Ooo, a new class survey has been doing the rounds – 13,000 people questioned about what puts you above the salt and what below.
This year, if you say “sitting room”, “supper” and “pudding” instead of “living room”, “tea” and “sweet” that makes you posh. And if you pronounce “scone” like “cone” instead of “gone” it does likewise.
I know! I know! I can hear you now – what kind of scum says “sweet”? Even “dessert” is better than “sweet”! And the scone thing is completely wrong. You should be cast into the outer darkness for rhyming it with “cone”. And we’re off and running.
God, I love class stuff. I love how much talking about it unites us even as the things we are talking about divide us. I love how live an issue it remains in this, the year of our Lord 2026. I especially love how subtly, yet comprehensively, it permeates the entire way of life on this wonderfully septic isle of ours.
Ever since I bought my first toaster I have marvelled at the minutiae of the system. You see, I bought the cheapest toaster possible. Home appliances are so boring – I couldn’t fathom spending more on any of the basics than I needed to. A washing machine, sure. Lotta moving parts, lot that can go wrong, expensive to keep replacing – get the best you can afford. But a thing to turn bread hot and crispy via lever and element? Nah. But do you know what cheap toasters don’t do? They don’t take Marks and Spencer’s sliced loaves. Or Kingsmill. Or any other actual loaf-shaped bread, with the bulbous bit at the top. They take only the small, perfectly square slices of the cheapest bread around. Plebeian toaster, plebeian bread for you my friend.
You think you made but one choice in Currys? Nay, nay and thrice nay. You spoke of and locked yourself into an entire lifestyle. Man thinks he is free, but everywhere he is in socio-economic chains.
And that is the heart of it, and that is what I love most about the endless discussions about class signifiers in this country: that it is, in essence, kabuki discourse. Because, however we dress it up, where you stand in the pecking order of life always comes down to money. More heavily disguised the further up the scale you go but it’s all money in the end.
The received wisdom of course is that money is vulgar. The truest posho doesn’t have a bean, old bean. This – like most of the stuff rich people tell you – is nonsense. There is no such thing as a poor aristocrat or member of the landed gentry. They have just had longer to embed the money into their little corner of the system. It has been transmuted into and disguised as houses (usually usefully filled over the years with priceless art and antiques) and land that simply…exists, around and about them. And has done for ages, which gives it an air of immutability, a sense that it is absolutely part of them, like a limb or a head.
It’s not though. It’s money. It’s like living on and in a bank account. At the very worst, they are cash-poor. This just means that instead of going to a cashpoint like a Normal, you need to sell one of the sketches Boz did when he came to stay with that Dickens fellow and Great-Great Aunt Folderol gave to the scullery maid to use as a shelf liner, or perhaps part with ugliest Canaletto you can find in the west wing loo. A bit like when the rest of us have to return something to the shop, or flog something on eBay or Vinted, or take something down to the pawnbrokers. But with Venetian art instead of Hush jeans.
The upper classes are not divorced from money in the slightest. They have simply had it for so long that they don’t realise what it is. It is security. And they have that in spades. And they have the bone-deep confidence, entitlement, power (mostly dedicated to the quiet perpetuation of the status quo) to go with it. That’s why all their stuff is old and decrepit. They’ve been rich and therefore powerful for so long that they have nothing to prove. That rotting Barbour isn’t a sign that class is uncoupled from wealth, just that there are different ways of showing it.
Money makes the world go round. It’s why billionaires keep it to themselves. All the flummery about “supper” and “pudding” is distraction and obfuscation. If you want to do better, be happier, be safe, have more power in life, you need more money.
If your ancestors were very lucky/politically astute/treacherous bastards they were handed it ages ago from a conqueror or king and it’s been paying your way, smoothing your passage through life ever since. And given you time to come up with insane stories about how it’s actually knowing that it’s a looking glass and not a mirror or scent rather than perfume which separates you from the herd. No, babs. Not even slightly. It’s how much money you’ve got and how long you’ve had it for. And how you’ve avoided having large proportions of it taken away from you via income tax and VAT and other infelicities that people who have to work for cash and monthly paychecks have to endure.
All of which is to say two things. First – the system stinks and we need a revolution, like, now. And second – don’t scrimp on your toaster. One of these I know we can do.
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