Working late at the office, you are loading some more paper into the printer when you suddenly remember you have run out of A4 at home. “Well,” you tell yourself, “I’m working overtime for nothing, so I’m owed.” Thus exonerated, you unlock the stationery cupboard and help yourself to a pack of 500 sheets – followed by a roll of Sellotape, three pens and a Pritt stick.
This, of course, is an act of pure, unvarnished theft. If you were caught nicking the stuff from Ryman, the police would come and arrest you. But somehow, the middle classes have managed to persuade themselves that when they commit a crime for personal gain, it is not the same as when the criminal classes do. So they lie, cheat and steal with abandon.
They defraud the taxman by hiding money offshore or by shopping abroad and concealing their booty from Customs. They make fraudulent claims on their insurance policies by inventing or exaggerating losses. They knowingly buy counterfeit goods and acquire illegal copies of computer software. They steal hotel and gym towels, flout hosepipe bans and fiddle their business expenses. And they will commit almost any act of deceit to get their children into the school of their choice.
One study, by criminologists at Keele University, found that nearly two-thirds of Britons admitted to acts of dishonesty such as keeping quiet when given too much change, paying the builder in cash to avoid tax or buying clothes for a special occasion and returning them afterwards for a refund. The worst offenders were the middle classes, with 70 per cent of those in the A and B social brackets admitting to everyday fiddling, deceitfulness and fraud, compared with 53 per cent of those in the D and E brackets.
Whatever happened to “honesty is the best policy”, “cheats never prosper”, “virtue is its own reward” and other such middle-class axioms? Do the middle classes not believe in them any more?
Once, the middle classes were almost defined by moral rectitude, occupying a presumed moral high ground between the feckless working classes and the degenerate toffs. After all, in the Victorian era, a lot of them were Nonconformists, tracing their lineage back to the Puritans of the 17th century.
Moral codes permeated all aspects of personal conduct – most obviously sex, which the middle classes tried as far as possible to repress. Since cleanliness was next to godliness, homes, clothes and bodies had to be well scrubbed at all times. Rules of behaviour were codified in an elaborate system of etiquette and manners – elbows off the table, no eating in the street – intended to set the middle classes apart from the riff-raff. Respectability was everything and people were haunted by the fear of social disgrace.
At least, so we are told. But the people painting this picture are mainly the middle classes. As Helen Haste, professor of psychology at Bath University, points out: “Mythologising the middle classes has always been something that the middle classes have been very good at, both in terms of their present status and their past.”
In fact, if you look beneath the veneer of middle-class morality’s golden age, a somewhat different picture emerges. You see, for example, a society that tolerated child labour as well as appalling working conditions for adults, and the supposed sexual morality of the day was riddled with hypocrisy, as evidenced by the vast number of prostitutes.
As for honesty being the best policy, the 19th century was a golden age not so much of morality but of white-collar crime. The emergence of a new, industrial economy produced a proliferation of joint stock companies unfettered by any requirement to publish honest prospectuses, to file audited accounts or to observe truth in advertising. For the middle classes who promoted and managed these companies, the temptation was too great. They embarked on an orgy of swindling, embezzlement and fraud.
“If we progress at the same rate for half a generation longer,” lamented the Illustrated London News in 1843, “commercial dishonesty will become the rule, and integrity the exception. On every side of us we see perpetually – fraud, fraud fraud . . . Can nothing be done to stem the torrent of corruption?” (Quoted in George Robb’s White Collar Crime in Modern England: Financial Fraud and Business Morality, 1845-1929.)
But let us be generous and suppose that outside the world of commerce, most middle-class people were model citizens. What went wrong, turning today’s law-abiding majority into small-time shysters and crooks? Has free-market capitalism, with its emphasis on the pursuit of self-interest, turned us into greedy, unscrupulous self-maximisers?
Susanne Karstedt, professor of criminology at Keele University and lead researcher on the study of middle-class dishonesty, points out that most middle-class crimes are committed in the marketplace and suggests it is here we should start looking for answers. Next month, the British Journal of Criminology is devoting an issue to white-collar crime and, in it, she argues that either because of corporate scandals such as the Enron affair or smaller, day-to-day experiences of feeling ripped off, people have developed a syndrome of “market anomie” characterised by distrust, insecurity and cynicism towards laws and regulations.
“Whilst peasants once raised up against millers selling corn or flour at inflated prices, consumers are now exercised by value for money, mis-selling, hidden charges and inaccurate product descriptions,” she writes. “They hit back by inflating insurance claims as a reaction towards small-print rules or overpriced premiums; they retreat into a shadow economy where they pay cash-in-hand to circumvent tax and social security laws.”
Peter Taylor-Gooby, professor of social policy at Kent University, says it would be hard to prove the middle classes have become less honest because any change in reported behaviour could simply reflect a greater willingness to own up to it. “People have probably always behaved in more or less self-interested ways in response to incentives,” he notes, touching on an eternal truth.
Nevertheless, he does wonder whether social trust is quite what it was. “A great deal of the developments in public policy at present are to do with focusing on self-regarding, individualist, rational actor motivations and incentives,” he says. “So, for example, you construct systems that give people strong incentives for hitting particular targets set in a comprehensive spending review, or you develop internal markets systems.”
These systems may work, Taylor-Gooby says, to the extent that standards in public service are raised. “But the question is whether at the same time one is . . . setting the tone, the climate of ideas, for a society in which people are more self-regarding and self-interested.”
Still, other explanations are possible. What if we are witnessing the death of shame? In other words, what if the middle classes no longer feel the need to be scrupulously honest because they are no longer bothered by respectability? Consider Britain’s soaring levels of personal bankruptcy. Once, financial ruin was so shameful that the proper recourse of a gentleman unable to pay his debts was to shoot himself. Now, he just goes to a debt management agency, signs an insolvency agreement and tells his friends what a breeze it was.
“Up to the 1960s, respectability was important,” says Haste, the Bath psychology professor. “Then we rebelled. The baby-boomer generation thought all that pseudo-respectability and keeping up appearances was hypocritical and developed a new code for how you expressed your social position.”
That code, says Haste, was all about style – in clothes, in interior design and in lifestyle generally. But it also embraced a new set of values on issues such as the environment, social justice and world poverty. Today, the middle classes may not care so much about respectability in the old sense of the word. But they have new moral values that their parents lacked, such as green values, a concern for the rights of minorities and a belief in being open about one’s feelings.
According to this new code, petty crimes directed at faceless businesses or bureaucrats are not shameful because they are just a way of getting back at profiteering companies or the system. But there are plenty of new “crimes” that the middle classes would be embarrassed to be caught committing, such as driving a 4x4 through central London, telling an ethnic joke or smacking the children.
So, Haste concludes, there is no need to worry about the apparent decline in middle-class morality. “There are some areas where morality matters less than in the past but others where it matters more. It’s different from the past but not necessarily the demise of western civilisation.” Besides, she adds: “Wringing our hands about the decline of the middle classes is a very middle-class thing to do.”
