I am really determined not to harp on again about politics, the election and the Labour leadership today. I think everyone is a bit cross-eyed with ennui about the whole thing.

What I want to talk about is social class.

But even as I was mulling over all its ramifications, I realised that in Malta, perhaps more than other countries, one’s politics has always been inextricably linked with socio-economic factors. Just like Susie Orbach’s famous book declared that Fat is a Feminist Issue, we cannot escape the fact that class is a political one.

So can one discuss social class without dragging politics into it? I’ll try.

There are people who go through life blissfully unperturbed by which social class others come from. For a long time when I was much younger, I was such a person, and to some extent, I still am. I hate pigeonholing and labelling people in these neat little boxes before determining whether I should consider them my friends or even passing acquaintances. I cannot really explain my disinterest in developing a social class ‘radar’; it was not so much missing as rather rusty from lack of use. So while I was vaguely aware that I had cast my net wide and had included among my friends people from all sorts of different social backgrounds, it mattered as much to me as the fact that some had blue eyes and some had brown. (And to date, it still doesn’t).

So there I was, happily going through life, pretty much oblivious to this whole social class issue. Gradually, however, it began to dawn on me that others were not so nonchalant as I was when it came to choosing their social circle.

There would be nasty remarks to the effect of “why on earth are you friends with her?” and while I would loyally stick up for the “her” in question, protesting that she was really nice, I would suddenly see the “her” through the eyes of the person who made the remark. Ah, I see – the problem isn’t the girl’s personality; it’s her “class”.

Of course, the paradox is that the same people who deride others on the basis of class (“Jaqq, I don’t want to have anything to do with them”) are quick to brand others racist when they speak in the same tones about blacks or Arabs.

Now it’s true that the unpleasant practice of snubbing people because they are not the right “type” happens all over the world, but I tell you, never have I seen it done so often and so spitefully as on this island. Which is ridiculous when you come to think of it… for we are barely half a million clinging to the side of this rock, running around like busy ants, desperately trying to outdo each other in material consumption and what passes for status. And yet, the social class divide is so deep that even I, who for many years seemed to be sleepwalking through the whole thing, ended up becoming acutely conscious of it.

Obviously, I have always been aware of the clues people use to size each other up (I said I was sleepwalking, not brain dead), but it was something I was subconsciously registering without being really responsive to. A bit like background music you are only aware of when someone suddenly turns up the volume, making it impossible to ignore.

That’s when I realised that not only were most people more intensely alert to social class than I was, but that they patterned their entire lives around it. And, like anything else that you have never really paid attention to before, once you are abruptly confronted with it – you can never really overlook it again.

The starkness of it was staring me in the face: for some people, there was a whole itemised shopping list to be ticked off: where a person comes from / what his parents do for a living / what language they speak / where they went to school and, (here it comes) who they vote for… all this really did matter. Boy, did it matter.

Then you get people who demand more details… it’s not enough to be from say, Sliema, but what part of Sliema: the so-called posh part or the part which is rather unfairly known as the Lazy Corner? Valletta is another minefield, depending on whether you come from the upper part St Barbara’s Bastions, or from the less desirable areas known as Due Balli or il-Mandragg.

For a long time, if you came from a village, you were, frankly, a peasant. As for being from the Cottonera area, well… let’s say noses tended to wrinkle in distaste.

But about 20 years ago something odd happened. Foreigners started buying old houses in the village core, converting them and actually deciding to live there. You know, right next to (oh my God) farmers. How eccentric; how strange. But wait a minute… what’s this I see? The nouveau riche decided that if foreigners are doing it, it must be OK and voila, it suddenly become trendy to live in places like Zebbug, Siggiewi and Gharghur. (Whereas before, if like me, you were actually born in Haz-Zebbug, the reaction to this would be an appalled expression followed by a mystified, “but you don’t look like you come from Zebbug!” Go figure.)

Which brings us to language.

If location is a social minefield, language is a veritable landscape filled with booby traps for the unsuspecting. The first divider is of course Maltese vs. English as a first language, which is inextricably linked to education. Those who are fiercely protective of their spoken language of choice, view the others with scorn, disdain and ridicule. The ones who don’t enter this fray are those who are fluently bi-lingual in both and thus have no petty hang-ups.

When Church schools became accessible to all, working class parents who wanted more for their children rushed to enrol their offspring. Having lost their elitism for the middle class, Church schools were replaced by independent private schools, even though the fees were crippling. Of course this also meant that anyone with enough money could get their child in.

