I grew up in the north-east of England in a working-class household with no bathroom and an outdoor toilet. My father worked in the local steelworks, while my mother supplemented our modest income by working in a shop. It was a happy childhood, but it was not an easy one. Today, my life looks profoundly different. I am a successful journalist on a decent middle-class salary, living in Crouch End in North London—a bourgeois enclave favoured by well-to-do couples, where expensive cafes, nurseries, and Pilates studios abound.
The Illusion of Fixed Class Identity
So, am I still working class? Of course not. Class is flexible and transient. In contemporary Britain, it has become an increasingly nebulous concept that is almost impossible to define with any precision. Is the blue-blooded aristocrat without a penny to their name suddenly working class? Is the reasonably paid binman who reads Shakespeare and listens to Radio 4 somewhere in the middle? Class is complex, ineffable, and—quite frankly—an unhelpful category when it comes to serious policymaking.
A Flawed Blueprint for Change
This is precisely why I was enraged to read the report entitled Class Ceiling released earlier this week. It purports to be a 'blueprint for change', specifically within the creative industries where those from less affluent backgrounds have long been underrepresented. Of its 21 recommendations, the headline proposal is to make class a 'protected characteristic', pulling it in line with race, sex, and religion under the Equality Act.
The report, announced last September, is co-authored by University of Manchester Chancellor Nazir Afzal and former deputy general secretary of the National Education Union, Avis Gilmore. So, a pair of high-minded academics spent four months preparing a document which concludes that the 'working class'—whoever that now refers to—should be protected in the same way that women are. The very suggestion is lunacy. What would this entail? Private bathrooms for the working classes? Working class-only changing rooms? It is an insult to people like me who have spent decades fighting to keep women's rights protected.
The Political Abandonment of the Working Class
Now, do not misunderstand me. I understand all too well how those from humble backgrounds are routinely ignored, trampled over, and scoffed at by those with greater wealth and cultural capital. When I first left the north-east aged 17 to move south, I often felt sneering looks behind my back from those who felt I did not belong. The problem has only grown worse in recent years as politicians—particularly those on the Left—have abandoned the very people they were elected to protect.
The Labour Party today, far from being the party of the working class, is more interested in the petty woke qualms of the chattering classes in their Islington salons than the concerns of industrial workers in the north-east who are navigating low pay, zero-hour contracts, and poor-quality housing. Our society is undoubtedly classist, but that does not mean class should be made a protected characteristic. The reasons are three-fold.
Class is Not Fixed
Firstly, and I am living proof of this, class is not fixed. I retain close ties to family and friends in Darlington. But if they saw me sipping a £4 coffee in Crouch End with my well-to-do partner, they would laugh in my face if I claimed to still be working class. That does not mean my working-class roots are not still part of me, but, for better or worse, I now clearly exist in a different socio-economic space.
The Impossibility of Definition
Inevitably, in proving class to be flexible, I have brushed up against the second problem: class is now all but impossible to define. Back in the latter half of the 20th century, the working class consisted of coal miners, factory workers—all those engaged in primary industries toiling in typically manual jobs to provide just enough for their families. Those industries simply do not exist on the same scale anymore. With the desecration of industry, we have lost our collective understanding of class.
If something cannot be clearly defined, logically it cannot be protected. Otherwise, we would see huge swathes of the population identifying as working class simply to reap the benefits of privileged access to certain opportunities. This is already a systemic and exhausting phenomenon. Who could forget Victoria Beckham, in her husband's documentary released last year, claiming to be working class, only for David to poke his head through the door and point out that her father drove her to school in a Rolls-Royce?
Even more egregious is the privately educated commentator Grace Blakeley, who once claimed that her posh home counties upbringing does not 'define my class position, my relationship to the [capitalist] production process does'. A YouGov poll from December 2024 found that a staggering 56 per cent of the population identify as working class. The more formal National Readership Survey estimates the correct figure is closer to 43 per cent. In a world where everyone claims to have had it hard, considering yourself working class has become a default option. And if it is made a protected characteristic, it will be abused by those who know how to play the system.
Eroding Protections for Immutable Traits
The final reason why class must not be made a protected characteristic is that it further reduces the sanctity of those immutable traits we should be doing more to protect. Namely, biological sex. Over the past four decades, I have been working to keep women and girls safe. Without a doubt, there has never been a greater threat to this safety than the rise of the trans lobby, which has sought to undermine the sanctity of womanhood by opening it as a category for everyone from the mentally unwell to sexual predators and narcissists.
As protections for truly immutable characteristics are being eroded, it is absurd to start protecting more opaque ones. A protected characteristic is something a person has to live with whether they like it or not, such as gender or race. Class is not set in stone.
A Romanticised and Outdated View
This report, however, seems to believe and indulge in an outdated, romanticised view of class. It likes to think of the working class as they exist in the cinematic imagination: homemade scones, cobbled streets, close-knit families and hardened men in their Sunday best propping up the bar at the working men's club. But life is not a Hovis advert. This interpretation is not only a lie but an insulting one at that.
Class is important to me. I know full well how my working-class upbringing has informed my values and my work. But making class a protected characteristic is for the birds. It is a poorly conceived idea that fails to grasp the fluid reality of modern British society and risks diluting the vital legal protections for characteristics that truly define us.
