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'Taste is woven into our class system' Perry

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'Taste is woven into our class system' Perry

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The Agony in the Car Park, 2012, by Grayson Perry (Grayson Perry/Victoria Miro Gallery, London)

As we oiks climb the greasy pole, we may pick up a deceptively authentic-looking set of middle-class predilections: a book-lined study, a modest grubby car, a full wine rack and original window frames. All the while, from deep inside our urbane metropolitan exterior, an embarrassing former self wails from his oubliette: "I want a gold Porsche." Such a primal desire for the gewgaws of one's culture of origin lead to the downfall of the hero of my tapestries, Tim Rakewell.

Class is something bred into us like a religious faith. We drink in our aesthetic heritage with our mother's milk, with our mates at the pub, or on the playing fields of Eton. We learn the texture of our place in the world from the curlicue of a neck tattoo, the clank of a Le Creuset casserole dish, or the scent of a mouldering hunting print. A childhood spent marinating in the material culture of one's class means taste is soaked right through you. Cut me and, beneath the thick crust of Islington, it still says "Essex" all the way through.

As with many aspects of our behaviour, a lot of the interesting stuff happens when we think we are not even making a decision. It's those default settings we all have, those unexamined "natural" and "normal" choices, which often say the most about us: where and when we eat, when and where we might expose a bit of flesh, the kind of curtains we buy, what television you watch, how you bring up your children. We often become aware of these unconscious choices only when we move between social classes. I think my middle-class wife screamed when I first came into the kitchen without a shirt on.

In my series of six works, The Vanity of Small Differences, we follow the life of Tim Rakewell, from humble birth to famous death. The main thread of this journey is his progress through the social strata of modern British society. Nearly all of the places, people and objects that feature in the work were inspired by my televised taste safari.

We chose the three locations for our television series - Sunderland, Tunbridge Wells and the Cotswolds - because they are each already strongly identified with the social classes. Sunderland has a proud working-class heritage from its heyday as a mining and shipbuilding town. The phrase "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" - referring to a fictional writer of letters of complaint, invented by staff at the Tunbridge Wells Advertiser in the Fifties - makes this town almost synonymous with conservative middle-class values. The Cotswolds have also become associated with a deeply rooted, landed upper class, owing to the prevalence of mellow, limestone stately homes among the rolling hills of this scenic area.

The Adoration of the Cage Fighters, 2012 (Grayson Perry / Victoria Miro Gallery, London)

Within each social group, taste seems to play a slightly different role. When I asked club singer Sean Foster-Conley what I should feature in my tapestries to show working-class taste, he said "the mines and shipyards". "But they no longer exist," I replied. In a very important way, however, he was right. The heavy industries that shaped the north of England also shaped the emotional lives of the generations of people who lived there. Winding towers and cranes can be torn down in a day, but the bonds, formed through shared hardship working under them, live on. Taste is an emotional business; working-class people often talk of a strong sense of community, and taste decisions are often made to demonstrate loyalty to the clan. Now that those communities are no longer held together by working in the same mine, mill or shipyard, call-centre workers or spray-tanners pledge allegiance to a locale, to their friends and family, through football, soap operas, bodybuilding, tattoos, hot cars, elaborate hairstyles and the ritual of dressing up for a Friday night on the town.

Among the gentry, taste also binds the tribe, but not much personal expression seems to be involved. The word that kept cropping up with the people I met was "appropriate". The owners of grand country houses were custodians of a scene that they were unwilling to let change. They felt deeply obliged to maintain these landmarks and the roles that come with them. Curiously, having to preserve these beautiful and costly piles has helped form the overriding aesthetic of the upper class - one of refined entropy. The houses are lovingly patched, a man wears his grandfather's coat, the sofa collapses, and the creation of a museum of clutter is blithely encouraged.

Talking to Rollo and Janie Clifford, who own four Grade I listed properties in Gloucestershire, I thought they took pleasure from a crumbling stone staircase or her 50 year-old car, covered in stickers. When quizzed, they denied an attachment to hard-won decay and pleaded poverty. When I pointed out that Rollo carried around his papers held together by a metal clip attached to a stump of dog-chewed cardboard when he could probably afford a new clipboard, he very grudgingly admitted to an appreciation of patina. How much of this is due to lack of funds and how much to inbred taste I do not know, but, as an Englishman, even a jumped-up prole like me feels genetically drawn to crumbling, faded glory.

