Will the worldwide economic shock eclipse that experienced in the global financial crisis? It’s too early to be sure, but some think it might.

We could do worse than take a steer from the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, in resolving that any pessimism bedevilling our intellect during these troubled times will serve to ignite the optimism of our will – in particular, the knowledge that we have the ability, as a people and nation, to apply the correct solutions to overcome whatever destruction the virus might wreak upon us.

The question, of course, is what those ‘correct solutions’ might look like, in the event that the worst-case scenario, or something like it, comes to pass. And that presents a conundrum which has the potential to split British politics down the middle (again) and dramatically recast established thinking.

Would the Government default to the nostrums which have held sway for over four decades, and assert that the appropriate response to a floundering economy is a heavy dose of austerity, and that any fiscal deficit is best and most swiftly reduced through heavy cuts to public expenditure?

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Covid-19 has exposed our financial fragility

By Jonathan Tepper

Or would it learn the lessons of the past 10 years — not to say those of previous global economic catastrophes — that slamming on the brakes at a time when everyone else, households and businesses, are retrenching is the worst possible medicine. It is, of course, the job of government at such times to lean against market logic by maintaining economic activity and levels of employment through spending — thereby ensuring, too, that tax revenues remain sufficiently buoyant to allow for a faster reduction in the deficit.

If it’s the latter, then we are in for a fundamental reordering of economic priorities that might herald a welcome end — in Britain, at least – to the neoliberal orthodoxy that has dominated the approach of Western governments since the mid-1970s.

In normal times, of course, there would not be an earthly expectation that the Tories would entertain such a radical shift in thinking. It would go against all their natural instincts (well, their instincts since at least the days that Ted Heath was leader). But, this time, any economic crisis would take place against a quite different political backdrop to previous such episodes.

For a start, the Tories have just secured a thumping parliamentary majority by winning the support of working-class England. These are voters often inhabiting deprived towns across the post-industrial north and Midlands — Labour’s old Red Wall seats — who, in many cases, stuck a peg on their nose and voted Conservative for the first time. They will justifiably be looking for payback for having made such a sacrifice, and another long bout of economic hardship when they have barely caught their breath from the last lot will go down like a cup of cold sick. The electoral consequences for the Tories in such a scenario would surely be profound.

Suggested reading

Who will pay for this Covid catastrophe?

By Peter Franklin

The authenticity of pre-lockdown Tory intimations of a more interventionist approach designed to bring investment and opportunity to these places will be severely tested when the bill for the virus eventually lands. For it is then that the Tories will be presented with the choice between abandoning 45 years of economic orthodoxy and forfeiting the trust of their new supporters.

In the context of the sudden materialisation of a multi-billion pounds rescue package designed to tackle the immediate dangers, any future quips about “magic money trees” or “Soviet-style economics” will ring decidedly hollow. The money is there. It always was.

And, so the argument will go, if we can direct it towards protecting jobs and industry from the economic shockwaves caused by a pandemic, we can direct it towards supporting job creation and reindustrialisation in the Redcars and Blyth Valleys when the health crisis passes. After all, there are, as John Maynard Keynes contended, “no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital”.

Any wrong approach on the economy would only deepen social inequalities and injustices. Already the virus is throwing these into sharp relief. The rest of us look on as the more hard-pressed within our society struggle to navigate the lockdown. I’m talking about those who are living in cramped and substandard housing, or in densely-populated areas where green spaces are in short supply, or where a lack of educational resources at home means that children may fall behind academically, or where Mum or Dad have jobs — such as in manual labour or the essential services or industries — which preclude their working from home and compel them to take risks with their health.

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Will Gen Z recover from Covid?

By Matthew Goodwin

We see, too, the elderly of all classes living lives of lonely (and literal) isolation with no end in sight. Little wonder that some of them would sooner step outside and take their chances against the virus than endure more weeks of solitary confinement.

All of this would be made worse if the long-term economic prescriptions meant more crippling austerity and, by extension, deeper privation and the gradual disappearance of more day centres, youth services, libraries and other community outlets that provide a lifeline for the disadvantaged and marginalised.

Much has been said and written about how the Covid-19 crisis has the potential to reshape our world, with activists and commentators asserting that these events have proved them right all along. That was perhaps to be expected. But there can be no denying that the crisis will in the coming months present us with a crunch moment in British politics.

The working-class heartlands, once red, now blue, are the new battleground. The way they respond to the economic crash seemingly coming our way may well determine how long the Tories hold on to them.

