The Sunday papers positively drool over stories about class - a peculiarly British form of navel-gazing that plays to our national prejudices and sense of self.

No surprise, then, that yesterday's supplements had cleared acres of space for a survey suggesting that seven out of 10 Brits now describe themselves as 'middle class'.

"So we're ALL middle class now (or so 7/10 think, as climbing the social ladder soars in popularity)" was the Mail on Sunday take on the online poll of 2000 people conducted by BritainThinks.

"The popularity of being middle class appears to seal the victory of 1980s Thatcherism, which championed the values of property ownership and self-reliance that are now nearly universal," the paper concluded.

My concern is that the results of asking people if they regard themselves as middle class may not, actually, tell us very much at all. The point about self-definition is that it relates not only to who we think we are but also to who we think we are not. Identity, our sense of self, implies that we can put a fence around our characteristics and say that those outside the boundary are "not one of us".

I remember the exercise in my school maths lesson where the class had to draw a Venn diagram incorporating eye-colour, hair-colour and height. No-one wanted to be the kid whose features were an isolated island, separate from the mainstream.

Defining oneself as middle class is saying one is not working class or upper class. Virtually no-one in the survey described themselves as 'upper class'. God forbid! I don't know whether any Dukes or minor royals were among the 2,000 respondents, but who would want to associate themselves with a social group whose cultural status is generally thought to have been inherited from the blood or bank balance of Mummy and Daddy? The use of the word "upper" seems to imply arrogance and superiority - quite un-British.

"Working class", a handle accepted by one out of four Britons, has associations with the tribal politics of the 20th Century but also, as the Mail article implies, with lower aspirations. Once the working classes would have dressed differently - blue collar rather than white - and the jobs they did would be manual rather than sedentary. There was a powerful sense of group identity associated with the noble virtues of hard work and the struggle to make ends meet.

Today, many of the occupations paying minimum wage are service jobs - call centres, contract cleaning, office security and catering. Low paid workers often wear a uniform, a suit, even a tie. They may be indistinguishable from the middle classes waiting for the bus to the office. The nobility of the proletariat has been diluted in the social emulsion of sameness.

Being middle class in Britain, therefore, is about not being upper or working class. It says I am not some snooty aristocrat, nor am I a class warrior or a couch potato. I have get-up-and-go, determination and spirit. Who wouldn't want to be that?

Which is why I think it is time to abandon this notion of middle class. It is an almost useless expression, so vague that even the BritainThinks pollsters were obliged to sub-divide it.

"The survey is clear that the 71% 'middle class' are not a homogenous group, but fall into six distinctive segments" they claim. How polling companies love their "distinctive segments".

We are introduced to Bargain Hunters and Squeezed Strugglers, Comfortable Greens and Urban Networkers, Deserving Downtimers and Disciplinarians. Political strategists are encouraged to believe that only if they find a message to appeal to the latest manifestation of Worcester Woman or Mondeo Man can they guide their party to victory.

In reading all the stories yesterday, I was reminded of some work done by another polling company, Ipsos MORI, for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation looking at attitudes to poverty in 2009 - in the midst of the recession.

Focus groups of working adults from across the income range were assembled. However, "participants demonstrated a strong tendency to place themselves in the 'middle' of the income distribution".

"For most of the participants in our discussion groups, it is people 'like them', whom they perceive to be in the broad 'middle' of the income spectrum, who seem to be undergoing a particularly difficult time. In their words, it is the 'middle band of people' who 'get forgotten', who 'suffer the worse' and who are 'worse off', losing out to both top and bottom."

Ipsos MORI also sub-divided this "middle" group into "Traditional Egalitarians and Traditional Free-marketeers", "The Angry Middle" and "Post-ideological Liberals".

This would seem to be further evidence that the phrase "middle class" is such a catch-all that we might as well ask people whether they are, in yet more sociological jargon, "strivers" or "skivers".

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An all-party committee of MPs has urged Immigration Minister Damian Green not to go ahead with a series of changes to the student visa system, warning of "potentially calamitous" consequences to an industry worth £40bn a year.

Members of the home affairs select committee today "caution against measures which could be detrimental to a thriving, successful industry" that is "not only economically beneficial to this country but also vital to the UK's international relations".

The committee report amounts to a scathing critique of government plans to try and reduce net immigration by introducing new controls on students applying to study in the UK. The MPs complain of "a policy based on flawed evidence" and urge ministers to rethink proposals that "could cripple the UK education sector".

The government is determined to reduce net migration to the UK from its current level of around 200,000 a year down to tens of thousands. However, since taking office, net immigration has increased, largely because many more students from outside the EU are coming to British colleges, language schools and universities.

Immigration Minister Damian Green told Parliament in January that "taking action on students is particularly important as they make up roughly two thirds of non-European economic area immigrants, and the number of student visas issued has been rising in recent years". However, a few weeks later he told the Commons: "We want to encourage all those genuine students coming here to study at our world-class academic institutions."

This apparent contradiction has led the select committee to accuse the government of "a lack of clarity" over whether the aim was to cap foreign student numbers or simply target "bogus" students and colleges. The prime minister has stated that "we are not currently looking at limits on tier four (student) immigration visas" but the MPs' report expresses concern at "the potential to create significant unintended consequences".

The anxiety is that Britain might lose out on billions of pounds in income from foreign students if it does not appear to be as welcoming as other countries. "UK universities are facing aggressive competition in a market which is vital for their future and for the UK economy", the MPs say, adding that they had already "heard evidence that Australia were launching an aggressive marketing campaign in order to increase their share of the international education market at the expense of the UK".

The committee report states that "the international student market is estimated to be worth £40 billion to the UK economy" and warns that "given the experiences of the USA and Australia", who lost trade after they tightened their student visa systems, "it would be wise for the UK to bear this very much in mind".

