Why the middle classes are still fair game

THE middle classes are, in the main, law-abiding people.

Yet as a group, the middle classes are disliked. If you pay for your child’s education you are a snob. If the child then tries to secure a place at Oxford or Cambridge, you are not only a snob, but a traitor too. If you drive a four-wheel-drive you are a monster. If you have two homes you are a parasite. If you prefer opera to T in the Park you are that worst thing of all, an elitist. Since the aristocracy has nearly disappeared, or, at any rate, have learnt to keep their profiles so low that most people think they have disappeared, attention has turned to the next in the pecking order. The middle classes are now fairer game than foxes.

This is the true explanation for the bizarre spat between John Reid, the Health Secretary, a working class Scot who has elevated himself to the middle classes, [from St Patrick’s, Coatbridge to London chatterati, and married to a glamorous Brazilian film director to boot], and born and bred middle-class Jeremy Paxman, [Malvern College, Cambridge University, BBC]. When under pressure in an interview, the Health Secretary did not hesitate to play the "class card", deriding Mr Paxman’s birth, accent and education in a way that would have gained Dr Reid the sack - and possibly a prison sentence - had his venom not been spat at such a deliciously soft target.

As an aside, I can’t resist saying that if Dr Reid’s outburst proves one thing, it is that you can take the boy out of the estate [council, that is, for any non-Scottish middle-class people reading this; in England, estate means something entirely different], but you can’t take the estate out of the boy.

I know Dr Reid will take that as a compliment.

In Scotland, however, it is not enough to dislike the middle classes; they must be obliterated. The drive to destroy them is relentless and underpins everything, from endless snide references in the media, to the hunting bill - hunting, by those who know nothing about it, being perceived as a middle-class pursuit - to the land-reform legislation and now the determination to remove charitable status from the independent schools that middle-class parents already financially cripple themselves to patronise.

The debate over independent schools is, you see, nothing to do with independent schools. It is really a kind of Scottish benchmark. Where you stand over independent schools determines just what kind of a person you are. The true Scot, the decent Scot, so conventional wisdom goes, will not rest until every brick, every book and every achievement of these bastions of middle-class aspiration is trampled into the mud. Scotland will not be "free" [free of what is unclear, but, post-Braveheart, the word does for just about anything] until no Scottish child ever again emerges from a classroom with a taste for wine rather than Buckfast or knows that "in loco parentis" does not mean "my father’s an engine driver". New Scotland wants nothing to do with high-brow education. Highbrow education is pernicious and probably English. The best thing Scots can do, so we are told from on high, is to work to get all independent schools closed down so that all Scottish children can sink to the same level as the wag who plastered an exceptionally rude word over the wing mirror of my car last week, but spelled the rude word wrong.

It may seem odd, and possibly incomprehensible, to foreigners, but since the first Scottish elections in 1999, the most coherent Scottish Executive policy narrative has been the desire to kick the middle classes to death. We see it not just in legislation, but in the new political class that has emerged. Nobody wishing to crawl up Holyrood’s greasy pole ever voluntarily admits to being middle-class, and those who clearly are - Donald Gorrie, the Liberal Democrat MSP, for example - while benefiting from their parents’ middle-class ideals themselves, are right up there in the vanguard of the jack-booted mob. Where once, amongst those rising to lead Scottish society, there was a market for family portraits - it did not matter whose family - carefully hung in dining rooms in large houses along the Clyde so as to give the impression of ancestral gentility, there is now a market only for demotic accents and marks of early deprivation. If you want to get on in New Scotland but, as a child, your shoes were always new, keep that to yourself, and if you discover that your great-grandparents had a bank account, take that secret to your grave.

THIS might all be quite harmless, except that along with the classist jokes and the malicious legislation, there is a poisonous message emanating from the new Great and Good. The message, quite simply, is this: don’t work to better your family or yourself. Don’t admire those who do. Don’t think you know better than those set to rule over you. Don’t ever aspire to independence of thought, word or deed. And, perhaps worst of all, if your family seems trapped in the underclass, don’t dare to rise above your station because if you achieve middle-classdom, we will ridicule and mock you, and make sure you and your children live to regret your presumption.

Harsh? Certainly. But depressingly true. Yet where would Scotland - or, indeed, Britain - be without the middle-classes and all their expectations and foibles? Quite apart from anything else, they are the financial backbone of this country. Those trying to set up their own businesses carry their crippling tax burden without much complaint and, without their money, the increasing army of politicians, spin-doctors, public-sector bureaucrats, inspectors, enforcers, liaison officers, implementation co-ordinators and the like could not pick up the kinds of salaries and pensions on which many grow fat. It says something not very nice about such categories of public-sector worker that even though many are from the middle classes, once they have taken the state’s shilling, they happily join in the bear-baiting, denying their middle-class roots as violently as Peter denying Christ at the palace of the high priest.

It is a tribute to the middle classes that, through all this, they plod on. One day, however, they may well rise up and throw off the Calvinist guilt that keeps quiescent even as their money is chucked, with hideous incompetence, into failing health and education systems they find impossible to use. There will be no revolution, however. The Scottish middle classes will take their revenge in quite another way. If things carry on like this, many will take a deep breath, vote SNP and move south.

It is not a perfect solution, but, as they watch Scotland sink without them, at least the middle classes will have the satisfaction of knowing that, in the end, it was they who had the last laugh.