Class.

BRITAlN, according to most of the fashionable books on the subject, continues to suffer dreadfully from an antiquated class system which divides the community and holds back the economy. Visiting American journalists of liberal persuasion shake their heads over such a needless element in the country's troubles; it is, they think, one of the principal features distinguishing Britain from the United States. This has become the received view. Where they start to disagree, partly because the kind of people they meet in Britain disagree, is about the effect of Margaret Thatcher.

There would probably be a consensus that Mrs. Thatcher, a meritocrat of lower-middle-class origin, has been trying to replace the old pattern with a new "enterprise culture," more on American lines. Her admirers would say that she had achieved something but not enough: her detractors would say that the "new class" she has created is a monster, worse than anything which was there before. Some British socialists and liberals have expressed approval of her objective, although not of her methods or the result: conversely, some conservatives join with crocodile-teared socialists in deploring the change she has wrought in the Conservative Party, the abandonment (as they believe) of old-school paternalism in favor of a new-style cult of success.

These are deep waters, or at any rate less shallow than the superficial analyses of the visiting firemen.

Before looking at the conclusions, we should look at the premise. Is Britain's class structure so pervasive and so different from America's? Class does, of course, exist in America, but, because American history is shorter and Americans are more mobile, it has tended to assume simpler forms. Money, as a class indicator, is more important than in Britain. Upperclass homes and clubs in America are assumed to- be luxurious: in Britain they are assumed to be shabby. However, the aristocracy of the Old South, although by European standards very shallow-rooted, did and, to some extent, still does survive the ownership of land on which it was based. The rules of the St. Cecilia Society in Charleston are more exclusive than any dowager duchess in Britain would presume to impose.

Rather cruel scenes in which the nouveaux riches-think of Wallace Beery forced into white tie and tails-strive to join the nobs have been a standard comic device of American literature and film. To find their equivalents in Britain you would need to go back a hundred years. On the other hand, the scene in High Society where Grace Kelly tells Frank Sinatra about the difficulties of the old rich beleaguered by modem taxation could come straight from any postwar British comedy.

Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady observes that the moment an Englishman speaks he makes some other Englishman despise him. This verbal class distinction"-what Nancy Mitford and Professor Ross called "U" and "non-U" "U" standing for upper class)-is less noticeable among the young, not because of Thatcherism, but because a universal pop-speak has infected the whole generation, along with a degree of inverted snobbery. Children from the best schools, whose American equivalents might be stigmatized as preppies," are apt to assume a kind of cockney accent: but Etonian cockney, to the well-tuned ear, is not the same as real cockney.

For reasons, again, both historical and geographical, verbal class distinctions in America, except at the extremes, are less clear, but they provide a rich field for linguistic explorers. Americans do not have titles and the Social Register is a crude index, but there is a sort of American whose accent and clothes are as unmistakably upper-class as anything you might come across in St. James's Street. Indeed he is very like the denizens of St. James's Street.

As Hollywood repeatedly demonstrates, the finer points of England's social structure (Scotland, Wales, and Ireland are somewhat different) are hard for Americans to grasp. The phony Englishman in Magnum makes any real Englishman's toes curl up with embarrassment, and, whenever Columbo, Hart to Hart, or Mission Impossible has visited Britain, the confusion of barons and baronets, policemen and clubmen, has been wondrous to behold. British members of the cast presumably take their money, chuckling, to the bank.

The English Gentlemen

TITLES, though slippery for the uninformed, are not the key to understanding. I had a schoolmaster who claimed that there were only two English words which are untranslatable-"gentleman" and "cant." The English concept of the gentleman has no precise foreign equivalent. The gentlemen of England have never formed an exclusive caste, like minor European nobles. They merge imperceptibly with social classes above and below. They are hospitable to new recruits, provided those recruits adopt the appropriate pattern of life. At the same time, the landed gentry includes many families that are much more genuinely aristocratic than the Peers of the Realm who take formal precedence over them. Politicians, industrialists, and other dubious persons can be ennobled at the stroke of a Prime Minister's pen: but nobody can make an instant gentleman. The system of primogeniture, however, means that many families without title are closely connected with the older peerage. Gentlemen who would be styled Count in Europe are Mr. in England. Such a continuous spectrum, with no hard edges, no precise definitions, makes for a closely knit society. The class structure has always been firm but permeable, a combination that renders it more kindly and more durable than its equivalent in most other countries.

George Bernard Shaw's characteristically whimsical objection to the class barrier represented by Eliza's cockney accent was eugenic; it limited the gene pool within which people could easily marry. In reality, the chorus girls who married into the peerage, as quite a number did at around the time Pygmalion was being written, made admirable peeresses, perhaps because they knew how to play a part. It has always been possible, as Professor Parkinson (of Parkinson's Law) says his father did, to decide to be a gentleman.

