By Michela Arena, Jules Walkden & Seb Wride
Public First, teaming up with The Daily Telegraph, has today published the results of a unique new research project that attempts to redefine social class in this country.
What differentiated our approach in this initiative was that we let the British public describe class as they see it, and then used that insight to guide how we ascribe class to people.
The result is a considerably more nuanced picture of class in 21st Century Britain than has existed before, taking into account cultural and economic capital of people as they are today – and, most importantly, how they see the world around them. For the end result, and the positioning of people into six completely new groups, visit the Telegraph class calculator here, and read some of the reporting around it here.
The following is an explanation of why we did this project, and how we did it.
What is class?
On June 6th of 2024, Rishi Sunak left a D-day event a little bit too early to tell ITV News that he had gone without lots of things as a child, most notably Sky TV. It was a flimsy response to the persistent accusations that Rishi Sunak was detached from the struggles of ordinary working people in the UK. It did not really convince anyone to the contrary.
Rishi Sunak is not the only politician who has tried to talk about the hardship he has faced. Keir Starmer endlessly talks about his dad’s job as a toolmaker and the pebble-dashed semi in which he grew up. Heading to Wes Streeting’s website, the first thing he says about himself is that he’s not a typical politician, he comes “from a working class family” and funded himself through college and university with retail jobs. Kemi Badenoch admits to having grown up in a middle class household, but said that she “became working class” when she worked at McDonald’s as a teenager.
And it is not like politicians have no reason to talk about this. Hannah Spencer, running as the Green Party candidate for Gorton & Denton, had worked as a plumber for more than a decade. Accusations levelled against her during the campaign included that lived in a mansion in Hale, and that she was married to a wealthy executive at AstraZeneca. Nigel Farage, carefully avoids his own class, and has frequently leveled at his political opponents that they do not understand working people.
“This Prime Minister has no connection with working people, no connection with what we used to call working-class communities. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to get up at five o’clock in the morning and go out and work physically hard for the day.” – Nigel Farage, former banker
All these politicians are using different ways of defining their class, and expressing their hardship. Hannah Spencer her occupation, Keir Starmer his father’s occupation, Rishi Sunak his childhood entertainment access. Their detractors are hitting back with a different set of definitions; maybe Hannah Spencer is a plumber, but her husband is rich and her house is large (note, this is not true, but the point stands). Keir Starmer may well have grown up in the house of a toolmaker, but he is now a Knight of the realm.
“The right don’t like the idea of a young, working-class woman in politics. They want to keep Westminster for a small club of posh boys that all went to the same schools or studied at Oxbridge. That’s why things have been run into the ground – we’ve had too many politicians that don’t know what it’s like to graft.” – Hannah Spencer
It’s not just politicians who are a bit all over the place in their conversations on class, it’s the public too. Here is a chart of what class people call themselves split by income. Note that 34% of people earning more than £100,000 a year call themselves working class.
| Less than £20,000 | £20,000 – £30,000 | £30,000 – £40,000 | £40,000 – £60,000 | £60,000 – £80,000 | £80,000 – £100,000 | £100,000 or more | |
| Upper class | 1.12% | 0.40% | 0.95% | 0.77% | 1.46% | 2.22% | 7.58% |
| Upper-middle class | 3.12% | 2.97% | 2.42% | 4.51% | 8.91% | 11.96% | 14.86% |
| Middle class | 16.62% | 22.99% | 30.88% | 37.16% | 39.69% | 38.46% | 38.09% |
| Lower-middle class | 17.48% | 22.17% | 19.69% | 17.01% | 17.10% | 13.64% | 5.20% |
| Working class | 53.86% | 48.69% | 43.84% | 37.39% | 30.55% | 29.14% | 33.81% |
| Don’t know | 7.80% | 2.77% | 2.21% | 3.16% | 2.30% | 4.59% | 0.46% |
A similar story can be seen when we look at wealth, with 26% of those with savings over £75,000 identifying as working class.
It’s easy to look at these responses and think people are just lying to themselves. That they aspire to a level of hardship they actually don’t have. Maybe we all just choose to play up the parts of our profiles that sound challenging, and hide the parts which make it sound like we had it easy.
