To ask what makes you middle class?

I thought Samantha is definitely UC as she is from an aristocratic family.

Samantha Cameron is verging on UC and she has a tattoo. Ditto Sienna Miller.

I know lots of staunchly MC ladies of Surrey with tattoos.

A recent survey suggests 28% of MC people have at least one tattoo whilst only 27% of WC do

Your opinion is somewhat dated.

What makes you middle class? Not having tattoos helps.

Thank you! I totally agree. Yeah, the grandparents thing gets me with the faux working class. Most of us had at least one working class grandparent, as the traditional working class has shrunk in recent years; and the middle class has expanded at the same time.
Yep, we all need to own our privilege 👏

@Ruminate2much

Yup. Deeply dishonest and performative. I have privilege but at least I own it. And my grandparents were domestic servants...

Yes this is my thinking too.

Yes I have seen the update.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/18/why-professional-middle-class-brits-insist-working-class

This article is worth a read...

But, if you're a university-educated, salaried professional you're definitely middle-class, in sociological terms. I don't mean specifically you as an individual. I mean you as in one. A salaried professional is what middle class is. I've always understood it to be that.

Same, apart from the high salary, unfortunately.

Sorry - I meant retrievers as in labs, goldens etc. Gundogs would have been more accurate!

In comparison, WC people I find have dogs like huskies, "designer" breeds like extortionate French bulldogs. Or they'll have a rescue. But they get rescue dogs in a different way to MC people. MC make having a rescue dog their entire personality and that they're holier than anyone who has a purebred. WC with rescues will cheerfully tell you "Oh yes, this is Bella. She's probably a yellow lab mix. No idea really, she's great and we love her. What's your dogs name, he's cute!"

You can feel any way you choose to feel - it's nobody's business - feel like the Queen of Sheba if you like, convincing others is a little bit more challenging but given you don't care about what others think that won't concern you either.

It is complicated, I'd certainly agree. I definitely think your husband is middle class though, as middle class angst is well known. It sounds like your background was more upper middle class?
I wish we didn't have a class system here. I get very anxious about it. I think the reason I get so upset about middle class people saying they're working class is that it's been used as a means to guilt-trip me before now. I've got a standard English accent, not posh, but well spoken certainly. But that's just having grown up in a village in southern England. My parents are actually Northern Irish and I was born there. We moved. My mum is from a farming background, kind of classless. My dad from a mix of working class and lower middle. My mum trained to be a nurse, and my dad went to uni (first generation) and did various blue and white collar jobs over the years. We never had money, and I went to state schools; but I'd say our home was fairly culturally middle class in some ways. I dropped out of college for health reasons, and have had an unconventional work life, mostly self-employed. I rent. I'm not well off. I've been bullied before now, purely due to my accent and so on, by people actually far more middle class than me, at least in their adult lives. Even a former landlady of mine would tease me for being very middle class (mostly because I was listening to radio 4!) But she was my blooming landlady! Owned two homes. She was an NHS manager! Way more middle class than me, in any meaningful sense. She would bang on about how working class she was because her dad's family were working class. But, my life then, as a minimum wage worker, was more working class. So, it really hurt. I guess that's why it's a sore point for me.
I genuinely have no idea now what class I am. I feel somewhat classless, as I'm not easily defined...

I think our "degree" culture has skewed it. I was born in 1960 and was from what I would describe as a "well heeled" rather than upper class/aristocratic background although my grandparents were local landowners and a "county" family. On grandma's side one didn't have to go far back to find horse thieves who fled from Ireland. I went to a "naice" school and it was the doctors'/academics'/lawyers' daughters who were pushed to uni. There were also a significant minority of girls from army families or the old multi-nationals: Imperial, BAT, etc, where much time was spent overseas.

Not many went to university at all. A large number scraped O'Levels, they weren't regarded as hugely important and went to: secretarial college, cookery school, floristry, interior design, etc. Most married well. All were very well educated despite not being well qualified. An example of this would be the late Diana, Princess of Wales although she was of course an aristocrat.

DH went to the local comp (first year after it stopped being a grammar), went to Oxford and became a lawyer. His parents were teacher/engineer but their parents were servants/mining railways. Their mindset was working class and they brought up their DC to think they were beneath others. They had no networks. Despite that they pushed their DC to university but didn't prepare them with the social skills that bring confidence. DH had to build that.

It's complicated.

Rather than income I would say its about attitudes .
for example deferring gratification . For example I was taught to save for a good quality new item rather than say getting it on credit or poor quality.
my own perception is that you can be wealthy but not middleclass - if
you have things like big tvs - show off things - that to me feels like a clas signifier.
we are poor financially but have a small tv , a v v old car ( dont care) , retired early on not much money because we dont care and dont feel the need to keep up with the joneses - I feel like I am middle class in my thinking because am not defined by material things - I could be wrong !

