The Great British Class Survey: Requiescat in Pace

Abstract

Professor Savage and his colleagues have shifted intellectual ground and changed the intellectual focus of the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) from the provision of ‘a comprehensive map of class in Britain’ to an examination of what they call the British ‘elite’. I argue that this ‘elite’ is no such thing and that whatever it is, it is not well defined by the procedures that are used to identify it. At the heart of all the papers the GBCS team present in this issue of the journal is an unavoidable incoherence which arises from the bias in responses to the original survey. Despite protestations to the contrary this response bias has not been dealt with properly and the resulting empirical analysis is without much value.