So over the years, a new faction has emerged, the upwardly mobile wannabes who pepper their Maltese with choice English phrases, just enough to be able to navigate their way in different social situations. A ‘born and bred’ English speaker will, however, sniff out this impostor from across the room, probably from the grating sound of a wrongly pronounced vowel or the infiltrating harshness of a Maltese accent.

Within the English-speaking milieu, there are also various sub-cultures whose grasp of grammatically correct English seems to have deteriorated from one generation to the next. That means you can find a 75-year-old gentleman with impeccable (if slightly pompous) colonial English from the days of the British Empire. Then there are those 40 and 30-something “ladies who lunch” who all speak in an immediately recognisable Convent School sing-song (there must be a nun somewhere who is responsible for all these women speaking exactly the same). You can spot them by their tendency to punctuate each sentence with a questioning “ey?” Not to mention syntax-challenged statements such as “it’s been at me for ages”.

(And if you need confirmation about the downward spiral of English, just check out blogs and discussion forums to see how many people confuse such simple words as “loose” and “lose”.)

The younger generations have discarded much of the pseudo-British accent (and much to their parents’ chagrin) often lapse into American accents and slang picked up from cable TV. Their sloppy grammar is made more colourful by the regular use of vulgar Maltese phrases similar to that which was immortalised on so many election campaign T-shirts.

Needless to say they study Maltese as if it were a foreign language out of sufferance and purely to enter university.

In complete contrast, some Maltese-speaking people (usually products of the State school system) have come to the conclusion that they can get through life without ever having to speak or understand English – the proliferation of colloquial TV dramas means they never have to watch another film or TV series in English again if they don’t want to.

Given a choice, they would rather watch Italian TV, and in fact, their grasp of Italian is often impressive. (The irony of this is too sweet and deserves a mention, for in the past it was the educated upper classes that were fluent in Italian).

Cocooned in a world which allows them to butcher English words by “spelling” them in Maltese (even when they SMS on their mobajl) they have neither the incentive nor the desire to become bi-lingual.

Here, I cannot but bring up politics. Taking all the above factors into consideration, is it any wonder that private school educated, English speaking people who hail from Sliema but who vote Labour are considered to be an aberration? (“come back to the other side where you belong!”). Equally surreal are the Nationalist voters who just don’t fit the prototype – like those now infamous Qormi women chanting for Gonzi.

And finally… money.

Probably the only thing the social classes have in common is that everyone wants more of it. But while the wealthy were traditionally the ones who came from a higher social class, this no longer applies.

You can find millionaires who are coarse and illiterate, and highly educated scholars who barely have enough to make ends meet. It is, in fact, when it comes to money that the lines between the social classes have become blurred. As everyone aspires to climb the social ladder, there are few places that are considered “too posh” any more. I become sharply aware of this over Christmas and New Year when even working class families think nothing of spending a small fortune on a seven-course dinner at a five-star hotel. To escape this invasion on their territory, the higher classes are fleeing to remote farmhouses in Gozo instead. The ones with real money have invested in “a little place” in Tuscany.

Once upon a time, those who flashed money around and constantly spoke about how much things cost were considered vulgar. As the saying goes, “they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing”. The sign of someone with true class, it was argued, was a person who would never ask how much you earn. These days, however, this kind of crassness among the supposed “higher classes” has become normal, except among those who are well bred in the real sense of the word, who have an innate instinct of what constitutes good manners. Rudeness, unfortunately, has become the one unifying factor throughout the entire social strata.

What is the difference, tell me, between a woman who screams at her children in Maltese across the breadth of Ghadira Bay, and another woman, using her own version of English, who shrieks with piercing decibels at a private beach club about how much fun they had on her husband’s boat?

Ultimately, this is why I cannot relate to those who put such great store on ‘who’ people are. You know, the kind who tell you, “but everyone knows who he is” (and by everyone they mean their own social set) or alternatively, “no one knows who he is” (again, if you would step out of your insular world for a minute, you might meet new people). Ah, but they don’t want to meet anyone who is not like them, for they feel safe with the same set of friends they’ve known all their lives in their compact little social network. Just to make sure, they even marry one another.

* * *

And this all brings me back to my original point. Does social class matter?

Rather than focusing on social class, perhaps it is time we placed more emphasis on “class”. As in people who have it and people who don’t. It’s in knowing how to behave appropriately in certain social situations. It’s in being low-key rather than over-the-top (whether it comes to cleavage, make-up, jewellery or the volume of one’s voice).

You can have money without having class, but you can never have class if you think it is simply something that can be bought with money.

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