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Good evening. It was pink, fluffy, upper class, Dame Barbara Cartland, who declared

Snobbery was dead here on Radio 4's Woman's Hour. Have English class barriers broken down?

She was asked, of course they have, my dear, she replied sweetly, or else I wouldn't be sitting here

talking to somebody like you.

Maybe she was a touch premature.

In fact, there are many who feel that snobbery is so much a part of modern life that it needs to be made illegal.

The British Psychological Society launched a campaign this week to have social class declared a protected characteristic like ethnicity.

Potentially, opening up employers, say, perceived to discriminate on grounds of class to legal action.

No doubt, old-fashioned, I look down on him, he looks up to me, style snobbery still exists, though how much it affects the life chances of those less privileged is an ongoing and passionate argument.

Reverse snobbery is a more modern phenomenon,

with ivory tower politicians glottal stopping for all their worth and trying to work a dose of deprivation into their life stories.

In this neck of the woods, accents once thought impossibly vulgar

are now in high demand, and those refined voices languished,

not just unwanted, but scorned. There's a case for saying wokedom's a form of snobbery,

and knowing how properly to address, and, by the way, note the elegant avoidance of a split

infinitive, someone with a complicated idea of their own gender is akin to older snobs knowing what to do with fish knives.

Is snobbery a particularly British vice, still holding back the poor, the socially marginalised,

and those who used to be called working class, or is it at worst a universal and relatively harmless preference for people of our own kind,

at best, a praiseworthy urge for good manners, good behaviour and good taste.

That's our moral maze tonight.

A rather mixed panel, I'm afraid to say.

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