This elegantly arrested decomposition gives off useful signals. It says "We are not in a hurry to change and upset anyone, we have owned this for ages and therefore are not billionaire incomers, who would install a swimming pool and electric gates."

The drama of taste really gets going when people betray their aspiration to a higher social status through their purchases. The broad swath of the British who describe themselves as the middle class are most aware of, and also the most anxious about, taste. At Kings Hill in Kent I encountered a set of unwritten rules. "Discreet branding" was a phrase that cropped up - Prada loafers with a little badge, a Paul Smith shirt with telltale eccentric buttons, a "low key" Rolex. Residents of these PVC clapboard houses sensed they had moved away from a tribe where crude bling gained respect, but they still needed the reassurance of an easily read code. Ostentation was still a difficult drug to resist - Range Rover Sports were everywhere and one resident poetically summed up the combination of pretension and banality when she described the estate as "the only place you would see a Bentley parked on a roundabout".

The ambience of the estate was maintained by a mixture of contractual obligation ("no caravans") and communal taboos ("no net curtains"). Talking to the residents, I found a genuine community spirit, but I sensed that for all of the convenience, security and luxury of their lifestyle, true middle-class status, if they actually wanted it, was beyond an intangible exclusion barrier. What that divide is made of, I think, is largely culture and education. The people basking on the sunlit uplands of the chattering classes have either passed through this miasmic barrier at university, or were born beyond it, where people just seem to know how to be fully middle class. Crucially, they understand that despite all the rules about taste that they have picked up by osmosis - when to wear shorts, what to name one's child, what to serve at a kitchen supper - none of them matters; one can flout them all as long as, and this is paramount, everyone knows you are doing it on purpose. So I can buy a Porsche and have it gold-plated, but it has to be full of rubbish and dog hair, and I must NEVER, EVER wash it.

Another driver of taste that I noticed among the upper middle class was the desire to show the world that one was an upright moral citizen. In the past, a good burgher might have regularly attended church or done voluntary work; today they buy organic, recycle, drive an electric car or deny their child television. This need to pay inconvenient penance to society seems to come partly from guilt. The liberal, educated middle class have done well, but they must pay with hard labour on their allotment, or by cycling to work.

Professional aesthetes in deconstructed suits and statement spectacles would love it if there were strict overarching rules of good taste. I fear they search in vain. I started my research with a full set of prejudices about the "inferior" taste of the working class I had left behind. I now find myself agreeing with the cultural critic Stephen Bayley that good taste is that which does not alienate your peers. Shared taste helps bind the tribe. It signals to fellow adherents of a particular subculture that you understand the rules. Within the group of, say, modified hatchback drivers, there is good and bad taste in loud cars in much the same way as there is good and bad taste in installations within the art world. Outsiders may find it baffling or irritating, but that is of less importance to insiders than impressing one's peers.

Grayson Perry's tapestry series The Vanity of Small Differences is on show at the RA, London W1, until August 18. The Arts Council Collection tour of The Vanity of Small Differences starts at Sunderland Museum on June 28. Details:artscouncilcollection.org.uk

Follow Telegraph Art on Twitter

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Grayson Perry: 'Taste is woven into our class system'

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The Agony in the Car Park, 2012, by Grayson Perry (Grayson Perry/Victoria Miro Gallery, London) As we oiks climb the greasy pole, we may pick up a deceptively authentic-looking set of middle-class predilections: a book-lined study, a modest grubby car, a full wine rack and original window frames.

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Snobbery - still a beloved British hobby

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Snobbery - still a beloved British hobby

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MIND THE GAP: THE CLASS DIVIDE IN BRITAIN By FERDINAND MOUNT (Short Books £8.99)

Being Welsh, I have a chip on my shoulder the size of Swansea on the subject of class. We had no proper aristocracy, you see, in the Principality, no equivalent of Irish Peers or Scottish Thanes. So instead we were taught to look up to doctors and solicitors.

Vets were like viscounts. Anyone with a donkey paddock was landed gentry. Teachers were as esteemed as baronets. You could tell when people had gone up in the world - they installed a bay window. My family were village butchers, so we lived in a red brick villa with servants' bells. No servants in my time, however, only my angry mother, who let the cat out of the bag by calling luncheon 'dinner'.