I think traditionally, working class = low-paid unskilled/manual jobs, from a family/community who are similar, minimal education/qualifications. Middle class = professional job/career, well educated, socially connected with others who are similar. It’s a bit more complicated these days though as some very well educated people work in low-paid jobs, and some people from ‘working class’ backgrounds become rich and successful in their career/business. Also for some reason many people think working class is ‘cool’ and middle class is ‘boring/smug’, so you have ‘middle class’ people pretending to be working class. The boundaries/definitions are very loose these days, which is probably a good thing.

Uff. Class system in the UK is very tricky to get your head around if you are not from here. Basically it has little to do with actual income, education level or career and more to do with accent, cultural preferences and parents social class. It’s bullshit and the biggest thing that holds people back.

That depends what you mean by "being" middle class. If it's a question of your self-image, then sure, you're working class. But someone else might look at you and define you in their own terms as being MC.

Statisticians (and marketing people) probably wouldn't use the term 'middle class' at all, but something like 'Social Grade': A, B, C1, C2, D or E. These are based on your occupation (or that of the household's main income earner). The first two and last two are lumped together for the census, so in 2021 there were:

• AB: higher and intermediate managerial, administrative and professional occupations (23.3%, 10.9 million people)
• C1: supervisory, clerical, and junior managerial, administrative and professional occupations (32.8%, 15.3 million people)
• C2: skilled manual occupations (21.3%, 10.0 million people)
• DE: semi-skilled and unskilled manual occupations, unemployed and lowest grade occupations (22.6%, 10.6 million people)

Class is more complicated that just your job, of course. You could be a titled aristocrat who works as an electrician when not sitting on the board of an arts organisation, in which case placing you in Social Grade C2 doesn't really tell the whole story. And these categories are only somewhat correlated with income.

If a plumber sets up a limited company to manage his solo business, then takes on a labourer, and an apprentice, and employs a part time administrator to manage payments and keep accounts, and eventually ends up as millionaire owner/CEO of something like Pimlico Plumbers, then when exactly do they stop being counted as a C2 skilled manual occupation and become AB?

Really there is no single answer to the question of what 'middle class' means. It means you're somewhere between 'working class' and 'upper class'. Given that fewer and fewer people in the UK are in low- and unskilled manual occupations and a vanishingly small proportion have ever been really upper class, I'd say a large majority of people could be considered MC, even if that doesn't fit with their self image.

This. Everyone in my family/friends circle was MC when I was growing up, and shoes-off was unheard of.
And I’d just add, in case anyone’s wondering, my DM with 4 dcs never had a cleaner until she was widowed and in her mid 70s.

So you think no one with an accent is middle class? I live in the North East and know families that are, and have been middle class for generations. Doctors,lawyers,politicians,CEOs all with accents.

The one and only thing it says about me is that I dislike inequality surely? I'm sure you do too, and most people do. But, it has to be acknowledged that Britain is a very class aware (at best) to very classist (at worst) society. For middle-class professionals to not acknowledge that they have a great deal of cultural capital prevents that inequality being properly addressed. Going back to the passport signature list, tbh I only mentioned that as an arbitrary example. I could have cited other examples. Without doubt professionals such as doctors and lawyers (who are middle class regardless of upbringings) have huge cultural clout. For them to identify as working class is very unfair on genuinely working class people.

Company directors are on the list. That will cover plumbers, builders, electricians, hairdressers etc.

You can choose to view it as classist but I think that said more about you than the actual list

Do you not understand what social mobility is?
Of course you can change class. Once upon a time u would have agreed with you because people didn't marry outside their class and MC jobs were not available to WC people. But that all changed with universities becoming more open and people being encouraged to attend. Once upon a time a person born into the WC could not have become a doctor or a lawyer. Good thing they can now

My now-retired ex-manager (staunchly and very vocally working-class and proud of it, father was a coal miner, Welsh) thought that I (no degree, pretty intelligent, worked my way up to a senior position in the Company, brought up in Home Counties so natural accent close to RP) was upper-class!
IMO it’s people who carry an enormous chip on their shoulder about their roots that put “others” into boxes.
I don’t. I have great friends from all walks of life and rarely stop to consider class at all…

I would say it’s about parents/grandparents. My parents and grandparents all had ‘professional’ jobs, owned homes and went to university therefore I’m MC. I have a lot of friends who tick a lot of the boxes for MC but would insist they are working class because that’s what their parents/grandparents were perceived to be…