My secondary school didn’t so much serve its pupils, but rather humiliated, discouraged and neglected them. As far as most of the teachers there were concerned, it was more a holding pen for the dregs of society than a place of education and improvement. I was once invited back to open a new wing of the school – given that I have a public profile and media career.  I told the person on the other end of the phone to shove their invitation right into detention.

Branksome Comprehensive served the 1,200 children on the council estate where I lived in Darlington. Though ‘served’ is perhaps an overstatement. Finding themselves teaching in a sink school, the teachers there subjected my schoolfellows and I to humiliation and violence at worst, and prejudice and indifference at best. Essentially, we were set up to fail.

In 2007, I wrote an article about someone whom I had known at Branksome; he ended up homeless and later in prison for murdering his ex-girlfriend. It prompted me to look into what happened to some of the other kids who had been there with me. I discovered that a number of them were serving life sentences for serious crime. Others had experienced different kinds of hardship. A mere handful had gone on to further education.

I started in Branksome in 1973, aged 11. My older brother Paul had already been there for a year, and, being a bit of a naughty child, had earned a reputation as a ‘troublemaker’. He didn’t do anything terrible, he just refused to be shoved around by a group of teachers who could not care less about his past, present or future. He did tell me he was caned 18 times one day as the teachers were ‘testing out’ three new canes recently acquired. Often, they would run at the kids to ensure they could lash them harder.

I remember my first day there, feeling shy and self-conscious, sitting in the school assembly as the Head Teacher addressed us all. I wasn’t particularly listening to him waxing lyrical, until I heard my name. He was pointing at me, shouting, “There we have one pupil to look out for. Julie, stand up.” He then began to tell the entire school that I would very likely be disruptive, because my brother was. It was an appalling start.

I had been a well-behaved and studious child in my primary school, which was set back behind the estate. That school was not purpose-built to contain ‘feral children’ as Branksome was. When I started secondary school, I was good at all the basic subjects, and even top of my maths class. And then the rot set in.

Something like 98% of my fellow students were from fairly poor, working-class backgrounds; there were one or two middle-class kids who had somehow ended up there. I soon made friends with a spirited girl who had moved from Newcastle and couldn’t find a school place in the middle-class area where she lived. She joined mid-term, and we soon became close. The English teacher, who seemed to dislike me, took umbrage at the fact that a posh girl wanted to hang out with a rough lass. The pair of us soon became demoralised, acted up, and were regularly sent to be caned, on the back of the legs and on the palms of our hands.

My mother used to say that the best education system was the grammar school. She had grown up in a traditional working-class family, and, as an extremely bright child, had sat the entrance exam for the local grammar. She passed. But when it became clear how much her parents would have to pay for her uniform, her books, and the regular field trips, they told her she couldn’t go, so she was sent to the local sink school.

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How I overcame my class stigma

By Roger Scruton

When I would come home and tell my mum how horrible Branksome was, and how the teachers didn’t care about us, she would put it down to the fact that it wasn’t a grammar school – its standards just weren’t particularly high. But I gradually became aware that the teachers simply thought we were ignorant and useless; they believed we would never usefully contribute to society. They had a vision for us that did not involve sixth form college, let alone university. As far as they were concerned, we were headed for the factory or a cleaning job, and there was no point giving us anything other than the most basic education.

But grammar schools aren’t the answer that so many, including my mum, think they are. They would not solve the problem of bad comprehensives. On the contrary, they would, as the evidence shows, widen the gulf between the poorest, most disadvantaged children and those who are given a leg up into the grammar school system. What we need to do is to improve comprehensive schools – and find a way to stop thinking of them as dumpsters for society’s forgotten kids.

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My social mobility shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Children denied access to a decent quality education are also being denied the opportunity to reach their potential. The chasm between middle and working-class kids in terms of social status, earning power, confidence and the ability to interact across different communities – and even to raise the next generation – is well established within the first 18 months of secondary school. A culture of low expectation for children translates into underachieving children.

I should know. I underachieved throughout my time at Branksome. I swiftly dropped to the bottom of the class in every subject except for English literature. I only persevered at that because my escapism was imagining myself as a writer; I can’t give any credit to the teacher, who once said to me, “You won’t want to read Shakespeare, you won’t understand the message.” I had as much chance of understanding the ‘message’ as anyone else. I was bright. But I was not from the ‘right sort of family’.

