Covid pandemic has exposed Britain's class divide that can be a matter of life and death – Susan Dalgety

I failed Darren McGarvey’s working class test on Tuesday night. I don’t shop at Greggs, have never drunk Buckfast and with thighs like mine, leopard-print leggings are a big no-no, even if I was tempted.

Susan Dalgety failed part of the working-class test in BBC documentary series Darren McGarvey's Class Wars, but didn't do much better at the middle-class one either

I didn’t fare much better with his middle-class one, as I dislike opera intensely and have never skied.

Author and rapper McGarvey has a new four-part documentary on BBC Scotland, Darren McGarvey’s Class Wars, where he explores Britain’s class system. During the first episode he carried out a vox-pop in Dundee, where he asked random passers-by what items represented working class. Leopard print-leggings are most definitely proletarian.

Interestingly, he concluded a person’s accent and language is one of the biggest signifiers of class. “I don’t speak or rap that differently from how Robert Burns writes,” he said, in his unmistakable working-class Glasgow accent. “But things receive cultural prominence because upper-class people like them; middle-class people mimic upper-class people, and this becomes the canon.”

On that basis alone, I am most definitely working class. My accent was formed in deepest rural south-west Scotland. Think Burns with a hint of Northern Irish, honed in one of Edinburgh’s largest housing schemes, Wester Hailes, and roughened by years of smoking.

To my American friends I have a “really cute” accent. To your average middle-class Scot, I sound like an east coast Janey Godley, without the charm. I would not get a job as a BBC continuity announcer, even as diverse as the institution is now.

Burning with righteous anger

But my voice is not the only thing that marks me out as working class. My ancestors, on both sides of my family, were agricultural workers, first in Ireland, then in Scotland where they fled for food.

I grew up in a tied cottage, where the roof over our head depended on my father’s employment, and I brought up my two sons in a flat in a housing scheme. My career, littered with spells as a local politician, civil servant and writer, shrieks middle class, but my small two-bedroom tenement flat suggests struggling freelancer rather than comfortably off.

My sons work in construction, driving a variety of vans – some white. Several members of my family, who will remain forever anonymous, even voted to leave the EU. And today, I burn with the same righteous anger about the social divisions that scar this country as strongly as I did when I was an active member of the Labour Party.

So, Darren, I may not like Gregg’s sausage rolls, but I am most definitely working class… with pretentions of bohemia.

But does class really matter anymore? Surely Scotland is a meritocracy, where anyone with talent can rise to the highest level. After all, our own First Minister grew up in a council house, at least until her parents exercised their right to buy it.

Expensive, bad-quality housing

Our universities – accessible only to a privileged few as recently as the 1980s – are now bursting at the seams with young Scots. And anyone with a good idea, and boundless confidence, can make their fortune, argue business gurus. As entrepreneur Sir Tom Hunter insists, in the trailer for McGarvey’s series, his working-class roots have never held him back.

At the risk of disagreeing with one of the Scotland’s richest men and most generous philanthropists, I reckon for every gallus young man or woman who escapes poverty by selling trainers, there are ten more who will sink into an adult life characterised by insecure employment, expensive but bad-quality housing and poor health.

Only last month, official government statistics revealed that in the most deprived areas of Scotland, a man can expect to live to 47 years old in good health, compared to 73 in the most affluent neighbourhoods. In 21st-century Scotland, just as it was in Victorian times, class is a matter of long life or premature death.

There was a brief period after the Second World War when it seemed that Britain had thrown off its class shackles. In 1945, an exhausted population voted, not for the war hero Churchill, but the mild-mannered revolutionary Clem Attlee and his Labour Party.

The introduction of the NHS, underpinned by a generous welfare system and investment in affordable housing, helped pull people out of poverty and ill-health. Social mobility became more than a political aspiration, and with the advent of the Swinging Sixties, even working-class accents were fashionable.

A classless society

Thatcher’s attempt to destroy the post-war consensus – where all political parties agreed on some basic principles such as free healthcare and social security for all – faltered with the dawn of New Labour in 1997.

Once more, it appeared that Britain was on course to becoming a classless society, or at least a meritocracy. National schemes such as Sure Start gave vulnerable families support, almost-full employment meant that we could all eat cake, and free-flowing credit fooled us into thinking we were rich. Burberry was no longer the exclusive brand of the landed gentry.

Then came the great crash of 2008, followed by the Tories’ austerity economics that punished the poor and protected the elite. The pandemic has further exposed Britain’s class divide. While the middle class hunker at home, earning a full salary on Zoom, the working class have kept the country running, often at great risk to their lives.

Coronavirus has highlighted our dependence on the hard labour of bus drivers, retail staff and care workers, yet our society does not respect people without university degrees, placing more value on a “junior project manager” with a nice voice than a 50-something social care assistant with a ‘schemie’ accent.

The pandemic offers us an opportunity to build a new consensus, one where all work is valued, where good health is not a postcode lottery and quality education is a right, not something to be bought by moving catchment area. A country where you can wear leopard-print leggings with pride. As the 1945 Labour manifesto urged, let us face the future together.

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