Is class dead in Britain?
Polly Toybee wrote a piece in yesterday’s Guardian under the title “Money busts the convenient myth that social class is dead“. Her theme, which trails a series of programmes she has made, to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4, commencing at 9 am on Thursday, is that “Britain likes to pretend it has moved on: but birth determines our destiny and income more now than it did 50 years ago”.
Of course things like parental attitudes to education and culture, including the way people use language, are critical to class. But there is one, and only one asset that can be transmitted down the generations, at no effort on anyone’s part, and that, as regular visitors to this web site will know, is land.
How strange, then, that she fails to mention this. And stranger still, that none of the 200+ responses to the article in the following 24 hours contained a reference to land or land ownership.
It must be concluded that the connection between class privilege and land ownership has been well and truly hidden, even by those who purport to be concerned about the problem. How convenient for those that benefit from this state of affairs! Conspiracy or what?