VI.
Three Percent of This, Four Percent of That 1980–2020 At some point in the 1980s, a strange thing started to happen in Britain: people stopped talking about class. Once the stereotypical preoccupation of the nation, in the space of a decade class became a subject of which academics, journalists, artists, writers – even politicians – dared not speak. Sociologists and historians even began referring to the ‘death of class debate’.48 What happened? It may have been political exhaustion: the trade unions, those bastions of workingclass representation, were held responsible in the eyes of many for the economic strife of the 1970s, and the Labour Party suffered electoral catastrophe in 1983 on an explicitly class-conscious policy platform. Simultaneously, amid the death throes of sectors of the economy traditionally responsible for the provision of working-class employment, it was increasingly clear that the communities and cultures on which older forms of class identity were based could not survive into the twenty-first century. Perhaps, even, the explanation was more philosophically grandiose: the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s put an end to a 70-year experiment in building a state predicated on Karl Marx’s theories of class. As far as class politics were concerned, 1989 was, in the famous maxim of political scientist Francis Fukuyama, ‘the end of history’. At the same time, class and social mobility were being replaced as the idiom through which recruitment to places like the Foreign Office were discussed in Britain. The age of ‘diversity’ was beginning. Originating in the United States as part of an attempt to make ‘Affirmative Action’ policies on race more palatable to white American business owners, ‘diversity’ was enthusiastically imported to Britain, especially to the private sector, where its arguments that social heterogeneity was good for business held much appeal.49 Since the 1960s, legislation tackling gender parity, race discrimination, and homosexuality had created new criteria by which greater workplace equality could be measured. ‘Diversity’ appeared to offer a panacea capable of implementing social fairness simultaneously on multiple fronts.50 There was a problem, however, when it came to diversity and class. Most attempts to tackle social bias in recruitment thus far had, as we have seen, been founded on the basis of ‘equality of opportunity’ and ‘meritocracy’ – essentially on the idea that talent existed in raw form in everyone and that if recruiters were blind to social background then organisations would hire staff on a more representative basis. Attempts such as that of Eden and Bevin to diversify recruitment to the Foreign Office depended on the erasure of working-class identity, so that background simply did not matter. Diversity, conversely, depended on the celebration and foregrounding of particular aspects of identity, such as gender, in order to get the best out of different types of people.
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