The middle classes should stop apologising for not being working class, leading interviewer Justin Webb has said.
Webb, who presents Radio 4’s Today programme, said middle class people should not have to justify themselves or be defensive.
He argued the BBC risked falling into a ‘terrible trap’ if it sought to ‘campaign against listeners’, adding that the status was just a ‘fact of life’.
Justin Webb, who presents Radio 4’s Today programme, said middle class people should not have to justify themselves or be defensive
Asked at and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival why Today was so middle class, he said: ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being middle class.
‘I think we fall into a terrible trap if we campaign against a) people who listen or b) against people who pay the licence fee.
‘I can’t, with my mother looking down from somewhere, think I’m anything other than upper middle class because that’s what she told me I am.’
In his memoir, The Gift of Radio: My Childhood and Other Train Wrecks, Webb described his dysfunctional upbringing, including a mother who resolutely clung to her middle-class status despite being impoverished after being sacked from her job.
He told the audience at Cheltenham: ‘The idea that «middle-class» is used as a term of abuse is fatuous… Being middle class brings in some wonderful things. And, from the example of my mother, it also brings barmy things.’
Last week Webb entered a war of words with his BBC colleague Amol Rajan who had claimed there was an ‘bias’ towards presenters with ‘posh accents’.
Last week Webb entered a war of words with his BBC colleague Amol Rajan (pictured) who had claimed there was an ‘bias’ towards presenters with ‘posh accents’
In his memoir, The Gift of Radio: My Childhood and Other Train Wrecks, Webb described his dysfunctional upbringing, including a mother who resolutely clung to her middle-class status despite being impoverished after being sacked from her job
According to Rajan, only 10 per cent of British people speak RP, or ‘received pronunciation’, as opposed to 70 per cent of news presenters.
In response, Daily Telegraph columnist Michael Deacon called Rajan’s argument ‘nonsense’ and accused him of ‘inverted snobbery’.
He also mocked Cambridge graduate Rajan’s many jobs at the BBC and suggested that a bigger diversity issue is that the corporation is ‘stuffed to the gills with Oxbridge graduates’.
A young Justin with his mother, Gloria
Webb shared Deacon’s piece in a now deleted tweet, in which he wrote: ‘Ha ha such a good piece from @MichaelPDeacon – in which he skewers the oddness of chaps pickled in punting telling us who’s in charge and who isn’t.’
He later added that ‘speaking in a way people understand isn’t classism for goodness sake’.
Webb also highlighted the fact online classes for social worker that Rajan is a graduate of Downing College, Cambridge, while he went to the LSE.
Webb doubled down on his defence of RP during a talk at the Henley Literary Festival last week.
‘So, my argument with Amol — I wouldn’t quite go so far as [to] say I want to give the guy elocution lessons because I think he is on the up and I am on the down when it comes to that — but I do think there is a basic need to be understood,’ he said.
‘Accents don’t worry me, certainly regional accents don’t concern me but the need to be understood, and the need to speak to people in a way that doesn’t repel them is hugely important for all of us.’