In a sense, class is comedy - Basil Fawlty or Hyacinth Bucket desperate to better themselves, and Captain Mainwaring swelling with pompous pride because he manages a bank. John Betjeman made fun of class pretensions in his poem that begins 'Phone for the fish knives, Norman' - at one period, fish knives were deemed hideously vulgar, or non-U. Similar solecisms included saying sweet rather than pudding and referring to dentures as false teeth. Serviette and toilet were to be avoided at all costs. It was considered a grave error for a chap to wear brown shoes with a blue suit, and 'no gentleman eats soup for luncheon', Lord Curzon decreed. Bands had to be removed from cigars, for fear that one was advertising the manufacturer.

In an overcrowded island, class is how we maintain differentiation - it's how we stop ourselves merging into a mass. Ferdinand Mount, however, is less interested in the jokes and snobbery side of things than in the fact that what divides Britain now is money.

Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco is paid 900 times more than those toiling at the checkout.

The chief executives of the FTSE 100 companies have seen their remuneration double in the Blair/Brown years. Sir Richard Sykes of Glaxo-SmithKline has a pension pot of £15.3 million, and Lord Brown of BP's stands at £12.7 million.

'Not entirely coincidentally, the employee pension schemes of these firms were in huge deficit,' says Mount, and generally there has been 'a disastrous drain on the final pensions awaiting ordinary mortals'.

The wonder is that there has been no furious revolution, no guillotine and no peasants' revolt.

If greed and folly characterise the City, Hogarthian squalor of a more traditional kind is on view at the other end of the social scale. Unemployment and lavish state benefits have led to marriage breakdowns, low self-esteem, boredom, fecklessness, brutal abuse and violence towards children.

But people won't be told. Cookery programmes have not weaned us off junk food. The lunchtime news has been dumbed down, but 'will still prove as inaccessible as Proust to most Chavs'.

If Beethoven is heard on the radio, the announcer is likely to say irritatingly: 'Here comes old Ludwig again.' Properly spoken BBC newscasters such as Alvar Liddell and Brian Perkins are as vanished as gasoliers.

As Mount says, the greatest shock to New Labour is that, despite their enlightened policies, people have stayed much the same. 'The universal harmony and contentment' that had been predicted never came to pass, and social divisions and inequality remain.

In education, for example, governments got rid of 'the elite grammar schools and the dustbin secondary moderns', brought in comprehensives - and with what result? High Court judges, civil servants and senior politicians are still from public schools. Ordinary people are not moving out of their parents' social class - even out of their parents' homes. Degrees now get you nowhere, except crippled with debt.

It is a dead end again for the poor. But Gordon Brown is cross with us for our 'low spirits and total absence of self-confidence'.

Decay and disorder are our own fault, and apparently mainly the result of 24-hour drunkenness.

Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes are also ailments we have brought on ourselves. Well, what this picture suggests to me is that we are all behaving as badly and as splendidly as the aristocrats of old, quaffing from pewter goblets, spanking serving wenches and setting the hounds on strangers.

When Mount mentions today's celebrities, 'lounging in their delightful sitting rooms or gambolling in their beautiful gardens', and tut-tuts that 'their achievements are minimal, they are uninteresting' - I thought, what did the inbred Bright Young Things of yesteryear, cavorting in their stately homes, actually achieve? The characters in Evelyn Waugh or Mitford novels aren't so very different from the soap stars in Hello!. If the poor are always with us, so are the twerps.

Meanwhile genuine toffs, the ones turfed out of the House of Lords, these days dress like the traditional working man, donning 'corduroys often of a lurid canary colour, and even a flat cap'. Dukes resemble pigeon fanciers.

Little artisans' cottages in Islington or Blackheath are now the domiciles of the well-to-do. The nice houses of the well-to-do have been carved up into poky flats.

It is a topsy-turvy world - and Mount's book is a provocative, wide-ranging survey, the best account of the way we live now since Anthony Sampson's classic The Anatomy Of Britain.

ROGER LEWIS is the author of Seasonal Suicide Notes.

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Snobbery - still a beloved British hobby: MIND THE GAP: THE CLASS DIVIDE IN BRITAIN BY FERDINAND MOUNT

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Being Welsh, I have a chip on my shoulder the size of Swansea on the subject of class. We had no proper aristocracy, you see, in the Principality, no equivalent of Irish Peers or Scottish Thanes. So instead we were taught to look up to doctors and solicitors. Vets were like viscounts.

