Class divisions are as real as ever – it’s the politicians who have changed their priorities, as this illuminating book shows

If you open a history of Britain at random, it will tell you two things about the period you chance on: that it was a time of rapid change, and that the middle classes went on rising. Rising is what God put the middle classes on Earth to do. In fact, according to this illuminating study, they have now risen to the point where they outnumber the working class.

Whether this is true depends of course on how you define these categories. One might also wonder how much size matters. Marx thought that the proletariat would overthrow capitalism, but he did not think that this was because it formed a majority of the population. In fact, he was well aware that factory workers did not even constitute the majority of the working class, let alone of the nation as a whole. Most working people in Victorian Britain were domestic servants, of whom a large majority were women. Most of those who laboured in Marx’s day were not blue-collar male but white-petticoated female. The word proletariat derives from the Latin word for offspring, meaning those who were too poor to serve the state with anything but the potential workers they produced from their wombs. Today, in a world of postcolonial sweatshops and agricultural labour, the typical proletarian is still a woman.

Schooling is still the key factor in determining higher education and job: the privately schooled have a huge advantage