But what if instead we take people at their word? Income is not quite class, after all; it feels relevant, but all the MPs are on quite similar incomes and it rarely comes up in their discussions of class.
Is there a measure that feels a bit more like what we’re all talking about?
Socio-Economic Grade (SEG)
For a long time, the main way of ascribing “class” in polling and market research has been through SEG This takes into account one thing: the occupation of the chief income earner in the household. Those in “white collar” professional settings tend to be ABC1, and those in manual jobs tend to be C2DE. Roughly, ABC1 is used as a proxy for middle and upper class, and C2DE working class.
| A | Typically senior professionals – directors of businesses, trained lawyers, surgeons |
| B | Middle management, teachers, scientists |
| C1 | Junior office roles, bank clerks, analysts, graduate employees. Students as well. |
| C2 | Skilled manual work – electricians, plumbers, carpenters, mechanics. |
| D | So-called “unskilled” work – warehouse workers, bartenders, caregivers, postal workers. |
| E | Unemployed, state pensioners, long term out of work, casual labourers. |
The core problem with SEG is that it just doesn’t quite feel like “class” when you start breaking it down. For one, all those politicians would be in the same SEG, but they are still arguing about each other’s class. It certainly feels a bit strange to ask a homemaker what their partner is up to in order to determine their class. Crucially, it does not seem to bear much resemblance to how people determine their own class.
| A | B | C1 | C2 | D | E | |
| Upper class | 11.65% | 0.86% | 0.69% | 1.42% | 0.98% | 0.73% |
| Upper-middle class | 13.22% | 8.62% | 2.84% | 3.82% | 4.41% | 2.66% |
| Middle class | 33.94% | 49.15% | 30.47% | 23.03% | 16.13% | 18.71% |
| Lower-middle class | 3.51% | 17.21% | 23.47% | 16.61% | 14.19% | 14.90% |
| Working class | 37.22% | 21.46% | 38.76% | 51.57% | 58.91% | 53.22% |
| Don’t know | 0.45% | 2.69% | 3.77% | 3.55% | 5.38% | 9.78% |
SEG is also increasingly dated. For example, students are placed into C1, part of the middle class, reflecting an era where University degrees were relatively uncommon, and a clear stepping stone into white collar employment. The British population contains a growing number of retirees, who are asked to draw on their most recent employment when placing themselves. Often more asset rich and with fewer outgoings, the triple-locked pensioners are probably not best assessed by a job they held several decades ago.
There is no denying that SEG measures something, but it certainly isn’t “class” in the way most people understand it.
Building a new tool for class
We set about building a class tool that incorporated two key things.
- How people define class in other people
- How people define class in themselves
The goal was to develop a measure of class which more closely resembled the way that the public talks about it. What are people drawing on when they accuse politicians of being posh, and what are high earners thinking about when they call themselves working class?
Defining class in other people
We set up an experiment in order to understand how people define class in others. We would show people a detailed profile of another person. These profiles were randomised. You might see someone’s income and wealth, or their hobbies and interests, or some mix of these things. We ran this with a representative sample of over 9,000 people in the UK.
This person is a Male between the ages of 18 and 24. They live in an urban area in the South of England. They went to University. They have a personal income of £10,000-£20,000 a year. They grew up in a low income household. They like watching the football, playing golf and going to the gym
We asked three questions of these profiles. A simple class definition (working class, middle class etc), whether the person was “posh”, and whether the person was of a higher or lower social class than the respondent.
What we found was that some of the most important factors to defining another person’s class were income and savings, both roughly equally. But beyond that, a whole range of factors come into play. For example, the difference in perceptions of class between a CEO and a receptionist, was about the same as that between someone who enjoys going shooting and someone who watches football, the difference between someone who says “pudding” and someone who says “sitting room”, or the difference between someone who lives in a flat and someone who lives in a 4-bedroom detached house.
There are some things that dramatically impact a person’s class perceptions. The difference between someone who went to a state or grammar school is not notable, but going to a private school has about the same impact as moving from no income at all to an income of over £60,000. Someone who grew up in a low-income household but now has savings of over £75,000 is seen to be just about as posh as someone who grew up in a medium income household but now has no savings at all. Then there are also some things that have very little impact at all; age, urban and rural areas, region of the country, home ownership, ethnicity.