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Middle class 'use comedy to assert cultural superiority 

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Middle class 'use comedy to assert cultural superiority 

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Researchers believe that social hierarchy holds the key to what Britons find funny, with middle class audiences using their preferences as a form of “veiled snobbery”. The study suggests that working class people generally enjoy observational humour based on everyday life that delivers gratifying, straightforward punchlines.

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"To a certain extent a person's taste in comedy is indicative of their social class," said Sam Friedman, a sociologist from the University of Edinburgh, who carried out the study.

"Far from illustrating crumbing class hierarchies, the increasing popularity of comedy among the middle classes simply shows how the privileged are now using their superior cultural skills to distinguish themselves in pop culture as well as the high arts.

"Shows like Brass Eye and The Thick of It are lauded by the critics, so to articulate a preference for what is regarded as the most valued comedy is a kind of badge of honour.

"However, one has to posses a certain amount of cultural capital to get many of the jokes, so to revere these shows can be a way of excluding working class people."

The survey questioned 1,000 people at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe asking their views on 32 comedians and television shows.

Respondents' were divided into class groups depending on their family background, education and occupation.

Monty Python was found to be the nation's favourite, making 82 per cent of those questioned laugh regardless of social class.

Mr Friedman added: " Monty Python is universally adored because it has something for everyone - from the slapstick of The Ministry of Silly Walks to the wit of The Life of Brian.

"The interesting aspect the study uncovered was how certain comedies appealed to different social classes for very different reasons."

It found that most working class people either hadn't heard of highbrow comedians or expressed a sense of intellectual insecurity about passing judgment. Many said such comedy "went over their heads" or was "beyond them".

By contrast, many middle class interviewees vehemently objected to low brow comedians and referred to their fans as "ignorant", "bigoted" or "thick".

The study quotes one interviewee, who said: "All I would need to hear is 'I went to see Roy Chubby Brown last week, it was magic' and I would want to glass them.

"It is the absence of sophistication in all of it."

Mr Friedman claims that middle class people's tastes are shaped by their social standing, privileged family background and elite education.

The paper, called The Cultural Currency of a 'Good' Sense of Humour: British Comedy and New Forms of Distinction, was presented to the British Sociological Association's annual conference in Glasgow.

Buy Comedy tickets from Telegraph Tickets

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Middle class 'use comedy to assert cultural superiority'

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"To a certain extent a person's taste in comedy is indicative of their social class," said Sam Friedman, a sociologist from the University of Edinburgh, who carried out the study. "Far from illustrating crumbing class hierarchies, the increasing popularity of comedy among the middle classes simply shows how the privileged are now using their superior cultural skills to distinguish themselves in pop culture as well as the high arts.

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The middle-class snobbery about being middle class

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The middle-class snobbery about being middle class

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A third of the most well-off, high status people in society consider themselves to be working class. Maybe it's time for some new definitions?

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On facing pages of a weekend national newspaper, there are reviews of two new books, both analysing the British class system in different fashions.

One, Consumed: How Shopping Fed the Class System argues it's now all about money and how you spend it, while the other, Sorry! The English and Their Manners, touches on the use of English, social codes, and how to read them.

Both deal with a fascination that never seems to die among Britons - an endless discussion of class, what it means and why we might care.

Having lived outside the UK for part of my life, I identify a little with the outsider who observes British ways, and wonders why. Partly because, when I lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during my high school years, I was always being asked by other teenagers to explain these funny little habits.

Britain was full of mysteries to Pittsburghers, who had an idea it was full of people either wearing bowler hats or kilts; who had no idea there was a country called Wales; and thought British music was oddly challenging; and that all of us were dead posh.

From the outside looking in, the fascination, or even obsession, with class in Britain feels idiosyncratic and oddly backward. Some of those authors who reflected it to the world, such as Wodehouse and Christie, were living abroad at the time; perhaps seeing it through a glass less darkly.

From Christie's snobbery about people with money but no class to Wodehouse's heroes trying to marry chorus girls, we have moved on through Upstairs Downstairs, and Essex Girls, to TOWIE, and still bright-cheeked columnists think it is public-school hilarious to come up with digs about Kate Middleton's mum party firm, and her air hostess past (wave your arms).

