Post by Teddy Bear on Apr 3, 2013 14:45:20 GMT
An article about the attitude of the BBC to the middle classes.
Why BBC Lefties hate being 'middle-class'
By Cristina Odone
The BBC has unveiled its "Great British Class Calculator" – and everyone's doing it. We are supposed to answer questions (based on research from the LSE) ranging from who we know socially – teachers, lorry drivers or CEOs – to whether we're home owners or tenants. Our answers determine which class we belong to.
It's a great wheeze, and shows that the Beeb knows that it's lying when it proclaims that "traditional British social divisions of upper, middle and working class seem out of date in the 21st century, no longer reflecting modern occupations or lifestyles".
Britons are as class-obsessed as ever. The only difference is that inverse snobbery is so widespread – especially at the BBC – that no one wants to be middle-class anymore. So Twitter has been spluttering all morning with Lefties who want more than anything to be "working-class", but fail miserably because they have a mortgage and hang out with university profs. Damn it, they're thinking: there goes my chance to be on the Today programme or Newsnight.
It's perverse, isn't it? I'm deep in Servants, Lucy Lethbridge's excellent book about Britons on the bottom rung of society. The parlour maids spent their entire lives trying to scrape a bit of money together to afford to leave service and work in a position that would allow them to climb the social ladder. Their common dream was to make it into the middle classes.
Little did they know that a time would come when being middle-class would prevent them from having a voice. I blame the BBC. It has been playing at social engineering for years now. Its regionalist agenda has been exposed as costly and ineffective. Its amusement at the concept of "posh" has yielded a few entertaining shows, of the "Trinny and Susannah" kind, and means the unashamedly upper-class Jacob Rees-Mogg MP can feature on Question Time panels. But its true obsession is with being working-class, which keeps the likes of Owen Jones in clover: he is not only working-class and Left-of-centre, but he is young enough to know that this is what everyone with pretentions to speak for "the people" must be. Watch him on the telly and he milks his background for all it's worth. And who can blame him? A warning, though: don't tone down the Northern accent, Owen, or the invitations to Broadcasting House will dry up.
By Cristina Odone
The BBC has unveiled its "Great British Class Calculator" – and everyone's doing it. We are supposed to answer questions (based on research from the LSE) ranging from who we know socially – teachers, lorry drivers or CEOs – to whether we're home owners or tenants. Our answers determine which class we belong to.
It's a great wheeze, and shows that the Beeb knows that it's lying when it proclaims that "traditional British social divisions of upper, middle and working class seem out of date in the 21st century, no longer reflecting modern occupations or lifestyles".
Britons are as class-obsessed as ever. The only difference is that inverse snobbery is so widespread – especially at the BBC – that no one wants to be middle-class anymore. So Twitter has been spluttering all morning with Lefties who want more than anything to be "working-class", but fail miserably because they have a mortgage and hang out with university profs. Damn it, they're thinking: there goes my chance to be on the Today programme or Newsnight.
It's perverse, isn't it? I'm deep in Servants, Lucy Lethbridge's excellent book about Britons on the bottom rung of society. The parlour maids spent their entire lives trying to scrape a bit of money together to afford to leave service and work in a position that would allow them to climb the social ladder. Their common dream was to make it into the middle classes.
Little did they know that a time would come when being middle-class would prevent them from having a voice. I blame the BBC. It has been playing at social engineering for years now. Its regionalist agenda has been exposed as costly and ineffective. Its amusement at the concept of "posh" has yielded a few entertaining shows, of the "Trinny and Susannah" kind, and means the unashamedly upper-class Jacob Rees-Mogg MP can feature on Question Time panels. But its true obsession is with being working-class, which keeps the likes of Owen Jones in clover: he is not only working-class and Left-of-centre, but he is young enough to know that this is what everyone with pretentions to speak for "the people" must be. Watch him on the telly and he milks his background for all it's worth. And who can blame him? A warning, though: don't tone down the Northern accent, Owen, or the invitations to Broadcasting House will dry up.
