a snippet from Christina Odone's great article today...
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.