In other words, perceptions of class are heavily but not exclusively financial. The way we talk about class muddies these things. Someone accused of being posh when they are out playing golf might hit back with the struggles they faced as a child, and actually both people have some leg to stand on.
We worked these results up into a tool which will tell you how many people in Britain would call you posh, which you can try here.
Take the “How posh are you?” Quiz
Self-prescribing class
How we define class in others is only part of the puzzle. Even some of the things we tested are quite hard to spot in other people; whether someone grew up in a low income household, or what school they went to can only really be reliably explained by a person themselves.
We ran a longer survey testing a wide range of self-defined attitudes towards class. These included attitudinal measures, such as whether people feel financially comfortable, how they would classify the comfort of their upbringing, and whether they feel they need to act differently in professional settings. We combined this with the measures identified by other people to create the typing tool shown in the Telegraph.
As with all opinion data, where we’re combining many metrics together, the result is noisy. However we were able to use a segmentation to divide the data into groups. The data drives the groupings, aiming to cluster people into groups that are distinct from one another and have a unique story to tell.
The calculator used in the Telegraph was iterated to better fit the groupings across an economic and cultural capital index. It was important that the result felt relevant to the participant, and made clear that finances or cultural engagement alone were not the drivers of the result. This process effectively sharpened the edges of the groups a bit; there will still be people who land somewhere between two of the groups, but the result is less blurry than a pure play segmentation. We’ve noticed it particularly with Dreamers and Ambitious High Earners, where people in high income groups might find themselves closer to a Dreamer because they lack some of the other signifiers of high financial capital (such as financial advice, savings accumulation, and passive income sources).
The new measure of class
You can play around with the tool yourself on the Daily Telegraph website here.
And you can read in detail what each of the segments are and how they are defined here.
The main thing to note is that the tool tries to capture some combination of how other people would define you, and how you might define yourself. You might end up just on the border of two classes, one round of golf away from moving a rung up the ladder. You might be in a group that better reflects your financial capital than your cultural capital, and it might be just the attitudinal elements of what you fed in that put you there.
| A | B | C1 | C2 | D | E | |
| The Elite | 27% | 8% | 6% | 6% | 8% | 3% |
| The ambitious high earners | 32% | 17% | 12% | 15% | 11% | 5% |
| The quietly comfortable | 24% | 35% | 18% | 11% | 5% | 13% |
| The just-about-managing | 8% | 20% | 21% | 20% | 17% | 17% |
| The Dreamers | 6% | 13% | 23% | 26% | 29% | 22% |
| The left behind | 3% | 8% | 19% | 20% | 31% | 41% |
The goal is not to be the final word on class in the UK. We expect many people to engineer their answers a bit to land themselves in a different group, or find their class changes if they revisit the tool in a year’s time with a few new hobbies and a bit more in the bank account. But then again, perhaps the only good measure of class is one that people can trick, and that changes over their lifetime.
| The Elite | The ambitious high earners | The quietly comfortable | The just-about-managing | The Dreamers | The left behind | |
| Upper class | 7% | 4% | 1% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| Upper-middle class | 13% | 14% | 5% | 3% | 2% | 1% |
| Middle class | 34% | 39% | 47% | 30% | 25% | 12% |
| Lower-middle class | 10% | 14% | 20% | 17% | 22% | 15% |
| Working class | 34% | 29% | 23% | 45% | 47% | 64% |
| Don’t know | 1% | 1% | 4% | 5% | 4% | 8% |
While we still get a good chunk of our “elites” calling themselves working class, the spread improves on SEG, with a much larger majority of the left behind identifying as working class than C2DE. It does seem to be this group, the smallest in our segments, that is split the most on its own identity.
Conclusion
For a country so interested in class, it is interesting that Britain has never truly landed on a measure everyone can agree on. Fairly obviously, the Public First and Daily Telegraph contribution to this discussion is not going to end the conversation. If anything, we hope it somewhat reopens it.
Maybe we can even get a bit closer to explaining the challenges our political leaders are facing; and why so few people respond positively to Keir Starmer’s father’s occupation. It is likely, though, that class will never truly be defined. It is messy. If it wasn’t, we probably wouldn’t talk about it so much.