But it goes on, and on. In some tightly written newspaper columns, in the hallowed halls of Westminster, and other places where the chosen few have made it, comments float forth on where people were "schooled" and which "college" they went to; about "proper" universities, and the others; and who says "loo" and who doesn't, and who cares?

Yet, in 2013, we do still care. But the markers have changed. In British Future's new State of the Nation 2013 report we find that a third of the most well-off, high status people in society (the ABs) see themselves as working class, rather than middle class.

Middle class, you see, has now become the thing that people are snobby about, so there's no longer any need to lose your regional quirk, and find your inner U. Because being "a bit middle class" is a term edged with irony, and certainly nowhere near a compliment. While in 1950, the majority might have been striving to become the middle class, these days those who have it are throwing it back, and embracing their living-in-a-cardboard-box heritage, having decided it is far more cool to be working class. We all go to the footie now, well except those people who can't afford the whacking great ticket prices. This new-cooler-than-school working class means Westminster bigwigs and big business chaps who talk "football" can be like one of us, even if they live in a more brightly lit world.

Time then for a new definition or two? If we could move on to a place where everyone who works is working class, then that brings a whole lot of us on to the same side. If we are on the same side then we could stop caring why this sentence or that shopping bag makes us just that little better than someone else. And then maybe we could be all in it together.

But history suggests that just wouldn't be British.

Rachael Jolley is editorial director of British Future.

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The middle-class snobbery about being middle class

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On facing pages of a weekend national newspaper, there are reviews of two new books, both analysing the British class system in different fashions. One, Consumed: How Shopping Fed the Class System argues it's now all about money and how you spend it, while the other, Sorry!

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						Inequality and Social Structure: A Comparison of Marx and Weber

					
				
			
		

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						Inequality and Social Structure: A Comparison of Marx and Weber

					
				
			
		

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Article considering the differences between Marx and Weber on class and social structures. Looks at the inequality between certain classes and the conflict that ensues.

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The fractured middle: UK salary split sees übers pull ahead

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The fractured middle: UK salary split sees übers pull ahead

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A deep divide has opened among Britain’s high earners, with an “über-middle” elite reaping the rewards of globalisation while millions of “cling-on” professionals struggle to sustain a middle class lifestyle.

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A deep divide has opened among Britain's high earners, with an "über-middle" elite reaping the rewards of globalisation while millions of "cling-on" professionals struggle to sustain a middle class lifestyle.

An analysis of almost 40 years' worth of data on salaries for the Financial Times has found that a large, highly qualified group has slipped down the economic league table. The findings starkly illustrate the growing inequality, driven by the highest earners, that policy makers are grappling with. President Barack Obama has identified the divide as a central theme of his second term.

In a week when the Bank of England issued bullish forecasts for economic growth, capping the most sustained run of upgrades since it gained independence in 1997, it will also raise questions about which groups are reaping the spoils of the recovery.

In this tale of two middle classes, doctors and London finance workers emerge as the big winners. But this "über-middle" is dwarfed by a much larger group of "cling-ons" who have seen their relative position dramatically worsen, even during the years of economic boom.

The data, prepared for the FT by two of the nation's foremost labour market economists, Professors Brian Bell and Stephen Machin, shine a light on Britain's changing economy and the shifting fortunes of the professional middle class.

In 1975, more than a decade before the Big Bang that deregulated the City, the average London financial services worker was paid about £3,800 a year, a salary that was outstripped by a sizeable proportion of other professionals. Academics were paid about £5,000, around a third more, while natural scientists and engineers received roughly 10 per cent more than finance workers.

Now the average London financial services salary is about £102,000 including bonuses while academics are paid about £48,000, natural scientists average about £42,000 and mechanical engineers £46,000.

Entire groups have completely disappeared from the ranks of upper earners. In 1975, further education lecturers and teachers together made up almost one in 10 of the top 5 per cent of earners. Thousands employed in manufacturing and industry - as printers, pit deputies or even coal miners - also featured but none are now in that bracket.

Driving the change is a big expansion in the proportion of finance professionals, including bankers, in the top 5 per cent of earners. Their share has more than doubled since 1975, from 7.4 per cent to 17.8 per cent.

The jobs which pay staggeringly high money are all in London

Professor Brian Bell, labour market economist

The findings come as a pre-election battle is beginning over the top rate of income tax, with Labour planning to restore a 50p rate for earners over £150,000 as some influential Conservatives press for a reduction to 40p.

