To find the British "inverse snobbery"… weird?!?

[MillieV]

OK - first things first… I'm not a Brit, but have been here for over a dozen years. As an "international", I seem to not belong to any particular class. Hence, I'm not defined by the class system here, and I find it really weird how so many people think.

I mean… in all seriousness... I sometimes feel this place is some alternate universe ripe to be portrayed in the next dystopian novel, where one is meant to stay in their own class bubble, never moving anywhere else. In movies, it's always "snobbery" that's portrayed - rich people looking down on the poor. So I'm so surprised to have found that "inverse snobbery" exists. To be honest, this is the FIRST country I've ever encountered that in (and I've lived in many), below are just some of the symptoms:

• People not wanting to see other people better themselves (shock horror, how dare they?) - this one truly p*sses me off

• People saying things like they 'are a working class family with professional jobs'. Jeeez… what does that even mean?!? So what… your great-grandfather was a miner or something… and hence, you still define yourself as working class? Oh. My. God. How far back do you go? Middle Ages? Or back when the Neanderthal was still around?

• People never wanting to hear about a sport that's perceived as posh (and turn their noses up at any mention of them).

… and yes, don't even mention private schooling.

Can someone please tell a 'Non-Brit' why this is? What's this obsession about?!?

be interested to hear laurie's reply. i think it is because queen's family are not all that 'old'. remember, some of the elite have lorded it over us in the uk for a thousand years. her family have only ruled us for a few hundred.

So looking at a wealthy person in those countries, you would naturally think "what have they been fiddling?"

And now, DogCalledRudis, you appear not only bitter, slightly thick in your black and white view of the world, but also racist. You are lovely!!! (and on aroll today :) )

wrt 'what have they been fiddling', certainly true in russia
hardly even a controversial point i would think
perhaps less so in poland

But who are the true aristocrats then as Laurie says, above the queen?, i had thought the queen epitomised aristocracy and was at the top of the class system. I hope Laurie does come back to answer my question, i am really intrigued.

Yep, there are aristocracy who are much older than the queen, can trace back further than William the conqueror who apparently do call her 'lizzie' in a derogatory fashion.

I thought David Cameron was only a peer because of his job and didn't have an actual aristocratic title independant of that ?

In fact doesn't Sam Cam have more aristocratic breeding and married 'down'?

I'm also wondering.
My DH is working class, farming community.
I'm international so don't fit the system well but for all intent and purpose would be closer to be upper class from my family background.
Where does it leave my dcs? Are they wc still or uc or could they chose what they want to be ?

now you start to understand, CarrotAndStick!
although i disagree with 'happily accepting'. we just are not very revolutionary. the one time we cut our king's head off, we sewed it back on a few years later and said sorry

anyhow, where are you from? let us tell you about your country

Next time I see a blue collar type with a big telly and decent car, I will ask what kind of benefit they have been fiddling, then, sanfairyanne? Since stereotypes are completly alright?

How can you care whether one has an aristocratic background? Does it change the person and who they are??

i think there are peers in his background, plus he is a descendant of royalty about five? generations back.
yes, it is his wife who has the aristocratic background. she is well posh
my comment about peers was to someone else who said they were an indicator of upper middle class background. still makes me bang head on wall

I just think it takes a few generations. My grandfather left school at 12. My parents went to state grammar schools and became a teacher/doctor. We went to private schools and have similar professional jobs. My children (and indeed all the 9 cousins) go / went to private schools. The Middletons are similar except the mother was a "doors to manual" air stewardess and they are in trade so in that sense I suppose their similar NE roots to mine did not lead into the professions and private schools as quickly as my family managed that change. I would be surprised if Prince George is still regarded as working class. I think it just takes a few generations to change.

A good fun series www.channel4.com/programmes/in-the-best-possible-taste-grayson-perry to watch about class is the 3 part series by Grayson Perry the artist who looks at working classes, those who are middle class and worried about if they are buying the right things and those who could not give a toss, run old cars and are above the lower middle class.
It is all just good fun. It does not matter at all. Decent people of all types and all classes in the UK tend to be good to everyone. That is all that really matters.

