For most normal people with busy lives, the phrases “ABC1” and “C2DE” are entirely meaningless. Bring them up in conversation, and it’s as likely that people will assume that they’re friends of R2D2 from the Star Wars franchise as understand what you are talking about.
ABC1 and C2DE are in fact categories of social class and household income used in marketing and advertising, as well as in opinion polls, in order to differentiate people according to wealth, education, and general social class. As a simple guide, the closer to “A” you are, the wealthier and better educated and more well off you are. The closer to “E”, the more likely you are to live in a council house and describe yourself as unemployed.
There’s a third category as well, generally used in Ireland: “F”, which stands for farmers and generally refers to people of a rural, agricultural background.
I mention all of this because this weekend’s Irish Times opinion poll figures on immigration made entirely clear what a lot of us might have suspected: That there’s a significant wealth and social class gap when it comes to attitudes to immigration and the impact of immigration in Ireland.
When asked, for example, whether “immigration has been a net positive for Ireland”, the overall national result was a “yes”: 48% of people said it was a positive, just 35% said it was a negative. Break that figure down by social class, though, and the results are stark: The majority for “positive” is derived from overwhelming positivity from the richest people in Ireland: fully 59% of the ABC1s said immigration is a net positive, with only 28% saying negative.
When you ask the same question of poorer people and farmers, the answer is very different: In both cases, 43% of people say that Immigration has been a net negative, with only 37% in the C2DEs and 34% in the Farmers group saying “positive”.
The gulf is also clear when it comes to current immigration policy: While all three groups want a “more closed” immigration policy (that is, fewer immigrants) the numbers asking for a “more open” immigration policy (that is, more immigrants) show that support for that position comes overwhelmingly from the most well-off: More than twice as many ABC1s want a “more open” immigration policy than in any other group.
Interestingly, social class and wealth is really the only measurement where we see real differences between groups based on demographics. Attitudes towards immigration are pretty consistent across age, sex (women are marginally more anti-immigration) and geography (though people in Connaught and Ulster are marginally more anti-immigration, which probably reflects a poorer and more rural population).
This data is highly relevant for a simple reason: The institutions of Irish society, naturally enough, are dominated by people who were either born into or who have achieved ABC1 status. In politics, the media, law, NGOs, academia, and even the churches, elevated positions correspond with higher social class and income, and these factors, as the poll shows, meaningfully shift social attitudes to immigration to the left.
One might speculate on the reasons for that: It’s probably true that the wealthier you are, the more positive your experience of immigration will be. From the tired (but entirely true) old joke that there are few asylum centres in Dublin 4 to the equally tired but also entirely true old observation that Au Pairs tend to come from overseas, and many migrants make excellent lattes in your favourite coffee shop. For poorer people and those in rural areas, their experiences are simply much more likely to correspond with unwanted migrant centres, and perhaps crime and anti-social behaviour.
These figures are not unique to Ireland: Across the western world the pattern is almost identical. The poorer and more deprived you are, the worse your self-reported experience of immigration and its impacts on you will be. The wealthier you are, the better it will be.
This is why immigration has become such a vexed issue for parties of the left that traditionally represented the poorer people in society. Look no further than Sinn Fein: In this poll, by an enormous margin, its voters are the most anti-immigration of all the parties. That is almost entirely because its supporters are also the poorest and most deprived of all the big parties.
But at the same time, Sinn Fein operates in a world of ABC1s: Its TDs earn high wages. It interacts daily with privileged journalists and well-heeled lobbyists and answers questions in interviews from people whose default assumptions are those of an ABC1. It is trying, and thus far failing, to ride two horses.
In the old days, class war and class divides were almost entirely the province of the left. Across the western world, immigration is changing that wholesale: Donald Trump (whomever his opponent might be) will win many more votes this November from the poorest Americans than he will from the richest. Brexit was based on a rebellion in the North of England – the poorest and most deprived areas, which also gave Boris Johnson a stonking majority in 2019. In France and Germany, the Front Nationale and the Allianz fur Deutschland both win most of their votes in the poorest areas.
The class war, as such, is now being fought on immigration. Which is ironic, because for all the left talk about “privilege”, their attitudes on core issues are increasingly those of the privileged, not the deprived.