How the middle-classes have ruined Britain

It’s forty years since Sam Peckinpah’s film Straw Dogs was released in the UK to great controversy. It’s a violent tale of many things but amongst them was the very contemporary 1970s notion that the middle classes were besieged. 

In it, Dustin Hoffman’s grant-maintained mathematician and his Triumph Stag-driving, air-du-temps girlfriend Susan George find their Cornish cottage heaven slowly turning to hell at the hands of the workmen they have hired to restore the property. 

The devil making work for idle hands, their defiant artisanal laziness transforms by degrees into a moral turpitude that starts with cat hanging and escalates through the rape of George, to the murder of the local magistrate – a former army major – an attempted lynching and the hurling of rats into the embattled house to which Hoffman defiantly denies them entry. 

For all the film’s nuances and themes, one thing is clear; the enemy is without the gate and he drops his t’s and aitches among the chaos he brings with his work-roughened hands.  

In the militant days of the 70s, it was a common enough theme. More comically, The Good Life’s Margot Leadbetter stood like a grim bastion against surly shop stewards and public sector petty bureaucrats alike while the lugubrious Geoffrey Palmer dealt with recalcitrant Spanish waiters in Fawlty Towers with the very fact of his middle classness. ‘I’m a doctor and I want my sausages!’ he tells Manuel with a clinching non-sequitur of respectability.

And there you had it. The middle classes, for all their buttocks-clenched comic potential and overdeveloped sense of propriety, were the guardians of order. The rock on which anarchy broke, the moral rudder that kept the nation on an even keel. They were the middle ground between the aristocracy and the working classes with their shared love of dynastic gangsterism, pugilism (Marquess of Queensbury rules, obviously), booze, fags, country pursuits, low morals and, as a quick trip to race day will reveal even today, horse flesh and Hogarthian revelry.

Nor did Britain do middle class revolutionaries like Lenin or the soixante-huitards, Bader Meinhoff or The Red Brigade. A bit of Bradbury red brick angst, some pampas grass wife-swapping and virtuoso rock bands like Led Zeppelin or Queen was as rambunctious as it got. Even punk was Malcolm McLaren’s very middle class construct. 

Oh no, the middle classes took up no prison time, few state resources, paid their taxes, called the police, colonized the professions and built businesses which employed the working classes and on which mercantilism the upper classes frowned. Money. Filthy business, y’know? Sniff. Even Napoleon was at it, our nation of shopkeepers was ever to be despised. 

Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter, got it and weaponised it: “I just owe almost everything to my father and it’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.” She said this in 1979.

It was a telling formula. Hard work, provincialism, entrepreneurialism and, above all, aspiration. Not just material aspiration, though that was certainly part of it, aspiration to ‘more’. Nobody was expected to ‘know their place’ any longer. Buy your house, get yourself a car, be the boss, get rich, go to university. She stole Labour’s votes – they never forgave her for it – and trapped them forever at a distance from their own constituency. 

“We’re all middle class now” said Hull’s John Prescott, Labour deputy leader and former ship’s steward, trade union activist.. and graduate.   Fast forward to the Red Wall, Islington and Sir Keir Starmer. 

And here’s where it all went wrong for the middle class and, to no small extent, for Britain. For it is our over-prevalence, in almost every aspect of national life, which has bull-horned its voice, inflated its concerns, magnified its politics and turned its virtues into vices in direct proportion to its material comfort with an overdeveloped a sense of moral virtue and a crushing sense of paradoxical guilt. 

Worse, the loss of self-awareness among the middle-class has bred with conspicuous ‘must have’ consumption to produce a chimeric horror of school-gate competitiveness that saw its old sense of vocation, service and modest well-to-do Rover-driving comfort turn into a permanent lifestyle advertisement. 

To compensate, its metropolitan manifestation flirts with soft Left politics, has abandoned church for the religion of woke in which it will take communion at university, confirmation in the quasi-legalese of workplace HR and holy orders in the triumph of feeling over fact. A sentimentality which it once abhorred in the working class. “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.”

Think about it. If there is a student left feeling ‘emotional’  by someone they disagree with speaking at their university, they will be middle class. If there’s another talking about privilege and torturing themselves over the history of a founding father while enjoying the benefits of the one of the world’s finest alma mater’s, they will be middle class. They won’t give it up, of course. Principles cost. 

That sharp-elbowed parent barging their way into the best local school, middle class. That same parent is the one  objecting in sententious terms to the unfortunate facts of competitive school sports teams, also middle class. Unless, of course, Johnny or Jemima has the necessary combination of ability, work ethic and good fortune, in which case, sport is a character-building series of life lessons and should be compulsory. After all, we were made to do it in our pants! 

Meanwhile, those caring folk sat on the Dartford Crossing preventing people reaching hospitals, goods reaching front doors and supermarkets, tradesman getting to work? Middle class. Proof that a little education is dangerous, encouraging as it does a tendency to catastrophizing, especially when underpinned by an unshakeable moral certainty. Much the same combination that drove the Crusades. If only we could drum up a child saint to lead it.. 

The list is endless. The quango boss as moral guardian, the actress who conflates her sex scene in a film about a sex scandal (the clue being in the script) with the historical burden of women down the ages, the battling know-betters doing their damndest to defy a plebiscite, their law is good law, the trainee BBC journalist ‘struggling to understand impartiality’ as Tim Davie recently described it, all middle class. 

That Labour politician sneering at the Union-flagged white vans of the Medway? Middle class. The levelling up Tory Prime Minister, or his wife, saddling his new-found voters with questionable eco-costs.  Well, you know..And guess who hid during lockdown while the working class brought them things? Yes, the QC leader of the Labour Party is the one demanding ‘more’ on Covid measures. Or someone very much like him. 

How things have changed. ‘Don’t knock the middle classes, they flew the Spitfires and commanded the destroyers’, somebody once said. Stoic, reliable, professional, quietly heroic rock bed of a nation.  

Now, it is the middle classes of academia colluding most fervently in the unpicking of our historical sense of self, typified by shame and manifesting itself in the bizarre notion that all we are is dead, white men. All achievements from the defeat of the Nazis to the laws of physics, exclusive and racist.  

“He has come to destroy memory”, says a character in the epic series Game of Thrones of the Night King. Or, and because it’s the rules to mention Orwell under these circumstances, we have become Winston Smith, dropping history in the memory hole and secretly writing in our diaries that ‘if there is hope, it lies in the proles.’

And there I reveal myself. Catastrophizing. I am, you see, a fully paid up member and to our many vices, we members must add hypocrisy. Like France, we want reform. But not for us. Life is too comfortable, you see? 

With Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs largely ticked off, we can progress to more, frankly, effete considerations; our self-esteem nestled in how other’s view our professed virtues, our new kitchen, the electric vehicle and the achievements of our children (for whom there is always a handy syndrome should they fail, only working class children do that) and always overlooking that when everyone has a degree, nobody does.

We have nothing to say and we’re saying it too loud. And I should know. So will stop.