Would you pass the BBC’s class test?

Here’s a question: what did your father (or, in some cases, your mother) do for a living when you were 14? Your answer could determine your chances of getting a job at the BBC, which has announced that by 2027, it wants a quarter of its staff to be from a working-class background – defined by the Social Mobility Commission as “the main parental earner” having a “low socio-economic or working-class occupation”.

Besides the substance of the BBC's pledge, its real problem is one of definition. It is much easier to categorise a person’s race, sex or disability than it is their class. Would you call Sir Keir Starmer working-class? His father was a toolmaker, so by the BBC’s standards he would count. But he went to a grammar school, was classmates with future Tory peer Andrew Cooper, and was a QC and Director of Public Prosecutions before becoming an MP and Labour leader. I wouldn’t have made it to the BBC thanks to my father’s City job, but plenty of his colleagues, especially those who worked on what was still then an open outcry trading floor at the Stock Exchange, were East End and Essex boys from working-class roots.

Class is our national obsession, with thousands of microsignifiers. Names, accents, vocabulary, education, address, clothing, political affiliation… all these and more help us pigeonhole others, often without even being consciously aware that we are doing so. Do you shower before or after work? Do you have your dinner in the middle or at the end of the day? Do you say “lavatory‘toilet” or “loo”, “serviette” or “napkin”, “settee” or “sofa”?

But the sands of these definitions are not immutable. Although the tripartite (upper, middle and lower class) division of the famous 1966 Frost Report sketch is still conversational shorthand, it feels too simplistic now. A 2013 BBC survey identified no less than seven social classes: the elite, established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, emergent service workers and precarious proletariat.

Two generations ago, private education was something which solid middle-class families could afford: now they have been largely priced out. Signet rings have expanded from posh to middle- and working-class, too; tattoos have gone the other way. Good luck finding a Conservative voter in a multi-million-pound Islington townhouse, but you will come across few fiercer Tories than in working-class Kent and Essex.

For every class signifier, there is not just an exception, but an equal and opposite. The true sign of class, of course, is to treat everyone you meet just the same.

Tim Stanley, leader writer

When I was 14, my father was unemployed, so I guess we were part of the non-working class.

He left school without qualifications and became an engineer, one of the Stakhanovite shock troops of BT (in work at 10am, home by 4pm). After privatisation, he got a company car, which was a mixed blessing. The vehicle had Cable and Wireless blazoned across both sides, making us look like a mobile billboard.

Mum came from a family of bohemians who had refused to work on principle (she also left school early, to tour the Caribbean and Australia). She married my father, I think, because he looked exotically ordinary. They scrimped and saved until they could afford a nice house in West Kent, and I was the great hope for class mobility.

Dad got the boot shortly after I joined the local grammar, and mum took several jobs to keep the mortgage going. My weekends were spent delivering leaflets and newspapers.

My father had what I guess would be diagnosed nowadays as a nervous breakdown. He got another job within a couple of years but never recovered his self-confidence. Poverty is humiliating. The school organised a two-day activity celebrating the EU (this was John Major’s Britain). They demanded we all contribute ten quid and I didn’t want to ask my parents for it. So, when a teacher demanded payment, I told her I thought the EU was rubbish and I was withholding our money in protest. From little acorns, Brexit grew.

We were not working-class, we were lower-middle-class, which the BBC wouldn’t begin to understand: people who are doing OK but are within one sacking or sickness of losing it all.

Martin Evans, crime correspondent

As laughable as it may sound coming from a Daily Telegraph journalist living in north London, I still consider myself to be working class. I’m not any more, obviously, but it’s all about your roots, innit?

I was brought up in a two-up, two-down in the North East. Dad was a fireman, my step-dad worked in a factory and my mother (or Mam as we say up our way) was a waitress. I went to a comprehensive school and was the first in my family to go to university.

So technically, I’ve got all the badges needed to qualify for the BBC’s new recruitment policy.

My children wouldn’t get a look-in though. They will have to fight it out with all the other middle-class kids in the ever shrinking pool of graduate schemes for non-quota jobs.

Even in 2022, class remains the one characteristic that too often defines a person’s life chances in this country. Social mobility is stalling and the cost-of-living crisis is only going to make things worse.

White working-class children persistently underachieve at school and the albatross of tuition fees means even fewer aspire to university. But what they lack in opportunity they often make up for in spark, determination and drive.

Schemes like this are not only a good idea, they are vital if we are to tackle one of the most lingering inequalities left in modern Britain.

So bravo BBC for lowering the ladder a little and recognising that true diversity is about more than just protected characteristics.

Boudicca Fox-Leonard, senior lifestyle writer

Aged 14 I was smacked in the face by a girl in the PE changing room. She had called me posh. My retort: “How can I be posh if I have to go to school with people like you?” Mean, yes, but she had just set fire to another girl’s hair.

Class, I learnt, is in the eye of the beholder.

Whenever I asked Mum (the Leonard in my name) what class we were, she would say “professional working class”.

At weekends my dad would don oily overalls and fix whatever was ailing the family car. The neighbours in our leafy Stockport suburb assumed he was a mechanic. Had that been the whole truth, then I would have met the BBC’s definition of working class.

Dad (the Fox) was the son of a lorry driver, he left school in north London without any qualifications to become an apprentice toolmaker on the Caledonian Road.

Yet he dreamt of something bigger. Night school, followed by the University of Manchester as a mature student, and he eventually became a chartered engineer.

Mum’s cursus honorum reads: council house, grammar school, mature graduate, Civil Service and then teaching.

I’m middle class today because grants meant my working-class parents could become graduates.

But no one ever expects to find Boudicca Fox-Leonard with a distinct northern twang.

Yes, I went to state school, but my home life was culturally rich, if not always financially. There were books and conversation, but no TV (or licence). It was an eccentric upbringing that defied class categorisation. And that, I’ve learnt, frustrates the type of people who work for the BBC.

Mutaz Ahmed, comment journalist

Let’s indulge the BBC’s tick-box exercise just this once. At 14 I was splitting my time between learning and caring for my single mother, a political refugee suffering the consequences of having been a journalist in a dictatorial country. I was on free school meals out of necessity. I lived in one of the poorest council wards in London – and still do. I knew boys who were stabbed to death.

Our household income, excluding benefits, was approximately zero. Yes, I am working class.

But telling this story is not how I got my job in the media. I got that by starting a political blog aged 16 which went viral, graduating twice before 22 and breaking stories as a freelancer. It is a testament to social mobility and equality of opportunity in this country that I was able to do all these things without the patronising discrimination of a quota scheme.

Some diversity programmes are designed in good faith, but all ultimately negate a person’s innate abilities and leave a cloud marked “positive discrimination” over the heads of every professional from a working class background. Is that not the opposite of equality?

If the problem is that BBC recruiters cannot be trusted not to judge on the basis of accent or skin colour, then the answer is to introduce more meritocracy, not less. Nameless CVs would be a good start.