THERE’S no shortage of working-class cliches, from owning a whippet to working as a horny gamekeeper. But times change, and these are the signifiers of being working-class now.
Not having crippling debts aged 21
Tuition fees mean working-class people who didn’t go to uni get off to a flying start in life without £45,000+ debts, and graduates are understandably bitter. After all that shitty coursework and sleepless nights during A-levels it turns out your parents’ advice should have been: ‘James! Get back on the Xbox! If you don’t fail your exams you’ll never get on the property ladder!’
Shitty bingo games on phones
Betting has strong working-class associations, but cloth-capped miners smoking fags in dingy betting shops have been overtaken by mobile games called things like ‘Monte Carlo Bingo’, tapping into a new and massive market of working-class women with a shaky grasp of probability. Strangely games of chance have bypassed the middle-classes, which is probably just as well or there’d be yummy mummies boring you rigid about Emily placing her first accumulator at Ladbrokes.
St George’s Cross flags
Union Jacks were once perfectly adequate for everyone’s Royal wedding, warship identification and National Front membership needs. Then football-loving white van men started plastering their vehicles and homes with the St George version, often to a ludicrous extent. There are now probably thousands of former council houses that would instantly collapse without the red and white flags holding them together.
Trampolines
Trampoline ownership is rigidly split down class lines. If Britain ever has a bitter class-based civil war, middle-class troops could simply round up anyone with a trampoline and shoot them, although ‘The Argos Trampoline Massacre’ doesn’t have quite the same gravitas as 1905’s ‘Bloody Sunday’.
Random glowing things in gardens
Thanks to light-emitting diodes becoming incredibly cheap, proles have been able to fill their gardens with tat ranging from boss-eyed gnomes on glowing mushrooms to illuminated candy canes. Middle-class bastards can still have a good sneer at their lack of taste, so everyone’s a winner, apart from Chinese factory workers exposed to carcinogens on a daily basis while making frogs in waistcoats carrying lanterns.
Earning loads more than your social superiors
Historically, middle-class jobs meant you were comfortably-off and working-class people scrimped and saved their factory wages to afford net curtains and pies. Then a shortage of tradesmen and a housing boom meant lots of working-class people were earning much more than teachers and solicitors. And why not? Although it has created a whole new pastime for pub bores: telling anyone with a degree they ‘should’ve become a plumber’.
Exciting new fictional stereotypes
Proletarian characters in films and TV were once limited to overly-familiar roles like dimwitted blonde secretary, young man stifled by his working-class background, and sexually-incontinent window cleaner. All that has changed, and working-class people are now represented by much more realistic and relevant characters, eg. East End gangster, chav kid on a BMX and murdered Victorian prostitute.
