10 - The Ruling Class: Ideology and the School Movie

Summary

One of the most distinctive features of British society is the importance and persistence of class differences. It thus may seem rather strange to find Ernest Barker arguing that one of the “constants” in the “English” character is “social homogeneity” made possible because “England has had little class-feeling,” even though he admits that “down to our own days, it has had, and has even cherished, a whole ladder of class-differences.” In this argument, the national character transcends “class-differences” and prevents them from becoming “class-feeling” that might threaten the social order.

Barker made these comments in 1947, in the aftermath of the People's War, but he does not see this state of society as a recent development. He seems to consider a long history of trade-union activity and events such as the General Strike of 1921 as insignificant compared with the interests that all citizens share in common. In more recent years, there have been claims that, although class was important in the past, Britain has developed into a classless society, a myth that Margaret Thatcher turned on its head by placing the blame for social breakdown and national decline on the loss of those traditions that enabled people to know their place in society.

Thatcher traced the problem back to the 1960s, when class differences and other kinds of inequality were challenged by new political movements. At that time, film theory and cultural studies became centrally concerned with a theory of “ideology” that sought to explain why people generally accepted the existing social hierarchy.