It has been 23 years since I first wrote for ����Vlog about opening UK universities to communities across working-class diversity and I would love to be able to say that things have improved. But, alas, they have only changed.

That fact has been brought home to me over the past month by the controversy surrounding Gregg Wallace’s behaviour as host of the long-running BBC television show MasterChef. For those outside the UK – or who have no interest in competitive cooking or celebrity culture – Wallace is a middle-aged man of working-class origin, who defended himself against of “highly inappropriate” sexualised comments and behaviour by alleging that the complaints came from “a handful of ”.

That assertion – with its implication that his behaviour would not be considered inappropriate by working-class people – is offensive to working-class women and men of all ages. The fact is that being respectful of each other’s feelings and social norms is, for most of us across the board, an automatic reflex. Yet, in the wake of Wallace’s comment, I have already been party to a conversation in an educational setting in which I was told that “working-class culture” is used as an excuse for sexist, racist, homophobic and every other prejudicial behaviour.

Of course, “working-class culture” can be used to excuse crass behaviour, but this works both ways. The irony is that judging the mores of an entire class based on the behaviour of Wallace – who has now been on MasterChef after stepping down – is the crassest display of unconscious bias I have seen in a while.

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I’m not a class warrior, but I do think that the hegemony within universities, including campus culture, is very middle class. And that hegemony tends to align itself with the “woke” end of the highly divisive and unhelpful free-speech debate, which tends to be fought between the loudest people at the extremes: those proclaiming that anyone not wearing a variety of anti-fascist badges must be a “bigot” and those that think that anyone not wearing a poppy or flag is a “woke” traitor.

That latter “anything goes” attitude is unconsciously seen by a section of ultra-liberal middle-class academics as a working-class trait. That is certainly how many working-class people consider themselves to be perceived within UK higher education. Moreover, among some academics, there seems to be a sort of cultural mission to create more “acceptable” versions of working-class students – from across genders, sexualities and races – in their own image: a sense of “come in, but leave who you are at the door”. 

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It might be hard for some to believe, but there still places where the epithet “love” is a genuine term of endearment and not seen as a tool to perpetuate the patriarchy, for example. I have seen older members from across working-class communities, who have worked up the courage to enter a place of education for the first time, bewildered and deterred by the way they are confronted by those coming from far more privileged backgrounds for their use of a vernacular that has been considered innocuous for the whole of their past lives (and I am not talking about language that has always been intolerable). This is often accompanied by a generalisation about “these people”, inspired by the Gregg Wallaces of the world.

Class prejudice is a two-way street, of course. Working-class people also make assumptions about middle-class academics and students. However, this tends not to impact upon middle-class communities in any material way, on campus or beyond.

Either way, assuming someone is anything simply because of their class is ridiculous. It has become a mantra of mine that one of my greatest frustrations is that when I speak of the people that I come from, it is immediately assumed that I mean old, white, Cockney men – rather than from a diverse family that shares one social characteristic (being working class).

Moreover, how we decide on the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable behaviour within a given environment must grow out of consensus and not be the ultimate domain of any one group that believes itself to be morally or intellectually superior because of its ideology or position within the hierarchy. This can, and will, inevitably create alienation and exclusion for those with the least power even when well intentioned.

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The fact is that some of those that shout the loudest for the “oppressed” on campuses are themselves becoming oppressors, taking no account of culture, age, context or intent when judging others’ utterances. And it is generally those that make the most noise that set the tone – even when that tone is at odds with most of wider society.

The parodic displays of “patriotism” shown by Union Flag-draped individuals at the “Last Night of the Proms” are no more excluding to large sections of our population than would be the group of middle-class academics I witnessed recently singing along to an almost Kumbaya-like rendition of an improvised song they called “clap for the working class”.

Joe Baden OBE is director of , an outreach programme at Goldsmiths, University of London. The views in this article are his own and do not reflect the views of any organisation or other individual.