Alongside this national culture the working class had a counter-culture: through bitter experience ordinary people had come to value solidarity over competitive effort and fatalism over aspiration. But because everyone was exposed to the national culture, to a considerable extent working-class children also internalised its essentially middle-class value system. 

Driven partly by the commercial race to the gutter led by Rupert Murdoch, and partly by the collapse in middle-class self-confidence, the dominant culture has been drastically vulgarised. What has triumphed is not even traditional core working-class culture. Partly, there was a selection effect: as the English working class shrank from being a substantial majority of the population to a minority, its composition inevitably changed. Ranged on a spectrum of attitudes from aspiration and self-help to fatalism and grievance, the ranks of the working class were depleted disproportionately from the more functional end.

 More profoundly, the new dominant culture selected disastrously from the myriad new influences to which society was exposed. For example, England has more immigrants from neighbouring France and Germany than from distant little Jamaica. Yet the contribution of the French and German cultural stereotypes of respect for intellect and hard work to English mainstream culture are negligible compared to the Jamaican stereotype of swaggering violence. A middle class embarrassed by past class deference and racism lacked the will to police mainstream culture. The role models for English working-class youth have become celebrity footballers and their shallow pastimes: indeed, survey evidence shows celebrity to be the predominant youth aspiration. 

More profoundly, the very criteria for respect have been turned upside down. Respect is now demanded as a right irrespective of behaviour. An example of this indiscriminate "respect agenda" is the desperate avoidance of official criticism of single-parent families in the face of mounting evidence of their undesirable consequences. In response to defeat, the middle class has retreated into a subculture where it is still able to serve its own preferences: with the internet and Radio 3, we insulate ourselves from the Sun and X Factor. With expensive suburbs and private schools  we can preserve the cultural dominance necessary for the fundamental task of each generation: to pass on our culture to our children. But because the middle class lost control of the national culture, its culture no longer has significant reach into the working class: working-class children are now largely dependent upon the diminished cultural resources of their own class.