Class war pipe dreams A biologist becomes a gas fitter, so the barriers are finally breaking down? Tell that to the shelf packers
Mary Riddell Sunday February 29, 2004 The Observer As pipes freeze and domestic boilers implode, a shivering nation can be grateful to Karl Gensberg. Formerly a researcher at Birmingham University, he compared his wage slip with his plumber's and decided that his career in molecular biology, on an annual salary of £23,000, was over. Now Mr Gensberg, aged 41, is a qualified gas fitter hoping to earn a minimum of £40,000. His 10 years of research will, he believes, eventually lead to major breakthroughs in treating arthritis and cancer. While university wages are scandalously low, great pioneers in science and the arts have often been more stoical. On the Gensberg logic, the impoverished Van Gogh, who sold only one canvas in his lifetime, would have swapped sunflowers for Yellow Pages and taken up painting and decorating instead. So perhaps Mr Gensberg was fed up not only with low pay and professional insecurity, but with the job itself. Newspaper reports hinted, snobbishly, that only penury could force anyone to swap academia for a life of phoning maddened clients to report being stuck in traffic on the North Circular and thus unable to inspect their defunct heating systems until tomorrow. But talented people, graduates included, want practical work. Hackney Community College in East London reports 800 applicants competing for 35 places on a four-year NVQ plumbing course. Part of the lure is the £50,000 salary in prospect, but something else is happening. That shift is illustrated in a portrait of Mr Gensberg, a stubble-chinned Gabriel Oak moving glamorously on from the 'glory days' when a university post meant status. His decision may say less about pay levels than shifting status. Society is being de-toffed. As the last hereditary peers of the upper chamber are banished to chilly piles, a new breed of aristo-hustlers, forcibly democratised, must earn their crust; literally so, in the case of the Earl of Sandwich, who markets packed lunches. A House of Lords, however constituted, looks increasingly preposterous when titles are so naff that any man knighted in an Honours List must pretend he doesn't want to be called 'Sir'. The affluent have seen other privileges leeched away by the conduit that first supplied them. The benefits of the consumer revolution of the nineteenth century have trickled further downwards, and Orwell's checklist of 'good roads, germ-free water, police protection', has expanded. Restaurants, shops, roads and the check-in queues of Gatwick teem with homogeneous tribes. As John Prescott said: 'We're all middle class now.' Britain has been slow to recognise this truism, or embrace it. France, at least at the level of the 'commune', is classless. In the town where I spend my holidays, the bus driver has the same social standing as the lawyer. Mr Gensberg and his academic friends, who, he claims, are becoming scuba diving instructors or letting agents, may be trail-blazers for equality. But oddly, at just the time fusty notions of prestige are dying, a contradictory paranoia is setting in. In his new book, Status Anxiety, and in a two-hour Channel 4 documentary next Saturday, Alain de Botton argues that we are consumed by worry about how we are perceived. The idea that social rank equals human worth may be dead, but so are easy guidelines to being a top person. The Spartan recipe of muscly, bisexual men with little interest in family life and an enthusiasm for killing Athenians would attract few takers in a modern dating agency. Nor would subsequent blueprints of perfection. As de Botton wonders, if the capacity to hunt jaguars, dance a minuet, ride a horse in battle or imitate the life of Christ no longer offers sufficient grounds to be labelled a success, then what is the dominant Western ideal according to which people are judged and status allotted? His inability to offer a neatly-packaged successor to the warrior, the saint and the knight is not surprising when the mandarin classes no longer command automatic respect or trust. Maybe the new icon is the gas-fitter, welcomed into icy households like a Messiah in overalls, as well as being paid a fortune. Money remains enmeshed with status. The Forbes listing of the planet's richest people has just been released, complete with fawning coverage of Britain's dollar billionaires. The latest register of members' interests allowed newspaper readers to ogle MPs' bank accounts: £450,000 for Robin Cook's book, £250,000 for Michael Portillo's wit and wisdom. Such figures are meant to ignite envy. But as Alexis de Tocqueville noticed, along with Adam Smith and various modern academics who have so far resisted becoming gasmen, money is no guarantor of happiness. America, the richest nation on earth, ranks sixteenth in the national league tables of contentment. Nigeria and Puerto Rico, where great poverty has been slightly ameliorated, score highest. As old titans, from God to GDP, lose their grip, other shortcuts to happiness and self-worth are on offer. Find the right partner. Do voluntary work. Cut your debts, curtail your ambitions, get a life, and your status anxiety will evaporate. Old hierarchies, of class and wealth, are crumbling. Money is no longer a badge of virtue, or a mark of automatic superiority. The market has teamed up with social enlightenment to break down any residual divide between blue and white collar workers. The age of contented, equal-value citizens starts here. Except that the stratified society has not foresworn class barriers, but simply shifted them. Last week Patricia Hewitt announced that there will be no move to legislate against excessive fat cat pay or rewards for failure. Simultaneously, a coalition of protesters urged the Government to support a Private Member's Bill to license gangmasters. A union official says that migrant land-workers have been left with almost nothing after transport costs and £55 for a bunk in a six-person room were deducted from their £4-an-hour wages. The middle classes have taken over the visible world. Differences shrivel away, pay norms no longer apply, and the affluent have nothing to lose but their status anxiety. Meanwhile, in the unseen basement of society, the poorest drivers of the economy are reverting to a position worse than the one they occupied centuries ago, when the moneyed meritocracy was in its infancy. Not objects of charity, or pity, or scorn from Social Darwinists who equated poverty with stupidity, they remain unnoticed unless they die in sizeable numbers or feature in an Ann Winterton joke. People of no status, they represent the worst dread of the wealthy. No one cares if they exist. Shuffling the middle class pack is no bad thing. For a time, there may be a lot more donnish plumbers. When good molecular biologists run short, they will be prized and paid accordingly. Market forces may be crude forgers of society, but excess and exploitation are the greater dangers. Last week the drugs group, AstraZeneca, revealed that its chairman is getting £1.8 million a year after a 21 per cent rise. On the same day, a union official reported that migrant workers packing fruit for supermarkets were taking home 78p a week. Elitism may be tottering, but the equal status society still looks like a work in progress. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
