This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series, Change in British Society, given by A.H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H.

was originally broadcast in 1978.

A class-ridden society.

That's the common judgment on Britain by social observers, whether delivered as praise or condemnation.

I heard this exact phrase from two foreign acquaintances revisiting the island after an interval of 10 years.

Both sociologists, the one a Russian communist, the other an American liberal.

The Russians spoke of the continuing hegemony of a capitalist class

with its power legally based on concentrated ownership of property

and its control operating through budgetary manipulation of the level of employment,

definition of welfare spending, domination of the mass media, and in the last resort, disposition of the means of violence through the armed forces and the police.

He gave me, in short, a brief recital of Marxist orthodoxy in which every significant feature of social structure and the distribution of life chances rests fundamentally on the present sovereignty

and the approaching overthrow of a capitalist class.

The American used the phrase with a tone and in a context which changed its meaning.

There had been economic growth, he thought, slower perhaps, but essentially similar to

that of the continent.

Nevertheless, class was still the outstanding feature of our society.

Neither the elite establishment nor the attitudes of lower class people had really changed.

That, he added, is the reason why you still have the highest quality television in the world.

A series like last year's adaptation of Robert Graves' I. Claudius would be impossible in mainstream America.

Nowhere else in the Western world does the elite retain the confidence both to indulge its own cultural tastes

and also to believe that these should be offered to

...