Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain

by Ferdinand Mount

This is a daring, provocative, and unusually frank discussion of the Gap—the invisible, yet powerful, divide between classes—which always has, and perhaps always will, plague Britain. To pretend that class distinctions are a thing of the past, is, as Ferdinand Mount argues, nothing more than an ostrich-like attempt at idealism. Through fine observation and extensive research, covering issues as diverse as the distribution of wealth, the significance of speech patterns, and the politics of egalitarianism, the author pursues an oft-times illusive answer to the fundamental How can oppressive inequality in Britain be wiped out once and for all?

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939. For many years he was a columnist at the Spectator and then the Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. In between, he was head of the Downing Street Policy Unit and then editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is now a prize-winning novelist and author of, most recently, the bestselling memoir Cold Cream. He lives in London.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bleh. When writing what is basically a sociology text about where the class strata stands in modern Britain, a helpful approach might be to actually interview people from the various classes and create a book of dialogues. Instead, Mount simple regurgitates prior thought and expounds endlessly his Thatcherite leanings. Several hundred pages of pompous toss.

[Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a patrician well-organised attack on the effect of the UK State's intrusion on the lower classes. There is much truth in it but the idealisation of the pre-1940 working class culture is dubious. But at least it was there. Post-1945 the story is very accurate. Possible remedies for the current situation of the working class are proposed but their viability must be questioned. He hankers after an American or French model and sees marriage as a panacea. What is missing from the book is any understanding of how feminism is shaking the roots of patriarchy worldwide.

[Rosalind · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book that purports to be a piece of sociology. In fact it's a piece of polemic with its heart in the right place but starting from false premises. The author, I feel, is somewhat disingenuous; the plain, if not 'ordinary', name masks the fact that he is Sir Ferdinand Mount, third baronet and a one-time political commentator on The Times. He argues from a patrician point of view as a journalist and takes an idealised view of the working class, carefully cherry-picking his sources to confirm his prejudices and taking a sour view of those primary sources and more recent academic writers like EP Thompson who don't confirm his view. There is no bibliography to show he has done his homework.

His tone is rather condescending too. I don't feel he would have let his idealised working-class folk into his own exalted circles but would be happy to let them have their own chapels – he's big on religion even though Dickens and others record the workers staying away from God in droves – and mutually-funded schools. His solutions, predictably, are those of the old "one-nation" patrician Tory; more grammar schools to allow hand-picked individuals who can be trusted to behave to "rise above" their roots (as with most grammar school proponents there's no critique of the secondary modern schools in which 80% of children were taught to know their place.

The author means well but he misses the point. He shows little awareness of the struggles of the working-classes to find a place in a post-industrial economy. It's readable enough thouigh.

[Jodie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read, as I don’t usually pick up non-fiction for fun. But, there is something cynical inside me that doesn’t trust a British class-system study by an Etonian.

[Theo Kokonas · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Class doesn't count any more" they say. Oh but it does in Modern Britain. Just as it did in the past. This is a well-written book which covers some good ground written by a fairly well-heeled member of the 'Uppers'.
I won't spoil it for future readers but it covers in good length how the poor have been stripped of a lot of things (sense of pride, common purpose, community, wealth) and this agenda has been sustained by the sneering middle and upper classes to this day. It's got some great gems such as how the media sensationalizes a rise in crime, ensuring to blackmark the poor and how they're just looking for the next opportunity to rob the rich, yet statistically it's always the poor areas that are targeted for burglaries rather than the more gentrified ones. It covers plenty of topics, and I found it a surprisingly compelling page turner and recommend it to anyone. My girlfriend has a thing for pulp fiction yet I think the second chapter which covers the dumbing down of mainstream television and media something she'll find very interesting. I'm fairly interested in picking up some of his newer books now!