It was a vicious circle. The more the teachers put me down, the more I rebelled and refused to interact. I fell behind in all of my subjects, and on the first day of my final year, after a liberating six weeks of summer holiday, I turned up – only to turn abruptly on my heel and walk away from the school.

I returned only on the odd occasion, to sign the register so that my parents wouldn’t get a visit from a school inspector. I missed my mock exams and took no O-levels. No one thought to ask where I was. On the day I went to collect my National Insurance Card, the head teacher, who suddenly seemed to remember me, told me: “You will amount to nothing.”

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Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

We all know that the quality of teaching makes the most difference to the progress of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Often, the teachers simply have to show an interest in the student – and take five minutes to get to grips with what the barriers to their learning are.

Improving the chances of kids in schools like Branksome might not even require more funding. It may be down, in part, to recognising that our state school system is riddled with class prejudice.

The most feted name in television right now is Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator and star of the television series Fleabag, and the writer of the first series of the equally exalted Killing Eve. Waller-Bridge deserves the praise heaped upon her. That she is a woman is also cause for celebration, given the scores of male writers that have long inhabited TV’s lauded list. But the fact that she is the privately-educated granddaughter of a baronet is hard to ignore. Since Fleabag ended, the protagonist’s poshness, and her “relatability” to non-posh viewers, has been a matter of exhaustive online debate. But more significant, surely, is how Waller-Bridge’s privileged status has helped clear her path to success.

Last year, a report from Create London and the charitable foundation Arts Emergency looked at class and inequality in the cultural industries, and found that only 12.4% of those working across film, TV and radio had “working-class” origins. The figures were even worse for BAME workers, at just 4.2%. A review from the media regulator Ofcom, published last autumn, offered a marginally brighter picture, noting that “diversity and inclusion are an increasingly core focus of the BBC’s agenda”, and that there is a “more nuanced approach to understanding and measuring representation and portrayal”. It did, however, acknowledge that there is more work to be done.

Further reading

The invisibility of disability on screen

By Ian Birrell

The problem of TV’s class ceiling can be found at every level of the food chain, from the commissioning editors whose decisions are influenced by their own biases and experience, to the script editors second-guessing the commissioning editors’ tastes, all the way down to those in graduate schemes and entry-level roles, often working for peanuts with the help of parental support.

Lisa McGee, the Northern Irish writer of Channel 4’s BAFTA-nominated Derry Girls, says that in the early stages of her career she had assumed “you just work hard, and talent will out”. But her attitude changed. “I have had my eyes opened. It’s not just the writers, it’s the people in the room with the writers. I find myself in rooms with script editors who are all lovely, clever people, but a lot have gone to Cambridge and Oxford, and that affects the storytelling. And the accents you’re hearing are pretty revealing. I’m conscious that a lot of people don’t understand what I’m saying.”

At the heart of the debate is authenticity: Shane Meadows, the son of a fish-and-chip-shop-worker mother and a lorry-driving father, doubtless knows of what he speaks when writing about working-class lives on housing estates in his This is England series. At the other end of the social strata, you sense that Lord Fellowes of West Stafford knew a thing or two about the early 20^th-century aristocracy before he sat down to write Downton Abbey. While no one’s suggesting you have to be a space traveller to write a sci-fi drama, an emotional connection to your subject is broadly seen as good thing.

Further reading

Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

There is an increasing number of initiatives aimed at opening the door to less privileged young writers – last year the BBC launched two schemes, one offering training to 50 school students to help them secure BBC roles, and another, based in Cardiff, offering ten traineeships to “high potential raw talent”. Meanwhile the Edinburgh TV Festival has launched the 2019 New Voice Award designed to make the industry accessible to marginalised writers.

But as well-intentioned as these schemes are, the broader impact is negligible. As Lisa Holdsworth, writer of Midsomer Murders and Call the Midwife, and the deputy chair of Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, explains:

“The things that get in the way of diversity, gender equality and multiple voices on television from different social backgrounds are all down the same thing: it’s people getting commissioned on a nod and a wink, and the sense that people who are not white, cis-gendered, and middle-class are a risk.”

Holdsworth says that the Guild has spoken to scores of commissioners who “genuinely think they have open doors. They think it doesn’t matter whose name is on the front of the script just as long as it’s a good story”.

What they are not doing, however, is looking at how the scripts land on their desks. “You’ve got to get through lots of gatekeepers before you’re even close to the door,” Holdsworth explains. “They need to look at the people who are bringing the work to them. That’s production companies, development producers and in-house editors, all of whom are looking for lower risk stuff. So that’s a narrowing of the field right there.”

