Class is not going anywhere any time soon!
As someone from a working-class immigrant family, politics wasn’t heavily emphasised in my life growing up. This is something most of us working-class folk have in common. However, this wasn’t the case for my middle-class pals who say that politics was at the centre of everything. These disparities are aided by the lack of information available to working-class people at home and schools, this creates a cycle of political alienation that’s hard to break away from and can sometimes persist for generations.
Before we begin, what is social class?
Social class, in short, is the stratification of people in society based on social and economic status. Gingrich (1999) suggests that for Marx, classes are defined and structured by the relations concerning work and labour and ownership.. and the means of production. In addition, Wright (2003) says class positioning is measured by “wealth” and “income” and individuals can move up and down the class ladder as they become more or less economically successful.
Now that we’ve come to grips with that, let’s look into social grading as a classification system for social class.
Figure 1.0 demonstrates the different social grades (Ipsos Mori 2009)
This structure groups people based on occupation with its six groups A, B, C1, C2, D and E which are often divided into ABC1 as the middle class demographic and C2DE as the working class. So what does this have to do with political participation?
Well, your social grade can be used to determine not only how you view politics but also how you participate. This inequality is further intensified as those who acquire more political knowledge tend to participate and turnout in higher numbers.
figure 3.0 shows the electoral turnout by social grade (Ipsos Mori, 2019)
People in the DE social grades are least likely to turnout: 53% were estimated to have turned out at the 2019 General Election, compared to 68% in the AB social grades (IPSOS Mori, 2019). In fact, the AB social grade had the highest level of turnout in all recent elections.
I mean, the statistics are unmistakable, working-class people are not politically engaged or at least not in the traditional sense like voting. But why ?…
It all starts in the home, cultural capital is vital in providing a foundation for future learning (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977), higher levels of civic knowledge associated with… self-efficacy and political interest are a contributor to citizenship participation (Fahmy, 2006, Schulz et l 2010). Things like reading books and taking part in social debates can equip young people with the necessary skills and knowledge to make informed decisions when they reach voting age. Working-class kids don’t receive political socialisation mainly because parents can’t transfer these skills as unequal economic conditions adversely impact the people with the fewest material resources (Wilkinson, 1996).
Photograph: Christopher Furlong (2020)
The Social Metrics Commission also said 7 million people, including 2.3 million children, were affected by persistent poverty, meaning that they were not only in poverty but had been for at least two of the previous three years. (The Guardian, 2019)
The same class inequality are rife in the education system.
As someone who has attended a comprehensive school, I did not witness participatory learning such as school councils, debates and mock elections. Citizenship education classes were non existant and I can imagine this to be the case for most working class students which puts them at the bottom of the social and educational pecking order.
Citizenship matters because it can act as a powerful exclusionary device ( Batsleer & Humphries 2000), children from low socioeconomic backgrounds don’t have the affluence for the private schools that offer political learning so they can’t benefit in the same way as middle-class children.
In fact, working-class kids are being impacted by government austerties as research sponsored by Kellogg’s (and undertaken by YouGov) has suggested that around 1 in 7 children were going to school hungry (Kellogg’s 2012).
All of these factors increase political apathy, those living in poverty who choose not to vote often feel completely excluded and disconnected from the political process (Guardian, 2017). Jennings, Stoker and Twyman (2016) found that people from C2DE grades were more likely to think politicians engaged in “self-serving behaviour and working in the interests of the rich and powerful”.
Mind you, this assumption is not too unreasonable since MPs earn more than the bottom 90% of the country (The Equality Trust, 2017). And to make matters worse, the proportion of ministers who went to independent schools is twice as high as Theresa May’s 2016 cabinet, at 64% (The Guardian, 2019).
Personally, I think the middle-class politicians of this country are completely out of touch with the people they are governing which can alienate the working-class voter. They are reinforcing the same inequalities that gave them the upper hand in the democratic system. Social class has been the spine of British politics and society, and in spite of the popular belief that we are becoming a classless nation, disparities in wealth distribution are just as high as they’ve always been (Jones, 2016).
References
Batsleer, J and Humphries B. (2000) Welfare, Exclusion and Political Agency. London & New York: Routledge
Available at: file:///Users/fardowsjama/Downloads/9780203978580_preview.pdf
Bourdieu, P and Passeron, J. (1977) Reproduction in education, society and culture. London:Sage.
Dorlin, D. (2015) Income inequality in the UK: Comparisons with five large Western European countries and the USA. Oxford: Elsevier Ltd
Gingrich, P. (1999) Introduction to Social Theory. University of Regina Available at: http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/s250f99.htm
Heath, O. (2016) Policy Alienation, Social Alienation and Working-Class Abstention in Britain, 1964–2010. Cambridge University PressAvailable at: doi:10.1017/S0007123416000272
Hoskins, B, Janmaat, G, J, Melis, G. (2017) Tackling inequalities in political socialisation: A systematic analysis of access to and mitigation effects of learning citizenship at school. Elsevier Inc
Ipsos MORI (2009) Social Grade, A Classification Tool. Available at: https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/publication/6800-03/MediaCT_thoughtpiece_Social_Grade_July09_V3_WEB.pdf
Jones, E. (2017) ‘These figures show how out-of-touch Uk politicians are from everyone else’. Available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/these-figures-show-how-out-of-touch-uk-politicians-are-from-everyone-else/
Krauss, M. (2015). The Inequality of Politics: Social Class Rank and Political Participation. IRLE Working Paper No. 120-15. http://irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/120-15.pdf
Smith, Mark K. (2014). The impact of austerity on schools and children’s education and well-being. The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education. Available at: [https://infed.org/mobi/the-impact-of-austerity-on-schools-and-childrens-education-and-well-being/.
The Equality Trust (2017) The Scale of Economic Inequality in the UK. Available at: https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk
The Guardian (2017) How poverty makes people less likely to vote. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/16/poverty-election-vote-apathy
The Guardian(2019) Two-thirds of Boris Johnson’s cabinet went to private schools. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jul/25/two-thirds-of-boris-johnsons-cabinet-went-to-private-schools
The Independent (2016) The real state of living below the poverty line in Britian. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/healthy-living/the-real-state-of-living-below-the-poverty-line-in-britain-a7484621.html
Uberoi, E and Johnston, U (2019) Political disengagement in the UK: who is disengaged?. Available at: file:///Users/fardowsjama/Downloads/CBP-7501%20(5).pdf
Wood, B (2014) Participatory capital: Bourdieu and citizenship education in diverse school communities. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 35:4, 578-597, DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2013.777209
Wright, E. (2003) Social Class. University of Wisconsin: Sage Publications
Available at: https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Social%20Class%20–%20Sage.pdf
Your insight on youth political participation is brilliant and it really encapsulates the struggles working class people are facing. You have clearly pointed out issues which disable youth participation (cultural capital, political socialisation) and it is important that you have provided some sort of solutions (participatory learning, citizenship education). The use of graphs was good, but at times I was a bit confused about all the letters and abbreviations and what they meant. Further, i think you could’ve made the blog look more attractive and detailed by using the tools provided on Campus press. Maybe you could’ve highlighted, underlined and made important words pop and stand out, it would’ve make the blog look more appealing.
All in all the information is well-thought, but you could’ve played more with the formatting.