'The great abdication' of the middle classes

Has a society ever changed so much, so quickly? In 1955, the American anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote: “The English are certainly among the most peaceful, gentle, courteous and orderly populations that the civilised world has ever seen. The control of aggression has gone to such remarkable lengths that you hardly ever see a fight in a bar and football crowds are as orderly as church meetings.”

Those words could hardly sound more hollow in the England of 50 years later, where anti-social behaviour prevails, where chief constables admit they have lost control of their cities, where feral children wander without restraint, where drug-taking and gun crime is rife, where family structures have broken down and authority has collapsed.

Mr Blair is quite right to speak of his anxiety about social decline, although his attitude smacks of hypocrisy, given that his government has wilfully dissolved so many of the bonds that used to hold our society together. From its vast expansion of the welfare state to its enthusiasm for uncontrolled immigration, New Labour has been an engine of social destruction.

It is a grim reflection of eight years of Labour rule that we now have among the highest rates of lone parenthood, pensioner poverty, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy in Europe, while standards of education and healthcare are falling.

But apart from the Government, there has been another guilty party in this sorry saga: the British middle class. In my view, the very people who should have been challenging the lack of respect and morality in modern Britain have been colluding with it.

The middle class used to form the conscience of the nation. Their values of respectability and decency were the guiding principles for society. At the turn of the century, for instance, many coalminers consciously modelled themselves on the best of the middle class, seeking to better themselves by establishing their own libraries, evening classes, and debating societies.

The essentially middle-class virtues of self-reliance, honesty, thrift and fidelity were widely promulgated, turning Britain into one of the most orderly societies the world has ever known, with crime rates and family breakdown just a fraction of those that exist today.

Aristotle said that the best state was one dominated by the middle class. That was certainly the attitude which prevailed in Britain until the late 1960s. But since then, in our age of social upheaval, that spirit has all but disappeared.

Middle-class values, once seen as something to aspire to, are now widely regarded as outdated, snobbish, irrelevant or shallow. For many, the desire to keep up appearances, to show restraint and dignity, are faintly disreputable or downright laughable.

As I explain in my new book, The Great Abdication, the great tragedy is that the middle classes themselves, supposedly the bedrock of our civilisation, have so willingly gone along with this change. Instead of standing up for their moral code, they have presided over its demise.

Unwilling to impose judgments on anyone, they have retreated into a private world of self-gratification and self-advancement, or, even worse, they have sought to pretend that they are not middle class at all.

Disguising their own affluent backgrounds, they glory in downward mobility, adopting the manners, outlook and the voice of the working class - the well-heeled university student from public school with the fake Estuary accent has become one of the more regrettable symbols of modern Britain.

One recent survey demonstrated that two-thirds of the population now consider themselves to be working class. Given the fact that Britain is now wealthier than ever before, with home ownership, car use and holidays abroad all at record levels, this is a patently absurd figure. But it shows how terrified people are of being labelled as middle class.

Rather than upholding their own role models, they revel in the unedifying exploits of downmarket celebrities like Wayne Rooney and his fiancée Coleen McLoughlin, the royal couple of Chav Britain. Where once the middle class strove to understand the higher aspects of culture, an outlook that led to the huge success of TV series like Kenneth Clark's Civilisation in 1969, today, they delight in following the inanities of Channel Four's Big Brother.

The ultimate middle-class film of the pre-1960s era was Brief Encounter, an intense drama about a doctor conducting a doomed, unconsummated affair with a married woman. The central theme was the conflict between their respectable values and their illicit love for each other. In the end, their middle-class morality triumphed. But it would be unthinkable to make such a movie today, when any restraint on passion is seen as ludicrous. In films, as in life, anything that smacks of restraint or dignity is seen as unduly repressive and out of touch.

To me, this social cowardice amounts to nothing more than an abdication of responsibility. There is nothing shameful about being middle class. Respectability is something to be proud of, not a cause for embarrassment.

So who are the middle classes today, and why have they casually abandoned what was once their central role in guiding and civilising society? The first question is far harder to answer than the second. The writer Patrick Hutber said that "motivation" was the key distinguishing quality of the middle classes. He used the word to describe a set of "virtues, aspirations and attitudes". This presents difficulties in defining the middle class of today, as it is my contention that these qualities have been largely and sometimes deliberately abandoned. We are left with broad qualities - education, income, occupation - which they have in common. But in short, you need only look around at Britain's comfortable majority to see that there is a middle class that is thriving as never before. The problem is that it doesn't act like one.

