from a sociologist
Mr. J.H. Goldthorpe, in a paper to the &ciology Section of the annual meeting of the British Association, presented the conclusion of research workers at Kingts College, Cambridge, that contrary to widely accepted opinion, working-class people who are affluent do not tend to become middleclass in attitudes to politics, employment or community life, In the 1950s the working classes became more and more affluent and politicians and others attributed the decline in Labour votes at successive elections until and including that of 1959 to increased middle-classness. This was a view that certain eminent sociologists of the past had also put forward. Mr. Goldthorpe and his colleagues found no evidence of this.
A group of 229 workers at progressive manufacturing concerns in Luton were chosen as the subject of the investigation, They earned at least £17 a week regularly, lived outside typically working-class localities and had hardly ever know unemployment, In other words, the group was chosen as the most likely to show the effects that were so widely believed, A control sample was also chosen of 54 white-collar workers from two of the concerns. In employment almost all the manual workers had one attitude - it was money that counted and the work had no interest. Among the white-collar workers the attitude was different, Liking the work they did was the reason most freqmently mentioned for staying in it.
In community life too the customs were different in the two groupSe Middle-class ways of making friends from people not necessarily neighbours or workmates, had certainly not spread to the manual workers, many of whom it should be mentioned were house-owners. In addition there remained a considerable degree of status segration, well over two-thirds of the manual workers finding their chief companions entirely within their own class. They did not appear to see in middle-class life a style to be emulated. Investigations of political attitudes showed 80% of the manual group voted Labour at the 1959 Election, a substantially higher proportion than Mark Abrams! estimated national figure of about 60% for the upper working class. Moreover, the high level of voting for Labour had been fairly consistent from 1945 onwards, There was no trend whatever towards greater Conservative voting in the course of the 1950s. Mr, Goldthorpe inferred that "one must not jump directly from economic circunstances to political action,"
By far the most frequent kind of reason given for attachment to the Labour Party was one phrased in terms of class and class customs, So affluence in itself had done little to erode the class basis of Labour support. The widely accepted chain of events, affluence to middle-classness to Conservative voting, is unsupported by the findings of this research group, Middleclassness is not simply a matter of money and politics and cannot be reduced to a mere “epi~phenomenon" of economic conditions, "Our affluent workers remain, in spite of their affluence, men who live by selling their labour
to their employers, There is as yet little basis for . expecting any particular change in the political attitudes and behaviour of these workers,"
Thus, one can conclude from Mr, Goldthorpe's work, there is no basis for right-wing "theoreticians" blaming successive election defeats on the bourgeoisification of the working class, It seems much more likely, on the contrary, that policies which stress the working class nature of the Labour Party will give electoral dividends,