ABSTRACT
In sociological terms, people's self-description of themselves as belonging to one class or another was essentially a status description. In voting for the Labour Party, people might have been endorsing some redistribution from the rich to the poor; but they were not necessarily endorsing an abolition of private property or even a major change in the social structure. They might have been supporting the party's policy towards a particular industry, such as the coal industry; in this case, their motives would have been sectional rather than class-based. The embourgeoisement hypothesis has plainly exaggerated the extent to which change has been perceived by manual workers. Middle-class job holders are more likely to be in a favourable position, but this is not necessarily the case. The process of equalisation, in other words, has preceded beyond the usually accepted class boundaries. Comparative evidence, notably with France, also suggests that British manual workers' sense of class solidarity with other manual workers is relatively weak.
