Are there too many posh people in politics? And, if so, what should we do about it?

Chris Dillow, in a slightly chip-on-his-shoulder manner, writes how "posh people" should be disqualified from politics. Chris cites lack of hustle, overconfidence, a casual attitude to money and the lack of a "gut understanding" of how other people live. There's nothing new about the analysis presented - people who've had a struggle to escape from poverty very often resent the effortlessness with which posh people slide into grand roles.

There are, however, some thoughts arising from this that strike me as important:

1. By creating two categories, rich and poor, Chris ignores the reality which is that most people are neither. An interesting experiment here would be to contrast the manner in which 'middle class' is understood in the USA and the way in which 'middle class' is presented very often in the UK. I'm middle class (my Dad was an insurance clerk in the City for all his working life) but my experience bears little or no resemblance to the typical middle class life described in the Sunday supplements with its foreign holidays, private schools, nannies and endless dinner party angst.

2. Empathy is really important in politics - perhaps as important as what we could call "lived experience". One of the features of modern political discourse, with its emphasis on economics and obsession with evidence, is that it loses feeling. Everything is boiled down to a narrow utilitarian analysis with no room for "gut understanding". People parade class credentials (or attack others for their excess of privilege) without appreciating that this is simply adopting a badge not being empathetic, let alone understanding, of other people's lives. I may be the grandson of a miner but that doesn't make me working class - just a little bit closer to understanding that class than someone who is the grandson of an earl.

3. Policy-making is dominated by the well-off. Chris points to some very privileged people - Jacob Ree-Mogg, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray - to make his point about how posh folk are a problem. But there's a much bigger group of people, not all the product of elite private schools, but still unquestionably wealthy and privileged. The influence of these people (they litter the media, civil service, think tanks and charity administration as well as politics) leads to tin-eared policy-making such as the persistent attacks on working- and lower middle-class lifestyle choices.

4. Generally-speaking the private sector is far more egalitarian than the public sector. I recall the then chief executive of Reed Elsevier telling a tale of how, for the annual report, his PR team were very proudly saying "all our senior management are graduates" - he had to point out to them this wasn't true as he wasn't a graduate. Employment in the city has always been a strange mish-mash between barrow boys and public school grandees (not least because trading requires that ability to hustle, negotiate or strategise that Chris points out is often missing in posh folk).

5. There are too few what I would call "ordinary people" in politics these days. From 1965 to 2005 the Conservative Party was led by people from ordinary backgrounds (Heath, Thatcher, Major, Hague, Duncan Smith, Howard) - all bar one from what us Londoners call the 'provinces'. That politics is now - in every part of its spectrum - completely dominated by folk from less ordinary backgrounds is a failing in what should be an egalitarian pastime.

We give a great deal of attention (rightly in the main) to getting better representation from women and ethnic minorities but much less attention to whether the interests and outlook of the people we chose, gender and race aside, reflect the interests and outlook of most people, especially outside London and the Home Counties. Indeed, there's a tendency to look down the nose as MPs like Phil Davies ("he used to work in ASDA, you know") or Ben Bradley ("shelf stacker in Lidl") rather than see this experience as providing a fighting chance of actually understanding what it's like for the customers and employees of value supermarkets.

I don't think the posh should be disqualified from politics, people like Tony Benn and Willie Whitelaw made major contributions to politics, but I do consider that Chris Dillow has a point - political parties need to think harder how they can get people who better represent the electorate. I think the Conservative Party has done some good work here but it is still the case that the centralised candidate approval system makes it too easy for London-based people with good connections to get approved and onto shortlists for winnable seats.

Perhaps we need also to look at non-graduate routes into professions - my uncle was a county court judge when he died but started his career as a 14-year old post boy in a solicitors' office (another uncle started at Barclay's as a sixteen-year old and finished as a senior tax accountant at the bank). These days too many jobs are closed off to non-graduates - the latest here is nursing which has gone the route of social work and policing in this regard - which makes it pretty tough for the 50% of kids who don't go to university.

Lastly, we need to ask whether the domination of London and the process of sortition by wealth (largely driven by housing costs) contributes to the manner in which well-off people simply don't have a clue about the real lives of most ordinary people - not just the poor but millions of people who are what the Americans would call 'middle class'.

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It should read: "The NHS must treat working-class lifestyles not killer diseases"

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Four in every five deaths in London today are due to unhealthy lifestyles, including factors such as smoking, alcohol, bad diets and a lack of exercise.

This simply isn’t true. Or rather we can’t demonstrate that this is true. Here’s the ONS on causes of death:

Around half a million people, representing less than one per cent of the total population, died in England and Wales in 2009. The vast majority of deaths occurred at older ages, with almost eight out of ten men and nearly nine out of ten women dying at age 65 or above.

It’s worth noting here that the annual number of deaths is as low as the number of deaths in the 1950s when there were significantly fewer people. So there are (per 1000 population) fewer people dying than ever before and the average age of death is higher than ever before. The chances are that it’s old age that’s killing people rather than a libertine lifestyle:

For those aged 80 years and above coronary heart disease and stroke were the leading causes of death for both men and women. For men, influenza and pneumonia appear amongst the top three leading causes of death; these illnesses also appeared as a leading cause of death for males in the youngest age-group, one to four years. For women, dementia was prominent among the leading causes of death in this oldest age group and it is notable that the total number of deaths for women aged 80 years and above exceeded the combined total of all deaths amongst females at younger ages.

So why is it that health ‘leadership’ is so keen to take on the evil choices we make rather than continue the work of getting better at managing heart conditions, better at treating cancer and better at responding to injury? Why finger lifestyle rather than the truth – that our longevity is placing an ever greater strain on health and care services?

