“‘We all need to remember, every day more and more, that in the last resort there is no such thing as the ‘common man’,” Richard Hoggart wrote, seven years before the birth of Nigel Farage. “If we do not, we may in the end have allowed individual decision to slip away in our dutiful democratic identification of ourselves with a hypothetical figure whose main value is to those who will mislead us.” Hoggart, who died in 2014 at the age of 95, spent his extraordinarily productive working life urging us to watch out for men such as Farage and Donald Trump: “mass persuaders” whose cynicism and self-interest knew no bounds.

The Uses of Literacy, published 60 years ago next month, was his second and by far his most famous book. In it, Hoggart argued that collective engagement in a project of civic literacy would grow naturally out of the increasing education of the working classes, and that knowledge really would translate into power. And in some ways his hopeful prediction came true. From the 1960s onwards thousands of young people entered higher education, catering to the first mass cohorts of grammar school children, and then, in the 1990s, furnishing nearly half of under-25s with a degree.

But what of the other half? This tacit segregation was laid bare by analysis of how people voted in the 2016 referendum. Statistically at least, if you were born before the era of mass higher education, and held few or no qualifications, you voted to leave. If you were under 40 – the biggest waves of university expansion happened after 1992 – and held a degree, you voted to remain.

As has been pointed out, many of those who voted to leave stand to lose the most from a potential economic downturn brought about by Brexit. But the point is not that people without qualifications are stupid, and that in the context of the referendum they unwittingly voted against their own interests. It is that they perceived that nothing and no one in power was acting in their interests, so what the hell? People with qualifications have come to live increasingly separate lives from those without, are rewarded far more generously in terms of pay and status and therefore had greater cause to believe in the status quo.

When Britain exposed its deep divisions in last year’s referendum, it was tempting to view “leave” and “remain” voters as opposing factions in a culture war. Mail readers versus Guardian types; town dwellers versus city dwellers; pub-goers versus tapas-eaters. Tempting, yes, but too easy. Britain’s cultural divide is an expression of another, more pernicious divide that has been growing for decades, that of social class.

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Writing in 2015, the sociologist Mike Savage identified the present-day “cultural omnivore”, whose position within the “established middle-class” cultural elite was anatomised in his book Social Class in the 21st Century. Savage and his colleagues based their study on their 2011 Great British Class Survey, conducted on the BBC website, which revealed vast and growing experiential gaps between university educated, city dwelling professionals and older, unqualified people living in smaller towns.

A new snobbery … Tony Blair with Noel Gallagher in 1997. Photograph: Rebecca Naden/PA

Cultural omnivores get jittery about being thought of as “elite”; they go to as many rock gigs as classical concerts, and might pick up a cheeky Sun with their Guardian. One effect of this cultural blurring – as evidenced during New Labour’s late 1990s honeymoon period, when Noel Gallagher from Oasis quaffed champagne with Tony Blair at No 10 – was to blind this new elite to widening social divisions. Surely we can’t be that divided if we’re all buying the same records, the thinking seemed to go. Although the Britpop era appeared to mark some kind of return to a period when popular culture was a potentially unifiying force between the classes, in reality it masked a new snobbery.

In his introduction to a 1989 reissue of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, Hoggart noted that “the coffin of class” had remained empty throughout the postwar period, in spite of regular claims by pundits that class was dead. What he’d witnessed instead in the intervening decades was a regular reinvention of the rules of class; a redefinition of snobbery and distinction, so that no matter how hard people attempted to dissolve the boundaries, new ones kept cropping up.

In 1960 Hoggart led the Pilkington committee on broadcasting, whose recommendations forced ITV to compete with the BBC on grounds of quality rather than ratings. It wasn’t assumed that you needed a degree to follow Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, which appeared on BBC2 in 1973. Now you’d be lucky if you saw it on BBC4. The original television adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots, made in 1977, was broadcast on BBC1. The 2017 remake is being shown on BBC4, edged off the BBC’s flagship channel by the somewhat less stretching The Real Marigold Hotel, in which ageing celebrities are filmed trying out retirement in India. “A little caviar for the snobs and buckets of rubbish for the masses,” was how Hoggart described the early-2000s division of BBC channels into posh and non-posh.

In The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart had anticipated this changing nature of culture in British life. His book is at once a testimony to a vanishing world of working class proximity and cooperation, and a warning about the creation of cultural life in the potential vacuum left by its passing.

Hoggart was not romantic about working class life. He was orphaned at the age of eight and his early years were spent with an assortment of relatives, giving him all the evidence he needed to be wary of sentimental appeals to what he called “group-feeling”. He recalls local suicides and the matter-of-fact way in which they were discussed, the weekly anxiety of budgeting for food and outstanding debt, the fatalism of the miner who gave the young Hoggart a crown in the local pub and requested that he “use it for thee education. Ah’m like all miners. Ah only waste t’bluddy stuff.”