Underpinning this shake-up in the top tier of society is a severing of the bond that for decades tied the top 1 per cent of earners to the 9 per cent below them. The very highest earners have increased their share of total earnings by almost 9 percentage points since 1979 while the rest of the top 10 per cent have captured only an extra 4 percentage points.

The data also highlight the difficulties politicians face in delivering balanced growth across the UK. Taken together, London and the southeast have increased their share of top 5 per cent of earners from half to almost two-thirds in the past four decades. The south's gains have come at the expense of Scotland, Wales and the north.

Professor Bell said the findings underlined the extent to which high-paying jobs had become concentrated in the capital as the economy increased its reliance on the financial services industry.

"The jobs which pay staggeringly high money are all in London. Forty years ago there were very well paid people around the country in manufacturing and they have all vanished. If you want to earn £1m it is difficult not to live in London," he said.
Letters in response to this report: Critically, research left out pensions / From Mr R N Austin Financial elite and a few more factors / From Mr Samuel Weeks
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018. All rights reserved.

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The fractured middle: UK salary split sees übers pull ahead

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A deep divide has opened among Britain's high earners, with an "über-middle" elite reaping the rewards of globalisation while millions of "cling-on" professionals struggle to sustain a middle class lifestyle. An analysis of almost 40 years' worth of data on salaries for the Financial Times has found that a large, highly qualified group has slipped down the economic league table.

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A working-class hero is something to be … but not in Britain's posh culture

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A working-class hero is something to be … but not in Britain's posh culture

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British culture was once open to 'messy kids' from secondary moderns. But if you want to make it in 21st century Britain, you'd best have a cut-glass accent and public school pedigree

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Last week the actor Stephen McGann spoke out about how difficult it is for young people from working-class backgrounds to enter his profession. "Opportunities are closing down," he said in an interview with the Independent. "If you're a messy kid from a council estate today, I think the chances of you making it as a successful actor are a lot worse than they were."

McGann, 50, youngest of the family of acting brothers, grew up on the edge of Toxteth in Liverpool and was educated at a Catholic grammar school. "What counted for me and my brothers - and for mates of ours like David Morrissey and Ian Hart, all growing up in Dingle and Toxteth - was the real change in education," he said. "We had one shot and we made it: none of us would be actors if we hadn't gone to that school. That's where I fell in love with acting and that's why I'm here."

McGann was echoing opinions expressed by other prominent actors recently. Brian Cox told an interviewer: "I feel awful that young people don't have the opportunities that I had. It's like we've excluded a root element from cultural life, and I think that's very dangerous." And Julie Walters, in an interview with the Sunday Times, contrasted her youth with that of aspiring actors today. "Back then, it was still possible for a working-class kid like me to study drama because I got a grant, but the way things are now, there aren't going to be any working-class actors."

These sentiments resonate with me, not just because I come from a similar background and once made a similar trajectory - from grammar school to polytechnic to a job in the media - but because they also echo a view I have heard expressed lately in different ways by certain artists and musicians. It contends that popular culture is becoming increasingly gentrified, not just in the elitism that still holds sway in so-called highbrow forms like opera and classical music, but in the drift of society at large towards privilege and exclusion.

"I look at almost all the up-and-coming names and they're from the posh schools," said Walters. "Don't get me wrong ... they're wonderful. It's just a shame those working-class kids aren't coming through. When I started, 30 years ago, it was the complete opposite."

Artists have also noted this sea change in our culture. When I interviewed Peter Doig last year he recalled his formative years in London's now dramatically gentrified King's Cross. "It was a different city then - you could easily find cheap places to live and studios to work in. We took all those things for granted and now they are gone. It does feel like you have to be wealthy in London now to have that kind of freedom. It's a shame. I think young artists need the time and space to waste time until they find a voice."

Society itself has altered too, and with it the cultural dynamic of Britain. The access that smart, creative, messy kids from council estates once had to polytechnics, universities and art colleges has been eroded by prohibitive college fees. We live in a Britain where the so-called democratisation of culture though digital technology has gone hand in hand with the increasing exclusion and disempowerment of the young and talented. As writer and pop historian, Jon Savage, whose illuminating documentary, , is released this week, noted recently: "It is a cruel irony that, just as commercialised youth culture seems everywhere - appealing to all ages, and making untold millions for media corporations - the demographic on which this was once based is being excluded from society. Without financial power or overt political affiliations, young people are too often ignored in this costive age."

