We must talk about class divide

Search Hansard and the two words, once flung across the Commons chamber like knickers at a Tom Jones gig, got just 38 mentions last year. The politicians have switched to that ghastly formulation "hard-working families", as if all families are intrinsically energetic and virtuous. (Why do our leaders shamefully ignore Britain's admirable, lie-on-the-sofa, take-thecarto-the-shops families?)

But away from political and media circles, it turns out, the British people remain gratifyingly classconscious. According to a weekend ICM poll, 53 per cent describe themselves as working class, little changed in 10 years. Eighty-nine per cent say people are still judged by their class, with almost half saying it still counts for "a lot".

I say "gratifyingly", not because I approve of class division but because I think the public is right. Class still explains an enormous amount about England, and the conspiracy of silence on the subject denies us a vital tool to change what is wrong with our country.

This remains a place where there is massive discrimination by class. We are not "all middle class now".

A working-class Londoner is more trapped, less likely to reach the middle class today than he or she was in the Fifties.

The education system has ceased to be a force for social mobility. Non-academic skills training has collapsed. Housing is obscenely overpriced. Above all, work itself has become less secure.

In London, especially, we don't always think about the right divides. Many of the divisions we think of as racial are, in fact, at least as much about class. London's Indian community is rich: better off, on average, than whites. They are mainly middle class, the descendants of traders.

By contrast, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, though the same race as Indians, are poor. They are mainly working class, descendants of villagers brought here for factory work.

Even Britain's terror problem may be more about class than about faith. Both British Arabs and British Pakistanis are Muslim; but few British Arabs, who are overwhelmingly middle class, become extremists.

You may say I'm overplaying the plight of the workers: that professional jobs, too, are less secure than they were; that a plumber earns more than a teacher, and that a dustman who bought his council house is better off than a graduate struggling to get on the property ladder. Maybe, to some extent, we are all working class now.

Yet property, skills and secure work, the foundations of prosperity, are far more likely to be found the further you ascend the social scale. The answer is to attack class discrimination in the same way we've tried to tackle racism: by trying to ensure fairness in employment, by addressing educational underachievement.

But in order to tackle it, we've got to start talking about it.