[Kirk Houghton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ferdinand Mount is an Eton-educated, Oxbridge graduate who wrote the Tory 1983 election manifesto. He also holds a semi-dormant baronetcy, is related to David Cameron’s mother, and resides amongst the middle reaches of the aristocracy. What does he know about the class divide in Britain? Can he even speak for the lower classes?
After 20 pages, I must confess my prejudices were getting in the way of this book. An opening chapter devoted to the evolution, exclusion and ownership of language by the upper classes, tracing obscure arguments between Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford in the pages of a 1956 anthology confirmed my worst fears. Here was another trivial study in the semantics of class expression interspersed with the author’s self-important smatterings of Latin, Ancient Greek and French at the end of every other sentence. Yet again we had another journalist with a major publishing deal clogging up the book shelves of Tesco’s Current Affairs section without anything important to say. How wrong I was.
Don’t let Mount’s background scar your judgement; this is a fantastic book, draped in mourning for the disinheritance of the Victorian working class and crafted in the type of elegant prose rarely seen in modern political discourse. Underpinning Mount’s theory is the idea that the industrial working classes of the nineteenth century were not only self-sufficient and sturdy, but vigorous in their demand for improvement through education and altruistic in their desire to help one another through collective action. That is until the state came along and gradually monopolised education, health services and housing, and crowded out the voluntary efforts of the great unwashed. This has been a one-way process since 1870 where the ruling classes have engaged in managing the masses with paternal condescension while disparaging their civil institutions and fearing their potential for disruption.
At the heart of this disinheritance has been a Marxist legacy of thought that has succeeded in scaring the upper classes, but has had a more banal effect on the working classes. As Mount shows, the Marxist vision of the future as a war between the owners of production and the destitute labouring masses was a gross simplification of society that never found expression in Britain. Furthermore, Engels’ portrayal of a depraved, God-forsaken proletariat robbed of all dignity and humanity by the drudgery of factory life is disingenuous in the extreme. Those uprooted from village traditions and spewed into the smoke-infested incubators of mass production in Lancashire and the Black Country were not the illiterate, violent, drunkards depicted in Marx’s bleak dystopia.
As a counter-argument, Mount undertakes a sweeping study drawing on government statistics, memoirs, and contemporary Victorian sources. His aim is to show how the working classes were constantly under attack from the ruling elite for their attempts to carve out a distinctive civilisation of their own. In other words the only people who really believed in the determinism of class consciousness were those who feared dispossession. On the contrary, the agents who Marx singled out as future victors in a scientific process of evolution were more than content to look after their own communities and seek accommodation and compromise under the stewardship of a liberal democratic franchise.
Let’s take the first distortion imposed on the new industrial civilisation by the horrified observers of the time – the abandonment of religion in the new cities. Far from disappearing, Protestant Christianity experienced a new lease of life in major industrial towns where the Church of England feared to tread. Non-conformist (e.g. Methodists and Baptists) chapels sprung up everywhere as workers built their own places of worship in the new urban conurbations. What’s breath-taking is how much this was resented by the Anglican establishment and the literary elite of the time, many of whom, like the famous education reformer, Matthew Arnold, detested the kitchen-sink organisation and crude catechisms of the lay preachers. Yet two million children were enrolled in Sunday School by the 1850s, most of them funded by working class Christians. Likewise, Horace Mann’s survey of 1851 records how nearly half of the 52 percent of church-goers did not practise Eucharist in an Anglican Church, but in the non-conformist chapels. It seems an apathetic, irreligious class of industrial heathens still had time to create their own churches, despite the popular (mis)representation of the time.
Next we have education. The progressive view of history taught in our schools and universities knows only one narrative here. The benevolent state rescued millions of children from twelve-hour shifts in the factory and gave them hope of mobility through the introduction of compulsory education. Parents of these miserable and malnourished ragamuffins couldn’t be trusted to educate their children; but for the first time these heathen masses could at least be taught how to read and right. Snobbish ignorance and simplification is yet again at fault here. Mount cites an 1841 Royal Commission which shows 79 percent of all miners in Northumberland and Durham were literate; indeed 92 percent of the adult population in Hull could read and write thirty years before the Education Act of 1870. If the state wasn’t providing these services, who was? Well, of course the working classes through their church subscriptions, savings and collective ventures. Parents and philanthropists were the main contributors, the former finding ways to put aside funds for the advancement of their children – yet again at odds with the stereotypical brutish workers who sought an outlet in their alienation through drinking, wife-beating and child neglect. In fact, government statistics from the mid-nineteenth century show ‘the number of private day scholars had increased from 674,883 in 1818 to 2,535,462 in 1858, from one in seventeen of the population to one in 7.7.’
One-by-one Mount tackles the crude stereotypes and succeeds in demonstrating how the growth of a self-sufficient working class of the nineteenth century was one of the most astonishing achievements in human history. As the economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek noted in his classic 1944 study, The Road to Serfdom, nobody doubted the industrialisation of the nineteenth-century was the beginning of a crude civilisation of which there was no precedent to fall back on. Which makes it all the easier to understand how the spectacular transition from village to town life for millions of people brought so much foreboding and anxiety from the ruling classes. What about the ubiquity of bastard children conceived in the factories by workers no longer under the watchful eye of the priest or village squire? Yet again this is another fallacy. Academic historians are cited to demonstrate how this was always a myth. ‘Up to 1930, rural districts had far higher bastardy rates than the cities.’
