The Guardian view on the class crisis in the arts: the UK’s culture must not become the preserve of the elite | Editorial

2026-01-30 - 18:35

Countless reports and celebrities have called for greater working-class representation, so why has nothing changed? In his McTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV festival in 2024, the playwright James Graham called class “everyone’s least favourite diversity and representation category”. A socioeconomic duty on public bodies was included in 2010’s Equality Act, but has never been enacted. Now Class Ceiling, a review from Manchester University, co-chaired by the former chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal, is calling for change. It wants class to be made a legally “protected characteristic” like race and sex (and several others), to address the class crisis in the arts – not just in the north-west but across the UK. The report tells a depressingly familiar story. A 2022 study showed that the proportion of working-class actors, musicians and writers has halved since the 1970s; another in 2024 found that fewer than one in 10 arts workers in the UK had working-class roots. Top-selling musicians are six times more likely than other people to have attended private schools, and Bafta-nominated actors five times more likely to have done so. The same is true behind the scenes: last year Guardian analysis found that 30% of artistic directors and creative leaders were privately educated. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...