A Review by Keith Smith
Whilst I read a terrific amount of non-fiction I don’t often find something in that category that I regard as a page-turner. This is one such book. Not only is it well-written, it is gripping, well-argued, thought-provoking and important. This is an updated edition of the book Ferdinand first wrote in 2004, and the basic premise is that there is a new class divide in Britain which is just as vicious and hard to get rid of as the traditional one.
Through acute observation and vivid illustration, drawing on every aspect of life from soap operas, speech patterns and gardening, to education and the distribution of wealth, he demolishes the illusion that we live in a classless society and shows how the worst-off in Britain today are more deprived culturally and in many other ways than their parents or grandparents. He piles evidence upon evidence to show how the working class has been consistently disempowered and leaves us breathless with indignity at the ways they have been denigrated by politicians, authors and commentators alike. The author’s solutions, like his explanations of what has gone wrong, are original, suprising and a liitle quirky. But then the whole point of this book is to get us to think for ourselves, and in that it succeeds admirably.
I found throughout that my understanding was being challenged. Take, in a historical context, authors as social commentators for instance. It was not only the likes of Mitford and Waugh who were happy to run down the lower classes..there was Forster and Woolf, Lawrence and T S Eliot, Shaw, Wells, Huxley and Gissing, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. I found it all rather astonishing. Then there is all the fascinating historical stuff about religion and the masses. I didn’t realise at all that the connection between the working classes and evangelism and nonconformity was so ruthlessly the subject of criticism and snide satire by the likes of Dickens and Trollope, nor that it caused quite such fear amongst the ruling classes.
Making liberal use of E P Thompson and other classic texts of working class history, Mount gives us a real lesson in how history is vital in building up context. And once we understand that, he launches us into more modern trends of state control, social housing, equality of opportunity, and the welfare state writ large, showing how the traditional self-help disciplines and tendencies of the masses have been undermined at every turn – leading to the creation of a dependency culture from which there is little hope of escape. It is all rollocking stuff. We may disagree with parts of the argument but not the whole. We have created a society in which there are simply, in his borrowed terminilogy, ‘uppers’ and ‘downers’, and in which the ‘uppers’ have very little real contact indeed with the ‘downers’, and certainly no understanding of them.
The weakest part of the book is the last chapter which deals with ’solutions’, and to be frank it is a bit of a cop-out after all that has gone before. A scatter-gun approach is suggested to raise the intellectual juices, as opposed to carefully thought through and costed proposals. And scatter-gun it is too, invoking three acres and a cow, John Lewis’s, and building on pristine ‘middle-class’ countryside. Nevertheless, this is certainly not to detract from the book as a whole which is one of the most refreshing things I have read in a long time. Superb, highly recommended, and essential reading for all politicians……