Perhaps the most interesting chapter of Mind The Gap focuses on the attitude of the literary elite towards the masses, especially the lower middle classes. Here Mount surveys the modernist writers of the early twentieth century alongside their Victorian predecessors. In the case of Virginia Woolf, a self-declared socialist, we find only a brazen contempt for the vulgar masses, with their soulless suburbs, philistine tastes and moronic deference to the Monarchy. These views are repeated in the works of D.H. Lawrence, George Gissing and a host of other great names from this period. Always and everywhere the fear of the masses permeate their thoughts. Supporters of working class autonomy and voluntary endeavour they were not.
Of course, our author, Baronet William Robert Ferdinand Mount, is aware of the dangers of romanticising the admirable stoicism, moral certainty and fortitude of the working classes. This is not an attempt to re-write the industrial revolution as a propaganda exercise in self-reliance, even though the current malaise of welfare dependency in modern Britain is clearly at odds with the twilight of working class pride in bygone times. Workhouses, child prostitution, cholera, vagrancy, abysmal mortality rates, malnutrition and physical degeneration cannot be omitted from the history of early industrialisation; Mount is not denying that life was a struggle for existence for many people. But he is right to lament how the state has appropriated all social responsibilities for providing succour, relief and education in place of the civil institutions that were perfectly willing to carry out these functions without interference.
So what are his recommendations for the future? Allowing parents to set up their own community schools is now a mainstream idea and has a clear link to the working class heritage of self-provision; reversing the seventeenth-century enclosures to give non-farming land back to the people might be too radical; giving workers more shares in their companies raises its head every ten years when progressive Labour thinkers want to put a human face on the image of capitalism. But Mount is not a Fabian socialist; his ideas are Conservative with liberal tendencies. He defends the marriage tax break and rues how the state rewards single-mother households in its allocation of council houses. Not only does this trap people, it also discourages them from moving to another estate or town for fear of falling down the housing list. We’ve heard all this before, yet this is not the standard Daily Mail complaint. Mount’s argument is more philosophical:
‘If ever freedom for the working class existed in the great pulsating, protesting collective… it certainly does not any more. People at the bottom have long since lost confidence in mass action as the guarantor of authentic freedom and justice. If happiness is to be found, it is to be found in the pleasures of private life, above all in love.’
This is worth serious attention. The last platoon of pride and personal achievement for the working class is the family. Unfortunately, Mount acknowledges his shortcomings here. No sane person would reverse the divorce laws of the 1960s; but why has marriage breakdown become so widespread? Is it a cosmopolitan elite that has a disproportionate influence on society – think of Ed Miliband’s shock when he discovered his core voters would not tolerate a Prime Minister-elect who trivialised one of their core institutions? But surely working class attitudes cannot always be manipulated from above by a sneering counter-culture elite of snobbish internationalists. This would deny the working classes the very ‘agency’ Mount venerates with so much admiration. Other reasons must be at work here – the decline of religious symbolism and meaning; the emergence of alternative lifestyles; the vigorous promotion of individual pleasure as a source of happiness; the increasing cost and extravagance of the modern wedding ceremony; the declining birth rate amongst the educated classes; the equality of inheritance law between married and non-married partners; the disappearance of the sex before marriage and child-born-out-of-wedlock taboos. All these might hold the answer, but which one is the most poignant? Mount chooses not to reduce a complex argument to a simple theory and deserves credit for that.
After finishing this book, I was reminded of an abstract theme David Cameron tried to communicate in the 2010 General Election – the Big Society. It now strikes me he was on to something here, but made the fatal mistake of believing all bottom-up civil society initiatives would come from the middle class. The local library maintained by private subscriptions and run by volunteers rather than Council Tax contributions – did he ever imagine this might come from the working class of a twenty-first century council estate? No, and with good reason. The prevailing view that the lower classes can only be maintained by the state is yet another victory for the re-writing of history and a further blow to the proud history of proletariat self-sufficiency. What’s surprising is that his mother’s cousin, the author of this book, could have told him this and guided him in his articulation of the real message – trust the masses to adapt and create their own institutions and see how they flourish.
Though I’ve never been animated by class consciousness, this book has opened my eyes to a culture that has been written out of history in favour of the all-encompassing narrative of the benevolent state taming the worst excesses of capitalism. But with their patriotism derided as infantile, their communities overrun by strange religions and alien traditions, their workplaces undercut by Eastern European labour, and their lifestyles regularly pilloried on national television it may be that there’s nobody left to reclaim the noble past. Who are the working class these days?

[Trisha · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this book up on a whim when I popped into an Oxfam on my walk. I would recommend you skip over the first few chapters entirely (it is just superficial filler) and go straight to chapters 4-8 where the heart of his argument is. Many have pointed out the irony of an old Etonian/ Thatcher government MP/ literal baronet commenting on the degradation of the working classes and I do agree that it would have been better if he even attempted to interview people from the class he was supposedly elevating. He admits in the introduction that this is him just having a swing at the subject (“Even a few months ago, I did not imagine that, this far on in the day, I would be writing a book about class”) and quite frankly it shows. It was a serviceable tube read but wouldn’t recommend.

[Ioanna Thomadaki-Visintini · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting and well-written book on the class divide in Britain. Definitely worth reading!

[Sarah Hamilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent expose of class in the UK today.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was extremely good, even though Mount allows more State interference than I would like when he comes to solutions. On the whole, his analysis of the emergence of the Under Class and the erosion of the old Working Class culture are hard work,self-improvement and hardiness, is convincing. The control of Working Class over their own lives in the 19th Century and before, gradually moved to the State in the 20th century: education, welfare, employment, and the demise of the self-improvement ethic.

[Amy-Fern · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was so bad it felt like punishment