On a long drive back from a Scottish mountaineering trip the other day I channel-hopped into an episode of the Moral Maze, in which Michael Buerk and his chums crossed swords on the subject of class with, amongst others, hard-left cheeky chappie Owen Jones and right-wing loud mouth James Delingpole.
I don't know enough about other countries to have a view on whether Johnny Foreigner is as obsessed by class as we are (although one academic contributor said that all human societies - and some animal - are similarly stratified), but like most Brits I'm at least averagely interested in the subject. Of course part of the fascination arises from the nuance that, although it clearly has something to do with it, money isn't everything.
My aunt, poor as a church mouse throughout most of her life and by today's standards hardly educated at all, nevertheless contrived to be as upper middle class as they come, with a deep interest in all things cultural and a patrician drawl that lingered long over the a in the middle of pasta. Language, attitudes to food, art and education are all part of the mix too.
But that's not the only reason Owen Jones was totally wrong to say that "class defines who has wealth and power and who doesn't . . . working class people work for others and lack autonomy over what they do". I know plenty of builders, butchers and window cleaners who are - in some cases defiantly - working class, but who don't work for others and enjoy an autonomy over their job which my middle class doctor friends can only dream of.
The funniest exchange in the programme came when leftist policy wonk Matthew Taylor sparred with James Delingpole about meritocracy. "Why is it", Taylor wanted to know, "that the best schools are almost completely monopolised by the middle classes?" Delingpole waffled something about believing in meritocracy. Taylor, smelling blood, snapped, "So you believe the middle classes have got more merit? Why are the middle classes more able?" Delingpole, who has sent his son to Eton, replied that selective schools have an obligation to pick the best. "And they just happen to be overwhelmingly middle class", sneered Taylor.
My opinion of Delingpole, not sky-high to start with, went south about here. Because the obvious riposte to Taylor is that the best schools get the best results because they are monopolised by the middle classes. It's the quality of the intake, stupid. Taylor seemed to want Delingpole to say this too, if only so he could knock him down, but it's true.
If you have a meritocracy, or something like it, for a century or so, the bright and industrious will tend to rise up the social ladder. They will meet and marry other bright and industrious people, and their children will not only tend to be bright and industrious but will have the benefit of being brought up by parents who believe in academic achievement and who tend not to have the social problems associated by being lower down the socio-economic scale. This isn't to say that all middle class kids are bright and all working class kids stupid, but of course the middle class taken as a generality will tend to be brighter. It's not difficult to grasp.
I am no great friend to meritocracy. It will in the end produce a stratified society with low social mobility (some will argue that's a destination we have already reached), but at any rate that seems fairer than one in which there are no means of breaking out of the bottom percentages. Ironically, grammar schools, the means by which working class children traditionally did so, were abolished by Matthew Taylor's political fellow-traveller Anthony Crosland in the Wilson government of the mid 1960s.
As with so many things you can end up arguing over words and what they mean. People like me tend to be interested in the social and cultural complexities of class, whereas Owen Jones wants class to relate to an economic struggle, and economic inequality in particular.
But just as Labour's abolition of grammar schools is embarrassing for Taylor, it's inconvenient for Jones that inequality rose in the boom years of the Blair / Brown governments, as the availability of hundreds of thousands of East Europeans increased labour supply and depressed wage inflation at the bottom end of society, while those at the top end forged ahead.
Affluent people like me enjoyed (and are still enjoying) the cheaper access to the service industries mass immigration brought with it. My breakfast in the Braemar hotel the other day was served by a smiling Romanian called Bogdan Ionescu. Every other member of staff I spoke to was East European.
People like Owen Jones lament the low wages of the working class, blind to the possibility that the open door immigration policy they supported helped wages stay low, and is helping to keep them that way still. When is the light going to dawn?