Dr Andy Mitchell, Medical Director for NHS England is right when he says:

“London’s hospitals are at breaking point and the demand for health care will outstrip the funding available in just seven years unless we fundamentally change the way services are delivered."

But absolutely wrong when he tries to blame this problem on “...conditions that stem from what we are doing to ourselves.” 

This simply isn’t true – unless he means eating better, living healthier and surviving for longer.

The medical mafia has decided that it must correct our lifestyles. Not because a correction is needed but because that mafia has decided it disapproves of our lifestyles. Or, to be more specific, the lifestyles of people in lower socio-economic classes – you know the sort who drink beer, eat supermarket microwave burgers and drink fizzy-pop. For this health mafia the working classes really are a drain on society.

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The BBC's new class system - a vanity project of no value or purpose

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When you’ve been involved with direct marketing, marketing planning and profiling for as long as I have, you will know that every so often another ‘radical’. ‘ground-breaking’ and ‘innovative’ new scheme of social classification is launched. Usually this is from an advertising agency, a data management business or something called a “strategy consultancy” and is essentially a jolly good wheeze to get lots of press coverage and thereby to promote the business launching the classification.

To make this work we have to have funky names for the classes – none of that ABCDE malarkey, that’s far too boring. Instead we get value-loaded words that play on our stereotypes of certain ‘class’ groups – terms like ‘proletariat’ or ‘elite’ pop up thereby summoning up either gap-toothed ‘Shameless’ wannabes or waistcoated Bullingdon Boys. Such designations do not help in our understanding of social class and such studies do not guide our knowledge of how society changes over time.

Indeed, the BBC – who seem to think spending money on such work is what we pay a licence fee for – have fully understood the point. This creates some jolly headlines, a load of people on Twitter trill about which class they’re in and it fills in some gaps in an otherwise quiet week.

So folks, a great deal of fun has been had by everyone with the BBC’s new class system:

The BBC teamed up with sociologists from leading universities to analyse the modern British class system. They surveyed more than 161,000 people and came up with a new model made up of seven groups

This, says the BBC, replaces the three group system - the three group system that was replaced in the 1950s by a five group system of social class (ABCDE) and then, in the 1960s, with a six group system (ABC1C2DE). Apparently this is some sort of great advance in our understanding of social class in Britain, we are blinded by fancy on-line tools and the involvement of professorial types and told that this is so much better because it involves surveying 161,000 people!

The problem is that it’s nonsense. The size of the sample doesn’t make it better than, for example, a social classification system based on census data or one using transactional and behavioural data from millions of people. More to the point, the system encompassed information (cultural choices, for example, that more reflect affordability than class per se). Indeed, this wonderful new seven class system really doesn’t improve on the established and widely used six class system – a six class system that is used all over the world not just in the UK.

Compared to the well-known geodemographic systems – ACORN, MOSAIC, etc. – this new classification is useless. It is inflexible – fine for targeting mass market television advertising – but worse than useless if you want more precise analysis, say for retail location choices or direct marketing. For academics that system is interesting, there’s a lot of data to play with and it may contain some genuine insights. But it won’t replace the established social class classification (for all its flaws) because it largely fails to improve on that classification.

Let’s make that appraisal by matching the seven BBC classes to those traditional six socio-economic classes:

• Elite - the most privileged group in the UK, distinct from the other six classes through its wealth – this is wholly indistinguishable from Socio-economic Class A
• Established middle class - the second wealthiest, scoring highly on all three capitals – ah, yes, this would be Socio-economic Class B
• The next three groups Technical Middle Class; Emergent Service Workers and Newly Affluent Workers fit less well but are essentially the old Socio-Demographic Classes C1 and C2
• Traditional working class - scores low on all forms of capital, but is not completely deprived Here we have Socio-economic Class D
• Precariat, or precarious proletariat - the poorest, most deprived class. That would be Socio-economic Class E

It’s not a precise comparison but it’s plain to see that this expensive piece of taxonomic research is essentially an indulgence that sheds almost no light at all on the issue of social class and how it affects the economic, social and cultural development of the nation.

Of course, it goes without saying, that the system ranks me as part of the "elite". I suspect this reinforces the system's daftness!

It really is a vanity project of no purpose and with the validity of a horoscope.

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The Guardian's writers never check their facts do they? The example of Richard Seymour

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Too much of our politics is dominated by the discussion of class – working-class, middle-class, upper-class and so on. These terms mean almost nothing – is the multi-millionaire builder working-class? How is all this defined? So my apologies for writing about the psephology of class in response to a rather poor article by some chap called Richard Seymour:

The relentless, long-term narrowing of the Tory base since the 60s – as it has become more explicitly the vehicle of financial and monopoly capital, and less willing to articulate popular working-class concerns – has seen Tory support recede from working-class areas.

Arrant nonsense – support for the Conservatives among C2DE social classes has risen since that time not fallen. Here are the facts for C2 voters from Ipsos MORI:

	Oct 1974	1979	1983	1987	1992	1997	2001	2005	2010
Con	26	41	40	40	39	27	29	33	37
Lab	49	41	32	36	40	50	49	40	29

And for DE voters:

	Oct 1974	1979	1983	1987	1992	1997	2001	2005	2010
Con	22	34	33	30	31	21	24	25	31
Lab	57	49	41	48	49	59	55	48	40

The truth is that the Conservative Party’s problem is with AB voters not working-class voters – the reason for the Party’s failure to win overall last year lay in getting just 39% of AB votes not in getting the votes of the working class English.

But that truth wouldn’t suit the Guardian, would it! The biggest demographic shifts in British politics have been the shifts of the skilled working class from Labour to Conservative and the loss of Tory AB votes to the Liberal Democrats.

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