I took The Times's social class test yesterday. You can do it too -
click here
you might find it very revealing.
Yesterday I answered all the questions truthfully - and was assigned to Traditional Working Class. I have absolutely no beef with members of the Traditional Working Class, stalwarts all, beavering away in the salt and the coal mines, reading Schopenhauer by the light of the midnight candle to improve themselves; even breaking the mould and sending their daughters to uni. To that extent I have always been one of Them - voting Labour, supporting the miners, that sort of stuff. Why, I was even at the same grammar school as Ken Loach, though a few years behind him. In my last hibernation, and retired on not quite enough pension to do what I would like to do, I spend a lot of time reading and writing - and pondering.
I know a bit about questionnaires, and how difficult it is not to give too much weight to just one of a number of variables, so I took the Times test again today, having spent yesterday evening reading, inter alia, Eco's fable of power and corruption,
The Prague Cemetery; Jeanette Winterson's erudite and achingly painful tale of power and wickedness behind the trial of the Lancaster 'witches',
The Daylight Gate; David Bellos's adventure into translation, the amazing art of,
Is that a Fish in Your Ear?, and Caitlin Moran's
How to be a Woman (which made me extremely to blush and hope that neither my wife nor my servants will be tempted to read it.) Four books at once? Why not? Thought fertilises thought.
So I tried the questionnaire again this evening, but this time I told a few fibs and changed a couple of variables. I upped my meagre pension somewhat, overstated the value of my house, and increased my savings rather, while keeping all other answers exactly the same. Phew! Now I'm of the Elite, which is about as high as you go social class-wise without actually being the Queen. And all because of money! Screw enough of it out of other people and you too could be one of the Elite (as MPs and investment bankers have already discovered - for theft and gambling are far more rewarding in the social hierarchy than honesty and altruism, providing you don't get caught.)
The message from this mishmash of a questionnaire comes out loud and clear - you stay in your allotted social place. Steelworkers must not like opera. Coal miners must read (or view) only The Sun. Farmworkers should stay with the cowpats. For social class is still all about £££ and how many of them you have got (as Alex would say on Pointless.)
The whole of the methodology of this pseudoscientific nonsense, the weighting given to what the
questioners consider to be the key variables, could be inferred if enough of us were prepared to tell repeated and systematic lies and check the results against each other, and then blow the whistle.
There are children out there whom education has not yet finished inoculating against this tripe.