Consider, too, the words of another successful British artist, Gary Hume, perhaps the most thoughtful, least extrovert of the YBA generation. "When I was a student at art college," he told me in a recent interview, "it was full of kids from all kinds of backgrounds, mainly misfits and outsiders. That is exactly why they were at art college. Art has become a respectable career path now, another professional option for the young and affluent. But what do all the wrong people do now? Where do they go - the misfits and the outsiders? If you can't do something meaningful through art because you can't afford to go to art college or even rent a studio, what happens to you?"

What is the cost, culturally, of their exclusion? Could it be that, for the first time since pop culture emerged in the 1950s, it too is being gentrified, even made elitist? You do not have to look far for the evidence - even the Daily Mail acknowledged it in 2010, citing an article in the now defunct music magazine, The Word, which calculated that more than 60% of that year's successful pop and rock acts were former public school pupils compared with just 1% 20 years ago.

The Mail followed up that feature with one headlined "From cricket to the catwalk to Westminster, public school accents are back: We reveal Britain's 50 most powerful posh people under 30." They included: actors Ben Barnes (educated at King's College School), Robert Pattinson (Harrodian School in west London) and Emma Watson (Oxford's Dragon School and Headington School); comedian Jack Whitehall (Marlborough College), model Poppy Delevingne ("Bedales-educated with royal connections"), playwright Polly Stenham (attended Wycombe Abbey and Rugby) and pop stars, Florence Welch (Alleyn's School in south-east London) and Marcus Mumford and Ben Lovett from Mumford & Sons (both educated at King's College School, Wimbledon).

To that privileged list you can now add successful young British actors including Harrow-schooled Benedict Cumberbatch and old Etonians Damian Lewis and Tom Hiddleston, pop singer Laura Marling and the newest supermodel, Cara Delevingne (Poppy's sister), all products of expensive public schools. Likewise, more established stars such as Chris Martin of Coldplay (Sherborne School, Dorset) and James Blunt - real name James Hillier Blount - Old Harrovian and former member of the Life Guards.

Pop culture has, of course, always had its share of often-credible posh performers, from the likes of Pink Floyd and Nick Drake in the late 60s to Radiohead in the 90s. But the dramatic increase suggests something has gone seriously askew. Pop music has always been a prescient form - the Beatles signalled the coming of Harold Wilson's Labour government, punk the rise of Thatcherism, and Britpop soundtracked the birth of New Labour - so it seems appropriate that the rise of posh in pop culture should chime with the ascendancy of the current Tory leadership. (David Cameron is an Old Etonian, George Osborne was educated at St Paul's. Both were members of Oxford's infamous Bullingdon Club alongside Eton-educated London mayor Boris Johnson.)

Pop culture, lest we forget, initially grew out of the postwar affluence that allowed working-class teenagers to express themselves though choice - the music they listened to, the clothes they wore, the styles and movements they spawned, whether mod, rocker or hippy - but it was also propelled by the progressive changes to educational access that began with the Education Act of 1944. The path from grammar school to art school, for instance, was one of the key determinants of great British pop music of the 60s and early 70s. It led to the meeting of minds that was John Lennon and Paul McCartney and spawned the proto-postmodern stylings of Roxy Music, one of the most adventurous and influential British art-rock groups ever. (Given Bryan Ferry's embrace of all things gentrified, and the emergence of his son, Otis, as an unapologetically reactionary spokesperson of the New Posh, it is hard to believe that he comes from a working-class background in the industrial north-east and that one of his father's jobs was looking after pit ponies at the local mine.) Neither the Beatles nor Roxy Music would have existed, never mind shaped pop culture, had there been prohibitive college fees.

When I worked for NME in the 80s and for style magazines like the Face and Arena in the early 90s, music and fashion were still the two places where smart and savvy working-class kids were given a chance to have a voice. Publishing and the media - including the liberal-left media - were run and staffed in the main by white public school or Oxbridge-educated men. (That has changed somewhat, but not nearly enough, in the interim.) Pop culture, to a degree, belonged to the chancers, the misfits, the outsiders, the feisty, often left-leaning mavericks and messy kids from housing estates who, by and large, created, shaped and wrote about it. Likewise, many of the seismic British pop-cultural moments - from 60s pop and rock through mod, punk, 2-Tone and acid house.

