"The city can't work and keep a middle class without decent schools" is an article of faith for the mayor.
But for working class women, decent childcare can be life changing, removing a major source of social stress and bringing to an end a common form of drudgery.
They were middle class kids, decent and smart, and they were lying: about the jobs they had waiting, her wrist injury in a game of volleyball, their ages and, I suspected by the way they tripped over them, even their names.
The inspectors wrote: "The treatment and conditions of too many prisoners at Wandsworth was demeaning, unsafe and fell below what could be classed as decent".
Video: Chris Huhne says 'things got out of hand' "The treatment and conditions of too many prisoners at Wandsworth was demeaning, unsafe and fell below what could be classed as decent," said the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick.
You can give someone all the opportunities in the world – a brilliant school, first-class training, decent jobs – but it's no good if they're prevented from getting on because of their gender, race, religion, sexuality or disability.
His aspirations are thoroughly middle-class — a decent house, a healthy bank account and maybe, someday, time for thought and art — and while he knows he's starting from the bottom, he also knows that, in America, there's nothing under the bottom but more bottom.
Unlike a lot of Premiership clubs, particularly in the capital, West Ham has maintained contact with its original fan base of white working-class men: decent, honest, passionate and brave men for whom a sense of disenfranchisement has been incrementally consuming their territory and culture since the '60s, and the terraces and their team are perhaps the last front left to fight for.
But you could still argue the class is a decent investment compared with the alternatives because yields there are so low.
But it also drives away the better class of hypocrites, decent and well-meaning but with lives including a few significant missteps they would rather not read about in the morning paper.
