The paradox of post-war Britain is that the social structure has not changed much, while the superstructure—or more precisely the most visible aspects of Britain’s social life, its habits and customs—has undergone widespread change. The second of these observations is obvious, but not so much the first, which has been obscured by a number of factors. To start with, outward appearances and lifestyles in Britain have clearly altered: middle-aged workers from the provinces taking their holiday in Rimini rather than Scarborough; the building boom that has left our city centres unrecognizable; the transformation of Britain from officially among the most puritanical societies into one of the most sexually permissive; the newly multi-national and multi-racial character of urban life; the Profumo scandal. An undercurrent of self-analysis and self-observation now runs through the press and broadcast media, though not yet reaching the level of introspection found in the United States. Whoever takes his temperature from hour to hour tends to exaggerate the importance of momentary fluctuations. In those happy times when the British people viewed themselves with an uncritical conviction of their superiority, they felt all the steadier for not registering such movements. Today we have to pay attention to them. Finally, a cloud of propaganda has formed around the British situation, creating pseudo-problems of change.

Anyone reliving their own memories of the 1945 Labour government will recall the nonsense that spread in political circles. Labour spokesmen maintained that Britain had undergone a ‘silent revolution’. Both Labour and Conservatives claimed that the rich had been wiped out by taxation and that the reign of economic equality had begun. Ten years later, the publicists of the ‘affluent society’ were saying that we had ‘never had it so good’. Poverty had disappeared, and if at this point no one had the nerve to claim that wealth had vanished too, the old British class distinctions were said to have been lost in the shared communal aspirations of all, which were being realized in television sets, cars and other consumer goods. Some—mostly people with no socialist sympathies whatsoever—went so far as to ask, quite seriously, whether Labour, as a class-conscious working-class party, had any future at all. Meanwhile, another category of myth was elaborated: that of British decline. Listening to debates at the time over Britain’s entry into the Common Market was a disconcerting experience. An unwary observer could have been led to believe that this country had not only ceased to be a great empire and military power—which was obvious—but had become a kind of greater Portugal. The sheer amount of time and typewriter ribbon wasted in circulating and recirculating these caricatures might in itself have sufficed to raise British productivity.

Britain, of course, is a country that loves myths, and this has always made any realistic assessment of its social situation difficult. The pioneer of industrialism—and the country in which urbanization has advanced further than anywhere else in the world—still delights in promoting itself with photographs of pretty thatched cottages in small villages, which have the advantage of attracting American tourists more effectively than any other kind of publicity. We are bent under the burden of the monarchy, hereditary peerage, royal honours and decorations, pompous customs and ceremony; but in reality it is easier for a relatively poor man with no family or other social connections to go into ‘business’ and become a millionaire in Britain than in the United States. The image of our law is majestic and just, but an ordinary citizen will almost certainly get fairer treatment in several other European countries. Scotland Yard is a byword for investigative efficiency, but Britain today is the classic homeland of gigantic bank robberies carried out by ‘persons unknown’. Britain proudly talks up its civil liberties, but a civil servant accused, let’s say, of communist sympathies almost certainly has stronger legal and constitutional guarantees in De Gaulle’s France than on this side of the Channel. Illusion and reality remain separated by a gulf as great in its own way as that separating the Lord Mayor of London—a businessman appointed every year to preside at banquets and picturesque processions—from the actual running of the city, with which he has nothing to do.

Beneath these layers of myth-making, the real changes in Britain’s fundamental structures have been negligible. This is owing in the first place to the fact that there was little room for fundamental change. Before the War Britain was already, in terms of social stratification, the most polarized of all the big modern states. Only around 6 per cent of the working population were employed in agriculture, mainly as labourers, as against the 88 per cent employed on monthly salaries or weekly wages. Small merchants, artisans, direct cultivators and other ‘self-employed’ also made up just 6 per cent of the population. Since then, polarization has increased slightly—mainly thanks to the decline of the small intermediate layers—but without a reversal of long-range historical tendencies, changes of this nature are necessarily small.

Within the frame of this general situation, there were naturally more spectacular phases, though these only perpetuated a pre-war, international trend. Two-thirds of Britain’s male population are manual workers, and among the unskilled—and in certain sectors, such as construction—foreign immigrants form a disproportionately large element. However, the largest contingent among these immigrants come from the traditional reserve of unskilled labour that is Ireland, which now sends up to a third of its total population to the neighbouring island. The influx of coloured workers—mostly West Indians and Pakistanis—was effectively blocked in 1962 by discriminatory legislation.footnote¹ Non-manual and ‘white-collar’ occupations are in a phase of expansion, but this coincides with their assimilation to proletarian status, or at least their willingness to join trade unions. Since 1945, professions such as university teachers, bank employees, technical and ‘concept’ staff have been organized in earnest. More important still, the entry of large and hitherto independent organizations of clerical employees into the Trade Union Congress, the confederation of British unions with close ties to the Labour Party, is now freely discussed.

Examining the situation as a whole, there have been no surprising or dramatic changes in the class structure or the distribution of occupations in the country. Employers are still employers, even if the state features more prominently than before; workers have mostly remained workers, and those who do not live week-to-week or month-to-month by pay packet or cheque are increasingly rare. It is logical that, on average, the British are much better off. The simple fact that unemployment, which never fell below 10 per cent between the wars, has with rare exceptions been negligible since 1945, would in itself have guaranteed improvement. The social reforms of the 1945 Labour government have been an almost universal benefit, although paradoxically the class that has benefited most from them is less well-off salaried professionals rather than workers. This advance is so patent that until recently the persistence of poverty and appalling housing conditions was largely ignored. Last year, one in ten British citizens had to resort—at one time or another—to the National Assistance Board (the modern successor to the old Poor Law), and working-class life is still, in effect, a sentence of poverty. But the tv aerials, automobiles and washing machines that are becoming ever more common speak for themselves. From a material point of view, life for the majority of people is easier and better. For some groups, such as the relatively well-paid young in the few years between school and early marriage, it is much easier. Money and the certainty of being able to find a job afford them a measure of freedom—holidays and travel, for example—that workers certainly did not enjoy in the interwar period.

For several years, sociologists have, as a result, identified an embourgeoisement of the British working class. However, factual evidence tells against the idea that this has come about on any great scale. Nor is there any special reason why such a phenomenon should occur. It is simply petty-bourgeois shallowness to suppose that the only thing preventing the working class from adopting all the forms and values of middle-class life is a lack of money. Even to the extent that this is true, the relative prosperity of the majority of British workers has been too modest and fleeting to attain the standard of living that the advertising industry would like to force on them. For the majority of those who can afford cars and washing machines, these are useful objects, not symbols of social status. Their problem is still—too often—how to secure a decent livelihood, not ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. In any case, there are large sectors of the working class, especially in the old industrial regions, where common traditions survive uninterrupted. The Andy Capp cartoons, published by the most typical mass-circulation newspaper with a working-class audience, London’s Daily Mirror, continues to present the British worker dear to tradition, at home with his cloth cap, a fag in the corner of his mouth, in shirt-sleeves and braces, lording it over his wife as his grandfather did. And it is no accident that the most successful television series is Coronation Street, the never-ending epic of a working-class neighbourhood in a typical Northern industrial city.