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Antagonism against a neighbour feathering his nest tends to be replaced by an awareness of class inequalities.
    In a time of economic security, society therefore tends to look fairly cohesive, which is probably why in the early ’seventies a lot of people genuinely believed that class barriers had finally broken down; but, as the decade advanced, the working-class people who’d bought their own houses and were up to their necks in mortgage and hire-purchase payments suddenly found they couldn’t keep up. Their expectations had been raised, and now their security was being threatened by the additional possibility of mass unemployment. This discontent, fanned by the militants, resulted in the rash of strikes in the winter of 1978/79.
    Although the middle classes often think of the working-class man as earning huge sums on overtime, the rewards of his job in fact are much less. The manual worker seldom has job satisfaction or a proper pension; he doesn’t have any fringe benefits such as a car, trips abroad, expense account lunches and longer holidays; he has to clock in and out and his earning span is much shorter. Once his physical strength goes, he can look forward to an old age of comparative poverty and deprivation. This all results in workers avoiding any kind of moral commitment to the management. ‘We cheat the foreman,’ is the attitude, ‘he cheats the manager, and the manager cheats the customer.’
    Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy brilliantly summed up the workers’ attitude to them:
    ‘They are the people at the top, the highers up, the people who give you your dole, call you up, tell you to go to work, fine you, make you split up the family in the ’thirties (to avoid a reduction in the means test allowance) get yer in the end, aren’t really to be trusted, talk posh, are all twisters really, never tell yer owt (e.g. about a relative in hospital) clap yer in the clink, will do y’down if they can, summons yer, are all in a click together, treat y’like muck.’
    Because they dislike the management, the working classes don’t like people saving their money or getting on through hard work. They put a premium on enjoying pleasure now, drinking their wages, for example, or blowing the whole lot on a new colour telly. The only legitimate way to make money is to win it. Hence the addiction to football pools, racing, bingo and the dogs.
    Living from hand to mouth, they can’t manage their money like the lower-middles. When the army started paying guardsmen by cheque recently, my bank manager said they got into the most frightful muddles. If he wrote and told one of them he was overdrawn by £30, he promptly received a cheque for that amount.
    Traditionally working-class virtues are friendliness, co-operation, warmth, spontaneity, a ready sense of humour and neighbourliness. ‘We’re all in the same boat’ is the attitude. That ‘love’, still the most common form of address, really means something. They have been defined as people who belong to the same Christmas Club, characteristically saving up not for something solid, like the deposit on a house, but for a good blow-out. They have a great capacity for enjoyment.
    Because they didn’t have cars or telephones and couldn’t afford train fares, and the men tended to walk to work nearby, life centred around the street and neighbourhood. ‘Everyone knew your business,’ said one working-class man, so it was no good putting on airs because you earned more. The neighbours remembered you as a boy, knew your Aunt Lil, who was no better than she should be, and took you down a peg. The network acts as a constant check!
    Girls seldom moved away from their mothers when they married; sons often came home for lunch every day, or lived at home, even after marriage. The working-class family is much closer and more possessive. They seldom invite friends into the house.
    ‘I’ve never had a stranger (meaning non-family) in here since the day I moved