One reason is self-indulgence. Moral rigidity is demanding, especially in terms sexual and financial matters. In a society which places so much emphasis on personal freedom, it requires real toughness not to give in to the siren voices of licence and luxury.

This is particularly true in our climate of aggressive secularity, where the ethics of Christianity have been replaced by the code of individual rights.

The great 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke wrote, “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites”.

In modern Britain, few people would even know what moral chains are, never mind be inclined to wear them. As a result, those who should know better feel reluctant to say anything condemnatory about the ease of divorce, or having children out of wedlock, or smoking dope, or fiddling benefits - after all, such activities all too often happen in their own families.

Other factors have encouraged the middle classes in this direction. One is the enervating embrace of the bloated welfare state, which has all but destroyed the middle-class belief in independence. Social security used to exist for those in genuine poverty: now it covers almost every family in the country. There can be no greater indictment of the absurdity of the current regime than the fact that even a couple earning £64,000-a-year is eligible for means-tested child tax credits.

Another problem is the decline in educational standards. This has happened partly through the ideological destruction of the grammar schools, which used to inculcate middle-class values into pupils, and partly through the loss of authority by the teacher as a result of child-centred progressive teaching methods and the abolition of any kinds of discipline in the classroom.

But once more, the middle class have colluded with this disastrous revolution. In fact, many well-off parents have actually welcomed the dumbing-down brought about by grade inflation and the expansion of universities, because it feeds the illusion that their offspring are performing well.

On a deeper level, all the dominant cultural and intellectual forces of our age are now battling against traditional respectability, so it is understandable if the middle classes are inclined to give up the fight. Throughout the public services, the BBC, the universities, schools, the London literary scene, Westminster, local government, and the arts, notions of morality and domestic responsibility are seen as either ludicrously bourgeois or dangerously extreme.

Such ideas do not fit in with the all-pervasive agenda of social inclusion and non-judgmentalism. The values of suburbia have been turned into a source of shame. In the name of the war on elitism, university admissions, for example, are now quite explicitly biased against the middle class, while in publishing, authors are far more likely to see their books published if they can weave a tale of racism, poverty, child abuse or gritty back-street drama.

In our civic life, every fashionable ideology has been dragooned into the attempt to undermine the middle class. So multi-culturalism continually stresses the importance of diversity, warning against any imposition of a universal moral code. For the pseudo-Marxists who fill the higher ranks of the state sector and academia, every sign of middle-class elitism must be eliminated in what amounts to a new kind of cultural revolution. The burgeoning therapeutic and counselling industry encourages the belief that every feeling, no matter how reprehensible or enfeebling, is valid, that self-expression is all. In the same way, an army of lawyers encourage the shrill emphasis on personal rights rather than wider social responsibilities.

All this is the utter antithesis of traditional middle-class values of self-reliance, self-improvement and respectability. And it is no wonder that Britain is in such crisis, when the middle-class are taught to be ashamed of the very qualities that once built a cohesive society.

I believe it is time to stop wallowing in guilt and self-indulgence. No one is going to challenge the current disastrous drift of public policy except the middle classes. If they could only find the courage to speak out against vulgarity and barbarity, against communal neglect and neighbourhood indifference, then the tide might begin to turn and we could start to build a better Britain on the solid foundations that the middle classes once provided.

The fact that something is wrong with Britain does not mean that it is government's job to fix it. Indeed, it is this over-reliance on government that has led to some of this trouble in the first place, as government itself is often at fault. And, as individuals have abdicated responsibility, they have asked not what they can do for society, but when government is going to get round to doing it for them.

Passing laws is not the remedy. Increasingly, ours is a society governed by the letter of the law, rather than by a sense of what is right. Instead, we should insist that people know, or should, know, right from wrong, and understand basic human virtues. Government can only follow a moral agenda once it is given both the spur and the legitimacy to do so by popular opinion.

We must generate that opinion ourselves. No-one else will do it for us.