Hoggart illuminated a hidden world not as a tourist or anthropologist but as an angered witness, though some critics distanced themselves from his perspective. In her 1982 book, Landscape for a Good Woman, the historian Carolyn Steedman damned his account of working class family life for what she saw as its “simplicity” and “passivity”. Steedman didn’t see her mother – an isolated single parent obsessed with glamour and with the material things she couldn’t have – in a portrait that emphasised the communality of terrace life and what Hoggart called the “cheerful existentialism” of working class people.

There is, of course, ample room for both perspectives – in fact, we need both, and those of as many others as possible. These kind of debates only highlight the lack of well known accounts of working class lives, leading to the suggestion that one must dominate, while middle class written lives are so numerous that we take their complexity for granted.

Dave Johns and Malcolm Shields in Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

In reviews and commentary, Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake suffered from the over attention that comes with under-representation. Because it was the only widely distributed film to have been made about the effects of the austerity policy, it bore the burden of having to say everything that was going to be said on the subject. As if in counterbalance to Benefits Street, the Channel 4 series that has made a cheap spectacle of difficult lives, Loach sought to make his eponymous hero beyond reproach. Disbelieving reviewers accused Loach of poverty tourism, saying that no one as “good” as Blake could suffer so much at the hands of government.

Such extreme and polarised reactions seem to confirm Hoggart’s lifelong argument that it was in the interests of the powerful to persuade the powerless that they have nothing to offer towards the creation of a common culture. British newspapers – overwhelmingly rightwing since the eclipse of Hoggart’s favourite case study, the Daily Mirror, by the Sun in the 1980s – chase their own tails trying to pretend they reflect the voice of “the common man” when, in reality, most of them hold that imaginary voice in contempt.

Why do people fall for it? At least some of the answers lie in the prescient arguments made in The Uses of Literacy about the way in which informed scepticism – essential to an inclusive democracy – gives way to blanket cynicism, when everyone seems to be saying the same thing, no matter which side they’re on. This returns us to the fictitious “common man” after whom the media, cultural and political elite go chasing, thinking they’ll attract him if they can just come up with the right combination of words using the “slogans intended for the common man” generator.

‘Politicians think they’ll attract the common man if they come up with the right slogan’

One of the more egregious examples of the slogan-generator effect in recent years must be the Labour party’s “Controls on Immigration” mugs, introduced for sale in the run-up to the 2015 general election. As if you’d go to make a cup of tea and, while waiting for the kettle to boil, look at your “Controls on Immigration” mug and bless the Labour party for standing tough against the metropolitan elite. They must think we’re, well, mugs.

The ubiquity of the wartime slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On”, seen on posters, in advertising and across a range of birthday present ephemera, is the apparently apolitical equivalent of Labour’s mugs. Or is it? Owen Hatherley’s 2016 book The Ministry of Nostalgia deconstructs the recent mania for “austerity chic” – essentially enamel saucepans and tea towels reminding you to get on with it, where’s your blitz spirit, put the kettle on and have a nice sit down – in a political context of deliberate cruelty towards those whose entire lives have been spent in forced austerity.

Hatherley’s book is a bracing attack on middle class complacency, the unwitting glue of smugness that enables governments of every stripe to keep attacking the poor and marginalised in the name of maintaining the social fabric. Noting the wilful ignorance involved in appropriating a wartime propaganda slogan to remind yourself to put up with the Tories rather than do something about them, Hatherley summons the angered spirit of Hoggart from the point of view of someone enraged by the willing collusion of consumers with persuaders.

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In 1957, British society was class-bound but not stagnant; in 2017, it is, apparently, both, the classes and regions having retrenched into mutually carping sides. What would Hoggart make of our culture today, where the “thin and pallid” versions of literature, popular music and journalism he identified abound?

The first half of The Uses of Literacy is a glorious catalogue of the components that formed what Hoggart termed “the full rich life”: the roasting hearth, “club checks” to buy clothes and neighbourhood social clubs at which semi-pro singers stretched every note as though pummelling a “sweet and sticky mass” of sugar syrup. By comparison, he argued, wider affluence was creating a market for those susceptible to what he called the “mass persuaders”: marketing men, essentially, who could take an unalloyed good like universal literacy and turn it into an expedient for selling mass culture – books, movies and songs created as if in a laboratory with a clinical focus on appealing to the greatest number. These products, he argued, had the potential to bring about a state of sluggish disenchantment, in which people knew there was something missing from their lives, but could no longer quite put their finger on what it was.

