"As you say, we don't know who 'wrote' folk songs, which is a pretty fair indication of its working/peasant class origins - educated people tend to sign their creations. Where else would you find massive body of totally anonymous work"

Good point. I suppose it's worth observing, though, that loads of hunting songs are anonymous and yet I imagine they were often created by middle and upper class composers.

"I have always thought the class is a curious way to define people, especially 'working class'. After all, nearly everybody works for a living, don't they?"

Surely "working class" is just the more polite replacement for "lower class"? Much like "developing countries" it's an attempt to categorise but not patronise.

A folkie friend of mine was telling me about a couple of guys he knew who ran a communist bookshop back in the 60s. They were both graduates, both from middle class backgrounds, and this obviously made them feel slightly fraudulent, being so removed from the people whose cause they espoused. So they went and got jobs as removal men. Now, call me unkind, but when I heard about this I laughed. I can almost imagine Ewan MacColl singing "I'm an honest working man, and I drive a Pickfords van".

I wasn't born until the 70s, so I don't share the experiences of those intellectual removal men, but it seems to me that Britain has changed a little since then. Sure, there is still inequality and unfairness, but I'm not sure how much society is still defined and divided by class. It used to be "you do what you are", now it's "you are what you do". How we dress and how we speak tells people far less than it used to about our "status".

What makes me middle class? Is it about money? I'm in a so-called professional occupation, but I know for a fact that a plumber or an electrician will make twice as much money as me. That's fair enough, their skills have a higher market value than mine. So are they still lower/working class? Is it about education? If a plumber reads The Sun whereas a librarian reads The Grauniad, then is the latter's social status higher?

It seems to me that "class" is an increasingly vague and blurred categorisation. People talk about the working and middle classes without always demonstrating a clear concept of what the terms mean today.