With the status go restraints and responsibilities, equally undefined, of which the most traditional is military. As the protagonist of Christopher Hollis's novel Death of a Gentleman writes in a last letter to his wife, "Gentlemen are there to be shot at when the shooting's on. Whatever the other duties in which the gentlemen of England have failed throughout their history, at least they have never failed in this." The Rolls of Honor bear him out. By November 1914 no fewer than 80 per cent of the members of the Public Schools Club were on active service: by the end of the war eight hundred had been killed in action. Jan Morris, describing the typical 1930s Oxford undergraduate, who might have been called Carruthers-"the agreeable, stalwart, dependable, salt-of-the-earth young English gentleman, who was not, as it happened, very clever"-ends the passage simply: Carruthers survived at Oxford until the Second World War, which he won." Another inherited responsibility was running the Conservative Party. But in the turmoil of the 1960s it was felt that "the grouse-moor image" represented by Harold Macmillan and Lord Home had become an electoral liability. The party managers wanted a new man" to match the meritocratic leader of the Labor Party, Harold Wilson, with his Yorkshire accent and his trendy speeches about "the white heat of technology." They abandoned the "customary processes" whereby Conservative leaders had previously emerged, substituting election by the Conservative Members of Parliament. Ted Heath, with a similar background to Wilson's, was elected. His premiership ended in disaster, but the door had been opened to a more surprising challenger-Mrs. Thatcher.

We must not exaggerate the surprise. The Conservative Party had been led by queer fish before; none queerer than Disraeli. The fact of Mrs. Thatcher's being a woman was controversial, but her social background and radicalism fitted the mood. However, unlike Wilson, she had genuinely strong political convictions, and, unlike Heath, did not change them under pressure. One of those convictions was that many of her colleagues were irredeemably wet; that the old-style Conservatives of the old class (although I'm sure she didn't think of it in those terms) had become defeatist, willing only to fight a rearguard action against the long advance of socialism.

She set about changing her Conservative government, and consequently the whole Conservative Party, into something more like her own image. As one mischievous MP frequently says, the party has "lost a button from its sleeve"; in other words, the new breed wear ready-made suits, not suits from Savile Row. This is not completely true. There are still Old Etonians in the Cabinet: but Thatcherite Conservatives tend to be more ideologically hungry. Thatcher's Britain F SHE has changed the party, has she also changed the country? In "Thatcher's Britain" is there a new class imbued with the enterprise culture? Both her friends and her enemies would be inclined to say yes, though in different tones of voice. London's financial district, like New York's, had its big bang," after which, as though from dragon's teeth, Yuppies sprang up, armed with Porsches and mobile telephones. They included, inevitably, some unattractive specimens, and much of their wealth has proved evanescent. To call them Thatcher's children" is both unfair and unhistorical. Just the same corner-cutting, money-obsessed types can be found in the novels of Trollope and Galsworthy. At the other end of the scale are the workers in moribund industries, the unmarried mothers, and the feckless young, all those who have come to expect more from the welfare state than the welfare state could ever provide. They too are called "Thatcher's children": but their problems would have existed whatever government was in power.

Mrs. Thatcher's philosophy was originally identified with "monetarism," which quickly became the most misunderstood word in the political vocabulary. Instead of being simply the belief that inflation has a monetary cause, it was taken to mean that money is the measure of all things and that her philosophy was one of material greed. Her real doctrine is quite the reverse. As befits the daughter of a highly respectable provincial shopkeeper with a Non-Conformist Christian upbringing, she regards honest profit-making as a duty that must be performed so that one can attend to other social duties. She has persuaded people that there is no virtue in a badly run business: she has been less successful in persuading them that Christian charity does not consist in spending other people's money. Her achievements are very vulnerable to a change in the economic climate or the political weather.

Because she is not, after all, a philosopher, or Caesar Augustus creating a new order, she has failed to convey or bolster the ideas that would pin the new conservatism to the old, grafting meritocracy onto a class structure which has, in fact, served Britain well. She is on record as saying that, unlike the socialists, she does not believe in a one-generation society": but in practice, although her government reduced the top rates of income tax so that it became easier to make money, very little has been done to alleviate capital and inheritance taxes. She uses hereditary peers in her administration, but the only new hereditary peerages she has recommended have been for men without sons to inherit them. Her much-needed, but so far unavailing, efforts to improve the standard of elementary education have been explained almost entirely in banausic terms-by the need to fit children for employment. She is always busy. One whole aspect of conservatism-the desire, one might say, to conserve-seems to have passed her by.

Gentility has been described as nothing else than old money; which is not necessarily the cynical comment for which it is often taken. Old money and its conventions do have a special role in society. John Adams said that he studied war, so that his children might study politics and their children might study poetry. A Thatcherite entrepreneur might just as reasonably say that he studied business, so that his children might study politics and their children might study poetry. Something of the sort has been the English tradition: but somehow one cannot imagine Mrs. Thatcher saying it.