It's official. According to the BBC's Great British Class Calculator, I am one of Britain's elite.
I have filled in the online questionnaire (the Corporation has apparently "teamed up" with "sociologists from leading universities") and it turns out that I am one of the 6% that has some savings, listens to classical music and so on.
These surveys are easy to disparage, so here goes.
Firstly, if you want to tell the nation that the old three-class system is redundant, all you apparently have to do is think of some categories - fewer than three is difficult, obviously, so better plump for more - decide what people have to do to fit in them, and hey presto you have redrawn the class map of Britain. The BBC is willing to "team up" with you, securing publicity and no doubt future funding for your "leading university". So far so predictable.
What about the quiz itself? There are only five questions, and it asks you things about money and leisure. The question about money is ludicrously simplistic. It asks if you are a property owner, but not how big your mortgage is. You could live in a small house with no mortgage or a bloody great mansion mortgaged up to the hilt. A question about pension savings ignores the fact the average person, perhaps on a modest salary after a lifetime working in the public sector, is nevertheless sitting on a notional pension pot of about £500,000, way beyond the dreams even of most of the so-called "elite".
Other questions ask "Do you know any accountants?" and "Do you listen to hip-hop?" Assuming for the moment that knowing accountants is socially desirable, and that hip-hop is less classy than classical music (it's different, but not necessarily worse), the survey nevertheless utterly misses the nuance which is at the heart of the British class system. At its heart class isn't all, or even mostly, about money.
My wife, on whose coat tails I have slalomed into Britain's top 6%, drives a nine year old Vauxhall Zafira which requires the hands of an artist (me) to get going on a cold morning; our children go to a comprehensive school; she would rather cut her own leg off than vote Tory; she is an unreconstructed fan of brass band music; she tends the shared allotment of a weekend; and yet I would blush to list the legal honours which she now holds. She is irredeemably middle-class, and yet lives a life style which in some respects is congruent with a much less affluent person.
It's that phrase "in some respects" which is the tell-tale. The point about class is that the bare facts are complex and in any event only tell you so much. Yes, it's partly about money; partly about lifestyle and interests; but it's also partly about attitudes, language and education (all ignored altogether in the survey). It tells you something about how difficult class is to pin down when the poshest person I know, by a distance, has a black skin and was born on a Caribbean island. But the compilers of surveys aren't interested in nuance - they want to put people in pigeon holes.
Quite a few of my friends are in the top 6%. They are almost without exception ordinary people, some middle-class, some not, who happen to have good jobs.
A footling survey like this one might not even be worth the half an hour required to post about it, were it not for the fact that it gets column inches in the press and reportage in the broadcast media. Politicians and the bien-pensant fulminate about Britain's inequality gap, as if they didn't help to create it. The idea of a tiny minority creaming in the money at the expense of everyone else settles in the public imagination, like grounds at the bottom of a coffee cup.
It's an absurd over-simplification; and one I'll remember next time I can't get the car started.
