What it means to be working-class

I thought Lynsey Hanley, as so often, hit the nail on the head:
The iron rule of being working class in today’s Guardian. She explains that for a kid to get on and get into the sort of education -- the sort of degree in the sort of university -- that will mean you’re on a steady £30,000 at 30 is these days a hopeless prospect. Hanley puts it in a way we seldom hear:

While in government, Labour consistently missed the point about the demoralising nature of low-paid insecure work, which, unless they are superhuman (as business and government demands of them) traps people in crisis-management mode: bills, debt, childcare, housing, on a rota of uncertainty. It may well be the case that flexible jobs are better than no jobs; the question is whether children whose parents are barely getting by can see a real and concrete route to a more comfortable life.

Pleasant

’Pleasant’ is an entirely middle-class word. It’s one that many people I know would never use, except in an ironic or derogatory way. A person’s attitude to you may have been ‘pleasant’ -- meaning, ‘pleasant enough, I suppose, but not amounting to warm or convivial’. My daughter, asked about the weather on her weekend break in Ghent, said ‘OK, not bad, not stunning’ -- then summed it up in ‘pleasant’, spoken with a particular class-laden slight lisp -- Bakhtin’s ‘stylisation’ of a speech genre.

‘Pleasant’ is the obligatory undirected general smile worn by certain middle-class women in getting on a bus, as if warding off hostility or violence (after all, who might be on a bus?). It’s milk-and-water, non-committal, incurring no risk of being taken up.

Talk to a working-class person and their mien is never ‘pleasant’. It’s frankly warm or humorously sardonic in a friendly way, or openly convivial (’All right, mate?’) -- or frankly unwarm, hostile.