Class is not an ‘identity’
Banning class snobbery won’t improve the lives of the working class.
Do you call your evening meal ‘tea’, ‘dinner’ or ‘supper’? Do you shop at Aldi or Waitrose? Do you enjoy a sausage roll or a quinoa salad? Love Island or the Proms? The questions have changed over the decades but a determination to categorise people according to their class persists.
The latest example of this comes courtesy of a new report from the British Psychological Society. The authors argue that making class a legally protected characteristic is the only way to tackle snobbery and inequality. The authors define social class as ‘financial resources, who you know and what you know’, but most of their emphasis is on ‘what rules we know, our clothes, the way we speak, our accent, how we understand the world’.
According to the researchers, people in ‘influential occupations’ face an ‘implicit poshness test’ when it comes to advancing their careers. In other words, it’s because working-class people don’t know which knife and fork to use at posh dinners that they are relegated to low-paid jobs. The BPS’s preferred solution is ‘an immediate and clear legal mandate for initiatives to reduce class-based discrimination’.