Further reading

Why don't we talk about television anymore?

By Peter Franklin

A further narrowing of the field occurs in the actors who make it to the screen. It pays to be privileged. In a recent interview, the actor Vicky McClure, currently on our screens as DI Kate Fleming in Line of Duty, spoke of the advantages enjoyed by actors who have never faced financial hardship. “I have friends who are millionaires. I have friends who are piss-poor. I know that at the end of the day you can’t help what you are born into, that it doesn’t make you less talented… But I just find it frustrating that if you haven’t got funds, you haven’t got the same opportunities.”

For young actors and writers attending state school, the doors begin to close during secondary education, with subjects such as drama, music and theatre studies the first to be squeezed as budgets come under pressure. Small wonder our actors and TV executives are still disproportionately privately educated.

Once you’ve overcome those barriers, there is also the problem of typecasting. In 2016, the actress Maxine Peake complained: “If you’re a northerner, you only play one character and that’s northern… Nobody says, ‘Oh, Judi Dench is doing it posh again’.” Eyebrows were raised when the Eton-educated actor Dominic West was asked to adopt a Yorkshire accent for his role as Valjean in Les Misérables. It would, said the director, help audiences understand the social divisions in Victor Hugo’s novel and the character’s earthy, peasant roots. Because, while TV viewers may not be au fait with the literary classics, we all know that anyone north of Peterborough lives in a bog and subsists on a diet of raw turnip.

Further reading

Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

There is a distinction, too, in how plots vary according to the backgrounds of the protagonists. The storylines of working-class characters and are invariably issue-led, and involve trauma or deprivation – recent examples include Three Girls, about the Rochdale child sex abuse ring, starring Lesley Sharp and Maxine Peake; and Happy Valley, with Sarah Lancashire. In both dramas the protagonists’ class is integral to their identity.

“I would love us to be able to tell the stories that anyone can tell, only with working-class characters,” explains McGee. “But it’s as if being working-class has become a genre of its own.”

Inequality off-screen is actively reinforced by the stereotyping on-screen, an endless cycle of marginalisation and ghettoisation – and misunderstanding. This seems especially galling in what is, we are forever being told, a golden era of television.

But as arts budgets shrink and risk-averse TV networks look for guaranteed hits, it’s always the supposedly niche or challenging work that is first to go. If the aim of art is truly to imitate life, though, then the networks need to do more to dismantle the barriers encountered by those unable to rely on benevolent parents or a fallback job in the City. A lot of white middle-class types working behind the scenes making key decisions inevitably leads to a lot of stories about the white middle-class – or, worse still, stories of other cultures and classes told through the same old middle-class lens. And TV is the poorer for it.

Not so long ago I was chatting to an urbane young businessman at a London party: after a few minutes he raised his eyebrows and asked: “And… you went to school?” It took a second before I realised he wasn’t questioning whether I had had any formal education, but using the old code Etonians employ when referring to their College.

It is a masonic handshake, but so very much more exclusive. It is a nod to understood values along with a wry acknowledgement of the self-regarding uniqueness of the place. These codes, the jokes and their understanding are a small but not insignificant part of the package for which my parents, and my grandparents, and several generations before them, paid all that money.

Suggested reading

Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

For a long time I told myself that a few years at Eton hadn’t meant very much to my life. After all, it was not a long stint – as I made clear to that smooth OE (old Etonian) and do to anyone else who brings it up – I was ejected after less than three years, at 16 (for smoking, drinking and suspected homosexual tendencies beyond the norm).

I was quite proud then that Eton’s quality control system had found me wanting; I was pretty sure I didn’t want any more of what the school offered and I was not unaware of the hallowed line of Eton rejects and rebels for whom life turned out interestingly. In the time of The Jam’s ‘Eton Rifles’ being expelled from Eton was pretty cool.

But I realise now that I am indelibly marked by the place, as I am by the values and rules of the class that used it. It’s like a tattoo you got on a drunken night long ago and which peeks out from your sleeve to embarrass. It’s not that it helped fast-track me to university, or into a top job. I spent my 20s and 30s working in Left-wing theatre and then centre-Leftish journalism, and while hardly meritocratic, being an old or ex-Etonian wasn’t an obvious advantage in those fields. Not as much as was being white, male and privileged.

