Few families budget the considerable sum spent each week on beer, the obligatory trips to the local movie theater, or gambling either through football pools or bets on horse races. But it is not unusual in these new circumstances to find men who spend £2 or £3 a week for such purposes. "Why the bloody hell not?" a worker in Liverpool asked. "I've got me job and I don't 'ave to worry." The permanence of his job and of high wages had become an accepted part of his life. He was one of those who had not been moved by the Labor Party's dire forebodings of unemployment and the dole under Conservative rule. To him these were as shadowy and distant as the Corn Laws and Peterloo. The new class has money, security, and leisure: this is the promised land. According to theories of some reformers, the worker, freed from the oppression of poverty, should be expanding intellectually, worrying about the future of Nigeria rather than the football fortunes of Arsenal. My opinion is that the opposite is true, that with the coming of the good life the worker has gradually shed his responsibilities (some of these, in fact, have been stripped from him) and has lost the old desperate desire to improve his lot and make himself and his class the paramount political power in the land. There is no need to save, for the state provides for all eventualities the worker can foresee. There is no compulsion to ensure that the children get an education that will enable them to rise above the circumstances of their parents. For the circumstances are so good, so unimaginably higher than those into which the fathers and mothers of this class were born, that there seems to be nothing further to be sought. Why should a boy be given a good education--"stuffing 'is head with a lot of nonsense 'e'll never use" was the way one father put it--when he can make £10 a week after a few years in a factory? The schools are there, they are free, but when the time comes the boy can leave the school and take up a man's work in the factory. There seems to be a conviction among working-class mothers that a girl needs a little more schooling to fit her for an office job. But the men of the class, proud of the money they are earning and the "rights" their unions have won, see no virtue in an office job or the higher education that fits one for it. For the manual worker has found security, and that is what he is interested in, that is what he has sought through the long, bitter history of industrial disputes in Britain. He is not interested in and he does not share the standards of the old middle class or even of the artisan class that preceded him.