The class quiz
More
In 1997, soon after New Labour won a landslide victory in the general election, Prime Minister Tony Blair (b. 1953) asserted that everyone in Britain was now middle class – an updated, and surprising (for a supposedly Labour prime minister), version of the comment made in 1889 by the Liberal chancellor Sir William Harcourt (1827-1904): ‘We are all socialists now.’ But the irony is that, according to statisticians, there is less social mobility in Britain today than in the 1970s, and the gap between the rich and poor is wider than ever. Talk of a ‘classless society’ in which everyone is comfortably off seems premature.
