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Good Morning. In the last few weeks there has been a noticeable increase in class-laden insults being exchanged between political opponents. A working-class minister has been accused of not having enough GCSE’s to do her job. Speakers at a Labour conference have talked of posh boys and banning private schools. While those who say we should find some kind of middle ground are told they’re out of touch with real people and living in a liberal, elite bubble. All this has a retrograde feel. Harking back to a time when we were stuck with rigid, fatalistic class distinctions, as so brilliantly captured in the 1962 comedy sketch on the Frost Report, where an absurdly tall, upper class John Cleese feels superior to a middle class Ronnie Barker who in turn looks down on a lower class Ronnie Corbett – who ‘knows his place’. Back then there were even finer calibrations of class to worry about. I was born into a middle-class family that had lower-middle class provenance (being ‘trade’) but which (through education and occupation) had upper-middle class pretentions and connections. I knew my place but I soon began to learn that it wasn’t as fixed as I thought. At my state primary school I felt posh; at my direct grant boarding school I felt somewhere in the middle; it wasn’t until I went to university that I realised what upper class really looked like. When I fell in love with a working-class girl, a friend actually asked me if it was sensible to go out with someone from a different background. Years later, when the Berlin Wall came down, some said the class war was over. The Proletariat hadn’t risen up because they really wanted colour TV’s. And in this country, we entered what the then Tory Prime Minister, John Major, called The Classless Society. Under Tony Blair’s New Labour, the phrase social mobility was coined. You no longer had to ‘know your place’ because you could move - on and up. Today many barriers of class have, like the wall, come down; but certain differences – particularly economic ones – are still unresolved. ‘The poor you will always have with you’ (and the posh, too) remains an inconvenient truth. Thankfully, that working-class girl I met (and later married) was smart and classy enough to introduce me to the source of that particular truth. When Jesus engaged with people, their social background was rarely the issue. Yes, he subverted ideas of hierarchy and pecking order; we are all equal in the eyes of God, if not the Inland Revenue. But his real concern was for the individual’s soul. When he met someone – tax collector, fisherman, army officer, prostitute – he addressed their particularity. His gospel inverts the condescension inherent in that sketch, as well as the class-laden insults being thrown around today. In His World people are judged, not by their class or status, but by their attitude to others.