment is a very narrow one; in the media, in lobbying, in law, in the City. And they all have that paternalistic, authoritarian ideology of the professional-managerial class. Which is basically the bureaucratic, technocratic mindset that Starmer himself personifies. We don’t want to change the system, we’re just going to make it more efficient; we’re going to tweak it, we’re going to introduce AI.

So, I think it’s only significant if you think that going to a state school makes you working-class. Whereas I would argue that the professional-managerial class has grown, and though it’s not in charge of the economy—that’s still captains of industry and transnational corporations—what it does do is run the state and the local state and the civil service on behalf of capital, really. That’s why even when Starmer tries to do these sorts of populist announcements, it just doesn’t come off as authentic because he personifies this middle manager bureaucrat, the HR type that everyone hates.

Lastly, what role do you think the monarchy plays today?
They’re obviously undergoing a massive legitimacy crisis, which you could possibly tie to the general crisis of the British state. You could almost look at the downward trajectory of the monarchy as symbolic of the decline of the social contract, of people’s idea of Britain and Britishness. I think one of the reasons people cling to the monarchy is because it represents an old idea of Britain when it was ‘great’; not in an imperial sense, but basically when it was a better place to live. And beyond that, I mean people just like street parties because they like an excuse to socialize and have a laugh and get pissed together.

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