Book contents
4 - Class Resilience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2021
Summary
Megabucks. Wages. Interest. Wealth. I sniff and snuffle
from a whiff of pelf; the stench of an abattoir blown
by a stale wind over the fields. Roll up a fiver,
snort. Meet Kim. Kim will give you the works,
her own worst enema, suck you, lick you, squeal
red weals to your whip, be nun, nurse, nanny,
nymph on a credit card. Don't worry.
Kim's only in it for the money. Lucre. Tin. Dibs.
(Duffy 1994: 72)Alwyn Turner's compendious study, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (2013), ends after 574 richly observed pages seemingly contradicting its title. Turner writes of John Major and Tony Blair, that ‘both had sought to create a classless society, both had failed, with wealth inequality increasing and social mobility decreasing, and both found themselves ill at ease with the kind of classless culture that emerged instead’ (574). Turner adds that Major and Blair (and before them, Margaret Thatcher) had aimed to refashion Britain as a meritocracy, where ability was more pertinent and consequential than family background and traditional networks of social power. They hoped, he suggests, for a new elite based on talent, but that instead: ‘The dominant strand of culture that emerged in the 1990s was very anti-elitist, as expressed through the National Lottery, reality television, the internet and the celebration of Princess Diana and David Beckham’ (574). In bracketing Diana and Beckham, Turner blurs two conceptions of class: one, that of some vaguely understood but easy to concede aspect of ‘quality’, that both might exhibit due to supposed gifts of grace and beauty, or sporting prowess; the other, the division of a population in terms of socio-economic position and status. While both Diana and Beckham were certainly celebrities (the focus of the following chapter), and therefore drew upon the cachet that such status conferred in the 1990s, in British terms the son of an East End kitchen fitter and a hairdresser came from a very distinct and discernible social class than the daughter of British nobility, who seemed destined to become Queen of England.
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- Information
- Literature of the 1990sEndings and Beginnings, pp. 95 - 122Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017