Class

[GeneLovesJezebel]

Do you ever hear social class mentioned anywhere other than MN ?

Yes

I’m baffled by people who think social class is some kind of forum-specific invention. And even if what you’re specifically asking is whether you hear other people talking about social class outside of Mn, the answer is yes. I had a conversation about class and education with a friend last night.

No. Not for years!

Maybe it's because the area I live in is wealthy, but the vast majority of the people here made their money themselves rather than inheriting it and also went to state schools.

The only time it’s ever something I hear / talk about in real life is at work when we’re discussing how to model our recruitment activity to attract young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. So even then it’s not about class per se and bizarre MN statements like “if you watch TV and drive a white Range Rover you’re working class” etc.

In my social groups it’s never mentioned. Half of the people I know aren’t British born so a) any so-called “class markers” have no meaning and b) people really don’t care or find it interesting. The British among us know we have a couple of friends who are upper class, but it isn’t spoken about by them or us. I’d imagine we all find it an old fashioned irrelevance which means something to people in parochial places where things haven’t really moved in, but less so among younger people in London.

Yes.

Yes. I remember reading an article in the times in the last year about how the wc prefer the tories because they know where they stand with the toffs and don't like the classes pretending to be something they aren't (referring to kier starmer). it's very much prevalent in the U.K.
my dc is at a top private school and the class system is up there in your face so so much. I'm wc and the 'rules' some of these people go by are definitely there. The foreign parents aren't included really though.

Yes. I’m constantly teased (in a genuinely affectionate way) at work for being very stereotypically upper middle class…I think because I’ve never tried to hide it and because I’m clear that it’s meant I had huge advantages that other people haven’t had (alongside wonderful parents who believed in me…only life advantage I was missing was being female!). It also means I speak from a position of strength so when I tell a fretting newbie that it doesn’t matter if/where they went to school/university they believe me. If the flip of that is being teased for knowing classical references then I’m good with that.

Sorry, unclear, I am a woman and therefore missed out on male privilege!

No never.

I am really interested in the way that society works and how people interact with one another on a small scale and larger scale. I'm also really interested in history, (well in my case more often her-story) and how it influences our world today. It may not be as important as it used to be, but it is still everywhere and classism is definitely still an issue in Britain today, especially regarding the ruling class (Eton toffs in government, still having a royal family) and the so called 'underclass' and all the benefits bashing and poverty porn TV shows and all of that (deserving vs undeserving poor essentially). It is not the way it was, so clearly defined, and yet I see it all around me. In the playground the middle class kids and parents group together, and the working class kids and parents group together (and the upper class kids group together in the private school down the road). There is still a lot of inverted snobbery and I've witnessed a lot of people treated as 'class traitors' for trying to be middle class (airs and graces, basically). On the other side I've seen a lot of snobbery in middle class people who won't go to certain toddler groups, or use certain nurseries, so that even as early as newborns kids are being segregated along class lines. I can usually tell within moments of meeting someone whether they will walk one way from the school towards the posher end of town (and all the good parking spaces) or the other way back to the council estate (with me). There are class markers which are glaringly obvious to me everywhere. Of course not everyone fits them but enough people do that it is possible to draw some generalisations.

Yes, but nowhere near the same extent. Some MNers seem to imagine the British. (English?) Class system to be as definite and unchanging as the Alpha/Beta/Gamma etc system in Brave New World.

Sometimes with BIL (Asian man from East London who has always had good jobs since finishing uni - he days sometimes he finds it hard to fit in with more middle class colleagues)