The Affluent Ex-Proletariat

"The Privileged and the People formed Two Nations," wrote Benjamin Disraeli in Sybil, a satirical novel of protest against the bitter poverty of Britain's .working class, contrasted with the comfort of the wealthy. The situation lasted through Dizzy's Victorian era and well into the 20th century. But in recent years, Tory-led prosperity, piled atop Labor's welfare state, has brought about an economic revolution beyond the Dizziest dreams of reform. A new formula for Britain's cost-of-living index, released last week by the Ministry of Labor, shows that modern Britain is One Nation. The 330 items whose costs comprise the index demonstrate that the working class is now an affluent society.

As reflected by the index, the British worker no longer wears a cap, but he sports a necktie. His wife has abandoned lisle hose for nylon and wears a girdle. Their children no more appear in hand-me-downs; working-class boys wear blazers, and girls blue jeans. More dramatic, say merchants, are changes in their choice of food and furnishings. Twice as much sherry is drunk today as ten years ago. Housewives ignore cheap meat cuts in favor of chicken and roast beef; avocados and chow mein have become stock greengrocer or chain-store items. Moreover, the lower class, with more money to spend, has adopted what was once an upper-class custom: dining out. Women's magazines read mainly by the working class carry recipes for wiener schnitzel and French dressing, discuss the Scandinavian look in furniture, and French perfumes. One family in four has a refrigerator, compared to one in eight only a year ago. Status is measured in terms of latex-backed rugs, papered ceilings and motor scooters. One housewife told a reporter last week: "I do very nicely now. I don't want for nothing any more. It's not like the old days at all."

Behind the buying boom, as elsewhere in Europe (see below), is an employment boom. Unemployment, which once ranged from 9% to 2-2% of the working force, has remained around 2% since 1945. One-third of Britain's married women work. Even working teen-agers have become affluent; their per capita spending, not including board paid at home, is reckoned at about $11 a week.

The new affluence is shaping a new class. Today only one man in three has the same social status his father held; only one in every four sons of unskilled workers is himself unskilled. "Many manual workers," reports a Labor Ministry survey -on spending, "have habits and tastes which formerly were regarded as middle class." But Sociologist Ferdynand Zweig, researching a study of "The Worker in an Affluent Society," found that the new-habits and tastes are largely material. The working class is spending little of its new income on intellectual self-improvement. About 60% neither knew nor cared about Karl Marx (who had direly predicted their growing impoverishment), and less than a quarter had heard of Sigmund Freud. "Two nations may be a thing of the past in terms of economics," concluded Zweig. "But not in terms of education and culture."

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