The world of pop culture has changed dramatically since then, becoming more fractured, atomised and less culturally important. If pop music is characterised by anything today it is a curious lack of meaning. "When I formed a rock group back in my teens," says Primal Scream vocalist Bobby Gillespie, "it really was all or nothing. It was literally my one chance to express myself or to resign myself to a life of drudgery in a factory. I'd heard the Sex Pistols and recognised immediately that their music was born of essentially working-class anger and frustration, and that in itself was empowering. When was the last time you heard music like that, music that said something so strongly with so much genuine and justified rage?"

Instead, it often seems like the pre-pop values of showbiz have returned in the shape of The X Factor and The Voice, and in the almost masochist escapism of posh soaps like Downton Abbey. If today's art, music and fashion often seem oddly estranged from any notion of political or social awareness, could it be because the kind of people who enter these arenas no longer have the kind of life experiences or desperate need to express themselves that Gillespie identified.

Where have all the wrong people gone - the working-class mavericks like Mark E Smith and John Lydon and Alexander McQueen? Where is the beautifully incandescent anger of the excluded that the Who or the Sex Pistols or the Specials once articulated? Does it still have a place in today's pop culture? Does it still have a meaning? One thing is for certain: if it does, it won't be voiced by Mumford & Sons.
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A working-class hero is something to be ... but not in Britain's posh culture

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Last week the actor Stephen McGann spoke out about how difficult it is for young people from working-class backgrounds to enter his profession. "Opportunities are closing down," he said in an interview with the Independent. "If you're a messy kid from a council estate today, I think the chances of you making it as a successful actor are a lot worse than they were."

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In The Best Possible Taste - 4oD Series of Documentaries on Class and Taste

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In The Best Possible Taste - 4oD Series of Documentaries on Class and Taste

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Grayson Perry is fascinated by taste: why people buy the things they do and wear the things they wear, and what they are trying to say about themselves when they make those choices. Grayson goes on safari through the taste tribes of Britain, not just to observe our taste, but to tell us in an artwork what it means. In each episode, he embeds himself with people from across the social spectrum in a bid to get to grips with our differing takes on taste.

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BBC Documentary - Who Gets the Best Jobs? Birth vs. Worth

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BBC Documentary - Who Gets the Best Jobs? Birth vs. Worth

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Richard Bilton examines the social barriers that have contributed to the UK being more unequal than at any other time in history.

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Richard Bilton examines the social barriers that have contributed to the UK being more unequal than at any other time in history. Enjoy, comment and subscribe.

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Telegraph Article - White-collar workers = the new poor? 

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Telegraph Article - White-collar workers = the new poor? 

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Discussion over how white-collar workers are now becoming inferior to new technology in the work place.

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Alan Milburn served as a Labour cabinet minister, and was appointed chairman of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission by Nick Clegg.

The assumption that a rising economy will "lift all boats" and result in better wages is no longer true, he said.

As a result, the children of middle class families risk being locked out of medicine, law and journalism by a "social elite" who attended private schools under a regime that "has all the hallmarks of social engineering."

While politicians have focused on getting people off welfare, five million people now have jobs but remain in poverty, and are "forgotten people of Britain", Mr Milburn said.

"These are the people who heed Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband, David Cameron, who do the ring thing, stand on their own feet, strive not shirk," he said.

Real wages did not grow for blue-collar workers from 2003 until 2008, he said, and were "propped up" by tax credits at a cost of £20bn a year. The state can "no longer afford" to support such measures, he said.

Mr Milburn said he did not believe immigration from eastern Europe after 2004 had brought down wages for unskilled workers and had boosted growth.

Jack Straw, the former home secretary, today said not placing restrictions on migrants was a "spectacular mistake".

Sir Ferdinand Mount, who served as head of Margaret Thatcher's policy unit and is a cousin of David Cameron, said mass immigration had lowered wages in Britain.

"I just can't believe that where local authorities can whistle-up plentiful supplies of eager and energetic baristas and beanpickers from central Europe, this has no effect on local wage rates," he told the audience. "I do think if Marx and Engels were with us today they would be telling us immigrants are the new reserve army of labour in Britain."

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White-collar workers to become 'new poor' as computers take over

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Alan Milburn served as a Labour cabinet minister, and was appointed chairman of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission by Nick Clegg. The assumption that a rising economy will "lift all boats" and result in better wages is no longer true, he said.