Suggested reading

Why 'separate but equal' is a fraud

By Polly Mackenzie

Privilege is a difficult concept – a word thrown around to the extent of losing much usefulness. But it is of enormous importance when you weigh up class and Britain today. It means more than entitlement: it is the ownership of a range of tools that, as any self-help book will tell you, are useful for a traditionally successful life. Self-confidence, self-belief, persuasiveness, and what used to be called ‘clubbability’.

I know an old Etonian who makes part of his living touring private schools giving lectures to the pupils on “charm” and how it gets you everything – headmasters’ wives love him.

Privilege gets many unquantifiable things that can turn out to be of enormous value: an understanding of how clubs and networks function, connections, a stamp of acceptability based on unspoken shared beliefs.

It is a freemasonry, and membership translates into jobs, wealth and power: it’s no wonder that the proportions of judges and senior lawyers, of armed forces top brass, of politicians and senior business leaders who were privately educated today is pretty much what it was 50 years ago. It works – a place at Eton for your son is not a bad bet, if you can afford it. The prizes are huge, and the odds on getting them still pretty favourable.

Politicians, both Left and Right, have attempted to address the gross inequality the system clearly perpetuates ever since Churchill encouraged Rab Butler to democratise the public schools during the war (see David Kynaston and Francis Green’s recent Engines of Privilege: the British Private School Problem for a fascinating history of this political failure).

Suggested reading

Elitist Britain is a closed shop

By Paul Embery

Yet while the products of public schools have always been among the institutions’ worst enemies, the institutions themselves have proved remarkably resilient. It is born of an inherent flexibility, the quality that has kept my class in power in Britain for so many centuries. You can come in, if you’ve got the money, or the brains, or the looks. It worked and still does: if it did not, the British would surely have risen and torn down those spires long ago.

There are two things around today that might challenge this long-fossilised situation. The first is financial. Eton – and everywhere like it – is very, very expensive today. It always was: 70 years ago the annual fee was “about the same as a Rolls-Royce, or keeping a mistress in Maida Vale,” as an old joke has it. But when my parents sent me there in 1974 the basic charge was £861, the equivalent of £9000 today. In 2019, a year at the school costs nearer £42,000, before extras.

Even at a private day school, the average is £15,000. Across the boarding sector fees are up 50% in 10 years. Sums like these can only hurt the traditional public-school customer base, the squirearchy and the professions. Can Etons populated solely by the children of the super-rich and a few scholarship-holders survive the political clamour to remove the tax-breaks and the schools’ (indefensible) status as charities?

My other thought is more speculative. I wonder if the Eton brand is now gravely tarnished. Many charges are commonly laid against Etonians and their class – arrogance, greed, callousness, and that’s just to start – but I think their fatal flaw might be an inherent lack of seriousness. “We are often told that they taught us nothing at Eton. That may be so, but I think they taught it very well.” said General Herbert Plumer – one of the “donkey” leaders of the first world war – when addressing an Old Etonians’ dinner in 1916.

Suggested reading

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

I think of Plumer when I read Boris Johnson at his bombastic heights. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t really mean it. Etonian humour is a lovely thing – there’s a strong tendency to self-deprecation that seems very healthy – but it may also cover up many failings. Particularly when coupled with the abiding sense that the destiny, by right, of a young man leaving the school is to go out and make the world a better place.

The system seems – dangerously – to produce people who look like leaders, talk like leaders, but don’t lead very well at all. It is an old charge, but the list of failed Etonians is long today. At its top is David Cameron, the amiable schoolboy who liked a game of poker, and went on to take unforgivable gambles with Britain’s future, the price of which we are all now paying.

Your reaction to all this may well depend on where you went to school, or indeed if you went to “school”. But let me leave you this, from Alec Waugh. His account of Sherborne, The Loom of Youth, was published in 1919, to outrage at what now seem the tamest scenes of homosexual yearning. But it is the teenage Waugh’s savage assault on the public-school class and its hypocrisies that is more interesting. And yet, like most ex-public school boys, Waugh is, ultimately, ironic and ambivalent:

“He is selfish, easy-going, pleasure-loving, absolutely without a conscience. But he is a jolly good companion and the Freemasonry of a Public School is amazing. No man who has been through a good Public School is an outsider. He may hang around the Empire bar, he may cheat at business; but you may be certain of one thing, he will never let you down. Very few Public School men ever do a mean thing to their friends. And for a system which produces such a spirit as this there is much to be said after all.”

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?