Chairman of the committee, Keith Vaz MP, is suggesting the government takes students out of the net migration figures, thus removing the educational sector from ministers' concerns over numbers:

"Students are not migrants. They come from all over the world to study here, contributing to the economy both through payment of fees and wider spending. Whilst we are right to seek to eliminate bogus colleges and bogus students, we need to ensure that we continue to attract the brightest and the best... if the door is shut they will simply study elsewhere."

The MPs "strongly recommend" that the government does not demand higher English language qualifications for students applying to a college with "highly trusted" status. They also urge that the post study work route whereby students who finish their course can take a job in the UK "be maintained".

Indeed, they question whether there is a significant problem of bogus students looking to abuse immigration rules.

The information government uses to justify tightening student visa rules "does not in itself prove endemic abuse of the system", the committee says. Mr Vaz argues that "generating policy based on flawed evidence could cripple the UK education sector. In the case of international students this could mean a significant revenue and reputational loss to the UK."

One area where government has expressed specific ambition to act is on students who come to the UK to take "sub-degree" courses at English language schools. You may recall my post on this subject which quoted Damian Green telling journalists how he had "discovered" that half of those who come to Britain to study "do not fit with everyone's image of the hard-working student in higher education".

The committee, however, estimates that the foreign students coming to learn English "contribute roughly £1.5 billion to the economy and are estimated to be responsible for 30,000 jobs".

"It is a sector which boosts tourism and provides a vital route for international students to achieve necessary language skills for UK degree courses" they say. "Witnesses repeatedly stressed to us the importance of pathway programmes to UK universities and all of them cited the increase of the required language level as a proposal which could significantly damage the recruitment of international students."

Today's all-party report is clanging alarm bells, sounding klaxons and rattling cages for all it is worth. The MPs accept the need to keep immigration under control and take steps to prevent abuse. But, after reading their document, one is left with the powerful impression that this group of senior parliamentarians fears the government may be about to endanger a key driver of economic growth and cost taxpayers billions of pounds.

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The prime minister has described youth unemployment figures as "disappointing, once again" with the number of 16-to-24-year-olds out of work rising by 30,000 to 974,000, "the highest since comparable records began in 1992" according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Taken at face value, the data suggest that the unemployment rate for young people rose by 0.8% to 20.6% - also a record high.

But a top economist, while agreeing that the situation is clearly dire, is questioning whether the numbers tell the whole story. Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith has also said the headline measure is "misleading" and has suggested the ONS change how it reports levels of youth unemployment.

John Philpott, Chief Economic Advisor to the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, asks "is the situation really as unprecedentedly bad as the headline figures suggest?"

In a paper published this month Mr Philpott argues that "the relative scale of youth unemployment is only properly understood in the context of consideration of the transformation of the youth labour market in recent decades resulting from greatly increased participation in post-16 education".

He points out that this has the effect of reducing the proportion of the 16-24 year age cohort active in the labour market, "thereby raising the measured youth unemployment rate for any given level of unemployment".

"In other words, as the economically active supply of young people shrinks relative to the number of young people in the population the youth unemployment rate magnifies the scale of youth unemployment."

So how bad are things really? The first problem is that it is impossible to compare today's unemployment figures with anything before 1992 because of a lack of consistent data. One cannot, for example, compare the current situation with the early 1980s when concern about youth joblessness was just as great.

The next point to bear in mind is that youth unemployment rates are always higher than other cohorts. Usually they are around double the aggregate figure because young people tend to move in and out of jobs before settling down in the labour market ('short-term frictional unemployment' in the jargon) and, as John Philpott puts it, "youth unemployment is ultra sensitive to the economic cycle, rising relatively quickly during recessions when there are fewer entry level job vacancies and when employers cut their least experienced or least productive staff, but falling relatively quickly during periods of economic recovery".

It is "therefore unremarkable", he argues, that we have seen both relatively high and relatively fast-rising youth unemployment in recent hard economic times.

"Nonetheless things do on the face of things appear worse than usual at present, with the youth unemployment rate 2.5 times higher than the average rate of unemployment (7.9%). However, closer examination of the measurement of youth unemployment offers a somewhat different conclusion."

The jobless figures include full-time students who are actively looking for work. There are more than a quarter of a million such people included in the latest unemployment figures. John Philpott says it is "perfectly sensible" to count students because they "have some influence on the degree of wage pressure in the labour market". But he concludes that, with student numbers rising, their inclusion "does once again magnify youth unemployment as an indicator of social distress".

"Excluding them lowers the headline youth unemployment rate for 16-24-year-olds in the final quarter of 2010 from 20.5% to 15.5% and lowers youth unemployment as a proportion of the 16-24 age cohort to 9.4%."

Mr Philpott is not suggesting that all is well with youth unemployment: "young people have been relatively adversely affected by the recession as employers have preferred to retain experienced prime age and older workers." However, his argument does question whether the current situation is really that much worse than previous downturns.

In a letter to the ONS, Iain Duncan Smith makes a similar point. He writes that:

"[I]t is misleading for the 965,000 figure to be used, when nearly 275,000 under-25s counted as ILO unemployed are also full-time students. This is more than one in four of the total and, with staying on rates in education having risen over time, accounts for a significantly larger proportion of overall youth unemployment than was the case twenty years ago."

He concludes by asking that in future the ONS "give more prominence to the number of unemployed people not in full-time study, to ensure that an accurate context is set for the debate on support for young people."

However, David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee has questioned Mr Duncan Smith's motivation:

"Could it be that he is getting his retaliation in first before youth unemployment hits the million milestone? If you want a distraction quibble about the data. [...] It would be better to try and lower youth unemployment rather than fiddle with the statistics."

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