Hoggart praised the keenly expressed emotions of 1950s club singers, with their easily lampooned melisma, who find their modern equivalents in the ubiquitous TV talent contests – Britain’s Got Talent, The X Factor, The Voice – on which young hopefuls try to out-sing Beyoncé and bust the PA in the process. Yet Hoggart was nowhere near as romantic about working class life as to locate that misplaced feeling he discussed in “community”; in The Uses of Literacy he advises against the use of that word “because its overtones seem too simply favourable; they may lead to an underestimation of the harsher tensions and sanctions of working class groups”.

Hoggart’s definition of mass product was something that contained no emotional truth – nothing that could be measured or felt as real, however painful that reality might be to confront – because it was produced by people who believed their audience had no ability or desire to detect that truth. “Sex-and-violence novels,” he wrote, epitomised “an endless and hopeless tail-chasing evasion of the personality”, a description that could have been taken from a review of Fifty Shades of Grey. That sense of evasion is palpable in much current chart music, the lyrics of which obsess over personal slights and bungled attempts at saving face using the distancing devices of social media. It’s a uniformly alienated sound, generated by producers seeking to smooth out any hint of creative individuality.

To the late cultural critic Mark Fisher, the fact that, viewed through a prism of privilege, “everyone” seems to do the same things proves that producers of mass culture have succeeded in “lowering the expectations … because it’s easier to standardise and mass reproduce mediocrity. It’s much harder to reliably tell us something actually interesting.”

Hoggart didn’t predict the combined effect of exposing working class boys to a good education and to pop culture at the same time … David Bowie in 1969. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

It wasn’t always so. There is a glaring blind spot in Uses, which is Hoggart’s failure to anticipate the extraordinary creativity of mainly working class pop musicians in the two or three decades after its publication. When he watched teenage boys “slouch” in front of the jukebox in 1950s milk bars, all he heard from the speakers was “a peculiarly thin and pallid form of dissipation, a sort of spiritual dry-rot”. Among those slouchers you might have found a young John Lennon or Paul McCartney; a few years later, a Little Richard-obsessed David Bowie would be forming his own jazz band in the milk bar-studded suburbs. Hoggart didn’t predict the combined effect of exposing working class boys to a grammar school education and to American pop culture at the same time. He never imagined that clever kids might make something clever out of what appeared to him dumb. That’s not to say that Hoggart and Fisher, who wrote beautifully about the role of pop music in his self-education, are not writing about the same fear. Both could see that forms of culture no longer produced for consumption in specific, meaningful contexts, but instead for a placeless, meaningless “average”, contribute to the emptying out of “the full rich life”.

Hoggart was less concerned with technological development than with how cynical people planned to manipulate the opportunities of mass affluence for their own ends. Social media, music and video streaming, and particularly their availability through smartphones, now bring “mass persuaders” into the fabric of everyday life in the way that no other technology has so far done, including television. Without a basis in civic literacy – literacy as bullshit detector – “fake news” is really information cooked and served the way you like it, depending on the source through which you choose to have it delivered.

Think of Donald Trump, the tweeting president. Because those who work in the media and politics use Twitter relentlessly to communicate with each other, they assume that everyone else uses Twitter, and therefore fail to appreciate that reporting someone’s tweets is not necessarily “news”. Twitter is a gossip exchange that has somehow, glibly, by unwitting collusion, been turned into a treacherous diplomatic tool. This is an abuse of literacy on an industrial scale: a would-be demagogue given greater power by a media that professes to be horrified by his every utterance, simply because he has chosen a medium that they themselves use and erroneously believe is universal and democratic. It is not: Twitter is an elite platform that happens to be “free” to use. Except, of course, you pay for its use in innumerable other ways.

It’s strange that we are only now talking about a resurgence of political populism when, really, refusing to tell your voters the complicated truth and pretending the answers are easy is a conceit that goes back many decades. In Hoggart’s words, this time from an essay on higher education from 1965: “It is essential to keep looking and listening rather than to settle for comfortable half-generalisations, to remain open to the changes going on around us, and to the need sometimes for changes in our own attitudes.”

“There are many who feel that they ‘know all the arguments about cultural debasement’,” Hoggart wrote in the conclusion to Uses, “though they do not really know the material ... In this way it is possible to live in a sort of clever man’s paradise, without any real notion of the force of the assault outside.”

Reading The Uses of Literacy can tell us a lot about today’s confusing landscape; for one thing, that “we” – remain voters banging “our” heads on the nearest table – are confused largely because “they” – leave voters in areas heavily reliant on EU funding, for instance – couldn’t seem to see which side their bread was buttered on. David Cameron’s folly was not so much his craven capitulation to the “bastards” in his party, but his sheer ignorance of the persistence and the causes of social division in his own country. The world of Us and Them is still, regrettably, very much alive.

• Respectable by Lynsey Hanley is published in paperback by Penguin on 23 February. To order a copy for £7.99 (RRP £9.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.