Cultural inequality is at the heart of the new class divide – Telegraph Blogs

Tuesday 30 June 2015 | Blog Feed | All feeds

Cultural inequality is at the heart of the new class divide

Looters raid an electrical shop in Birmingham last year (Photo: Reuters)

Inequality won’t go away. The gulf between rich and poor concerns conservative commentators more than almost any other issue, as rightly it should. Niall Ferguson was making the point over the weekend that, despite a widening gulf in American society, no Republican candidates wish to address the issue.

He cites the great Charles Murray, who wrote a piece in the Wall St Journal ahead of his book Coming Apart, which is worth reading for its entirety. Murray begins:






Murray goes on to point out the stark statistics of the American divide.

Comparing a typical middle-class and typical white working-class American neighbourhood, he looks at how they changed from 1960 to today. In 1960 94 per cent of whites aged 30-49 in middle-class neighbourhoods were married, compared to 84 per cent in the poor area. Today it is 83 and just 48 per cent respectively, meaning that the marriage gap has risen from 10 to 35 percentage points.

Then there is the percentage of children born to unmarried women; during this period this rose among the middle-class from 1 to 6 per cent; among the white working class it went up from 6 per cent to 44 per cent.

Likewise the proportion of economically inactive men in the lower-class neighbourhood rose dramatically from 1960 to 2008, at the start of the downturn, while among the wealthy it changed hardly at all.

Perhaps most striking, the crime rate in wealthy neighbourhoods remained the same from the mid-1960s, while in the poorer areas it increased six-fold from 1960 to 1995, and is today still 4.7 times what it was when John F Kennedy was elected.

Finally there is a religion, which among white Americans has become an increasingly upper-class pastime. This, Murray says, “runs against the prevailing narrative of secular elites versus a working class still clinging to religion, but the evidence from the General Social Survey, the most widely used database on American attitudes and values, does not leave much room for argument”.

In Britain the story is slightly different, in that we have always had a class divide which manifested itself in different manners, words and leisure pursuits, but much of Murray’s analysis could be applied here too.

In the UK marriage is increasingly a middle-class affair, while crime disproportionately hits poor neighbourhoods, and unemployment (especially youth unemployment) now vastly affects the less skilled compared to the skilled, far more than it used to. One of the most distinctive markers of the post-1960s British class system are the sports-casual style of clothes worn by what Ferdinand Mount called “the downers”; clothes that would be inappropriate in most occupations.

In many ways Britain’s new cultural class divide is more distinct than the old one; today one can usually tell a child’s social background just by their first name, with working-class children often no longer choosing the regal and biblical names which were once universal, and a sign of a shared culture. The difference, perhaps, is that the early 20th century working-class aspired to move up.

Inequality is a serious issue, but it’s not the simple matter of tax and spend that the Occupy movement would like it to be; rather, as Murray points out, cultural inequality is at its heart, and it will only start to narrow when society’s (mostly liberal) leaders re-introduce the social norms that provide a more level playing field.

As he writes:


The irony is that, for a 21st-century upper-middle-class that despises Victorian values more than anything else, nonjudgmentalism is just another form of ruling-class hypocrisy.

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