Goodness sanfairyanne. That's a lot of head-banging. "Dissolved peerage".

you can do what you want, OfaFrenchMind. maybe you could google how Russian oligarchs got their money as well.

well, CarrotAndStick, i guess none of us would care much about anyone's background if we lived in a fair and equal society
perhaps we do
perhaps it is a coincidence that the cabinet is made up of people who all went to the same two schools

think of the school you went to, and its nearest neighbour. now imagine.if all (ok, most) the top.jobs in the country were filled by people who went there

weird coincidence

Laurie, thanks for coming back, but i'm still confused. When you talk about aristocracy that trace further back than the queen, are you referring to another royal family in the UK? in what way where these aristocrats lording it over commoners and who are their descendants?

As for the people calling calling the queen 'Lizzie' in private, i don't see how that makes them any class above the queen, or do they have the priviledge of calling her 'Lizzie' to her face?

Yup, because all righ men from EE are russian oligarchs. I'm surprised there is still enough oil on hearth to cater to all of them... Making generalities and citing Google (or Wikipedia), does not education or information make...

well i am not going to overly defend someone elses view of polish multimillionaires. they can fight that battle themselves.

Fair enough.

we have got so far into this thread and noone has yet recommended that fantadtic book

watching the english

there is a new edition just out too. well worth a read

Sanfairyanne I'll be ordering that as soon as i've finished writing this report

Riveting stuff this thread!

All I'm saying is that it's more finely nuanced than that.

Royalty isn't always the top of the tree given that they used to kill each other to get there.

It's the nuances we can't miss - look at that whole swathe of new middle class in London (really working class) with houses they're using to leverage buying private school for the children when really they're only paying the interest payment on their houses.

They're only a couple of pay cheques away from disaster and their 'hand to mouth ' living is credit cards every month rather than pay day loans.

It's a house of leveraged cards.

Yes, it's a small group but if there's only 50 aristocratic families and ten of them are 'higher' than the Queen then it's still significant in that area of class.

Maybe it's the same further down - maybe there's a group of homeless people with a dog looking down on those without a dog

The above is a joke

Yes Greengrow, I think there are probably quite a lot of people with MC lifestyles who have had the same trajectory. Mine certainly did - generations of working class miners/labourers/factory workers, then a generation educated post-war who managed to get to grammar school and a free Uni place so got the middle management/professional jobs that gave them a status away from their WC roots. Their children (me) then got the tail end of fee-free Uni places and a 'better' professional job. I now earn enough to give my children a private education and more MC trappings.

The thing is that opportunity for social mobility - esp the sudden increase in middle management/professional jobs - seems to have receded and social mobility has been going down so it more difficult for families to follow the route up. Also I'm aware that we're not really 'entrenched' in our current standing - we don't have the property and wealth to guarantee the next generation enjoys the same benefits, instead much of it is built on our current income (and yet we have invested and saved but not enough to preserve this long term). That is not true for the 'older' families e.g. there is a boy in my DS's class who is the son of a peer and whose family are extremely wealthy - his will not ever need to work (though I imagine he will want to) because his of the wealth his family made over 1000 years ago and the preservation of that wealth by the next generations.

There is no way any but a tiny number of outsiders will be able to do that- the position we have is fragile. Instead we are effectively trying to entrench in our children by giving them the education they need to compete internationally for the fewer high-status professional jobs (and I can completely see why people resent that) but it is easy to see how it could evaporate.

LaurieI agree with you that the current economy is built on fantasy money, and artificially low mortgage payments, but this class is fairly stable actually- if you look at the end 80's recession/early 90's and now, this group still have m/c jobs and haven't moved much in terms of social mobility. They may lose money, go bankrupt even, and then get another job and start again. Thats because they have education and a reasonable job history; it's the same reason that it is now extremely hard for young people who don't have their clutch of 5 GCSEs A-C to get any job at all or to earn a lot of money, they don't have the social or economic capital to do so and all the evidence is these strata are more stagnant than ever in our society, not less.