Nobody will mourn their passing or attempt to have them reintroduced in desolate parts of Scotland. We will be left with memories of men with tatoos hacking away at coal and fighting one another, women with coarse accents belting their children in supermarkets.

A new report from one of those think tanks that sounds like an irritating art house techno band, the Future Foundation, has concluded that the proportion of Britons who “regard themselves” as middle class has risen from 30% to 43% of the population over the past 40 years. William Nelson, the report’s author, suggests that class distinctions are becoming blurred and that the “traditional markers of social class — job, family background and wealth — seem to be fading”.

There have been many attempts to extinguish the working classes since they first began breeding in the wild, back in the late 18th century. The most usual approach has been to deny that they exist at all. I think it was Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, who announced cheerfully, with a patrician wave of the hand, that “we’re all middle class now”, which suggests to me that he had not spent much time wandering the streets of his own constituency, Stockton-on-Tees. (Macmillan is the most famous name associated with Stockton along with the Gladiator, Jet)

The effective abolition in the 1990s of the old registrar general’s scale — which made it quite clear who was working class and who was not, in the baldest of terms — also made it easier for social scientists to conclude that the working class had somehow disappeared when nobody was looking. Now we have Nelson and the Futureheads, whose modus operandi was to ask people whether they considered themselves working class and to take the responses at face value.

The fashion is that you can be whatever you want to be and nobody has a right to tell you any different, regardless of the evidence. If a plumber in Plumstead with a melanine topped cocktail bar in his front room and a mantelpiece full of porcelain cats and darts trophies insists that he is upper class, Nelson brooks no objection. Similarly, if the Duke of Westminster wishes to insist he is a worker, it’s fair game.

It is an approach that extends to race. At my local hospital you are instructed to tick a box beside one of about 100 nationalities before you will be treated. But the form makes clear that your parentage, place of birth, ancestry etc need have no bearing on the matter: it’s up to you to decide. I always insist that I am a Somalian Jew and nobody takes umbrage.

So perhaps Nelson may have it the wrong way around. He is right that income differences between working and middle class have eroded to such an extent that they are almost meaningless. But in allowing us to decide that we are all socially superior, he has ignored one or two important signifiers.

The working classes were once characterised by their addiction to two pastimes: football and drinking. As you are aware, football attendances are higher than they have been for 20 years and the sport is now ubiquitous. Millions watch it on television. Further, as a nation we get more drop-dead drunk than at any time in our history. Serious, committed binge drinking is endemic.

Then there is deferred gratification: the thing that the working classes never much cared for. The middle classes, historically, put off pleasure for the sake of later reward. They saved money, they invested in their children’s education and, when exhausted by years of mind-numbing office work, they left their children a decent inheritance, having lived lives of polite denial. Further, they were not sexually promiscuous — that miserable relic of Protestantism, deferred gratification again.

The population of Britain, however, is today up to its neck in debt. Our savings are minimal. Recklessly, we spend, spend, spend on consumer durables, holidays, white goods and the like, shoving the bills on our expensive credit cards as never before. We spend so much that there is frequently nothing left for our children to inherit.

We are disinclined even to save for our retirements — living each day at a time, wallowing in our affluence. We have sex with disparate partners; divorce rates are higher than at any time in our history and the average length of a first marriage is much shorter.

We may do less manual work than before, — we leave that to Boris and Svetlana from the Ukraine, because they are cheap, and our heavy industry decamped years ago. But we are less inclined to associate career status with social standing.

So perhaps the truth is that rather than the working class becoming extinct, it is the middle class vanishing before our eyes. To paraphrase Macmillan: “We’re all working class now.” It makes me feel a little happier about the state of Britain. Mine’s a double — and you can put it on my card.

Times Recommends

• Brown's boom will end only in bust
• Brand USA needs urgent repair
• Where are our Nobel physics prizes?