To not find middle class ‘socialists’ laughing at the poor and uneducated very funny.

[Mightymucks]

I’m currently a mature student and am on a lot of FB pages related to my Uni. I need to be on there for news, but an awful lot of the content seems to be middle class self proclaimed socialists laughing at jokes poking fun at the thick unwashed masses who might have the temerity not to slavishly agree with them on every issue.

Take this morning. One of them posted a joke about an imaginary rabid Brexiteer called ‘Sharon from Croydon’ who voted for Brexit ‘because she thinks brown neurosurgeons are stealing jobs she would have been qualified for if she hadn’t dropped out of her hair and beauty NVQ’. Cue much hilarity from these students and lots of comments about ‘thick northerners’ whose capability of engaging with the political process doesn’t extend beyond looking at one slogan on a bus.

I called him ‘a snob’ and he responded that he was ‘calling out racism’ despite the fact that ‘Sharon’ is fictional and therefore doesn’t need calling out. It was just a series of lazy stereotypes designed to stoke predjudice and exactly the thing socialism is supposed to be explicitly against?

A symptom of this in a ward by the Uni near me Labour has actually removed a local candidate with long standing Labour links and huge respect from locals because he is
‘too working class’ for the students to vote for and replaced him with a history academic from out of town.

I should point out that in my working class northern area I don’t know a single person who isn’t aware that Marxism and socialism represents the working classes and the poor and uneducated. But apparently a University education doesn’t extend to teaching that these days.

I also know it isn’t universal in Labour because I had a fantastic female middle aged canvasser around this weekend who was totally clued up on issues of local concern like school funding and libraries and actually convinced me to vote for them.

But AIBU to hate these middle class millennial fuckwits who pretend they’re socialists but are actually massive fucking crashing snobs?

mucks - Sounds familiar!! The trouble is, they don't know how idiotic they are being because there's usually no-one in these rooms to tell them. Then they waste a ton of money on some stupid campaign that achieves very, very little in terms of actual health outcomes, because they never understood the problem in the first place.

Holy Shit Stop the presses! University students are being pretentious opinionated twats!?!? Fuck me, never thought I'd see the day!

i disagree too pig, I hate Corbyn because he's incompetent, for the most part, because the flagship free tuition & renationalisations are stupid distractions from helping those on the lowest incomes to achieve, oh and I think he'd be terrible at managing foreign policy.

I’ve blamed it before and I’ll blame it again: Rise in popularity of Twitter. People following people that only think like them firing off and reading limited sentences and instantly blocking those that don’t agree with you so you don’t see any opposition has really ramped up the divisiveness of politics and stamped out any room for debate. It’d be interesting to see some sort of chart or study on this.

Agree mission.

The electorate can usually sense when such political groups have contempt for them, and usually repay such contempt at the ballot box

The problem is the electorate also has a very short memory. How quickly did people forget about Emily Thornberry’s snide ‘white van-man’ tweet?

Agreed re the use of social media being damaging.

Also, and I hesitate to say this because it's slightly off-topic and it's a cheap shot but I really can't see a discussion about the problem with Labour in 2018 without casually slipping in the following...

Diane Abbott.

It’s really ironic though, that a group of people have gathered here to bash a specific group (millenial, left wing socialists) for having certain opinions and bashing a different group (working class racist Brexit voters)

WTF does Dianne Abbott have to do with anything?
Hypothesis confirmed: OP and the rent a mob are DEFINITELY Brexit voters.

Scully - A couple of posters have identified an age-group, but most of us haven't. I have mentioned my FIL, who is most definitely NOT millennial. What most people are objecting to is snobbery and class-based discrimination.

And yes OP, I am a millenial 🙌🏻
And WC ironically. I’m related to a few Sharon’s from Croydon.

OP - so do you think then that just because “Sharon” is from the WC that she ought to be somehow excused from being an ignorant racist? Isn’t this some sort of reverse class-ism?? The Sharon scenario is a very real one and is damaging for society as a whole. Why shouldn’t it be called out? Just because the example is a WC one and of course they should be worshipped by Marxists everywhere? Don’t think so!

Pig - well, I’m working class by most measures. I’m not offended by the Sharon comment, because I don’t feel it applies to me, only Brexit voting idiots?!

Aren't you just the same?
I'm starting to think this statement is a lazy way to shut down opinions other than your own, sort of like kids do the "You're ugly" "So are you" kind of thing.
Oh to be young, at Uni -funded by Mum and Dad-- and have all the answers in life.

As an aside (goes off on own tangent) I never get the offence taken to the word ‘chav’
My mother, who grew up in abject poverty in a northern town, left school at 15 and says ‘dinner’ (lunchtime meal) ‘tea’ (evening meal’ and ‘toilet’ uses chav to refer to a certain type of person whom she considers uneducated, stupid and who has poor taste. She would not consider it to mean ‘working class’, but rather a seperate, taste based insult. For example, she would call Katie Price a chav, despite the fact she is a millionaire and rode horses (posh)

When did it become shorthand for the entire working classes? Probably with bloody Owen Jones shit book

In a few years time when many traditionally middle class professional jobs are automated, made AI, offshored or disrupted so individuals can do them themselves online then we’ll see. It’s easy to point and judge when you think that yourself, you have nothing to lose in the game.

I’d imagine Sharon from Croydon could do very well for herself in hair and beauty - my beautician employs several people and provides a service that people value and are happy to pay a good amount for.

Scully - Well, as I've said, I'm working class too by origin and a Remain voted. Yet I do think it's offensive, because behind it are a series of generalisations (Leave = stupid = poor = working class; Remain = clever = wealthy = middle class). Not only are they a poor reflection of a far more complex voting pattern (what about the weathy white rural Leave vote?), they reflect a kind of discriminatory view of the entire working class as requiring paternalistic care/guidance or as incompetent and incapable. Behind that are a set of views about the unchallengeability of middle class entitlement to wealth and power that I am sure you have already encountered in your lifetime, and will sadly continue to do so. Generally, now that I work a middle class job, however, I encounter such views as an interlocutor who is assumed to agree with whatever banal generalisation is trotted out about the working class by a middle class speaker, and not as the object of direct discrimination. It's still offensive, though.

Respectability by Lynsey Hanley is a really great read for anyone else who is working class and encountering this snobbery.

The electorate can usually sense when such political groups have contempt for them, and usually repay such contempt at the ballot box

Which doesn't make sense when working class folk vote for entitled millionaire Tories who once spoke of the "managed decline" of the north.

How about focusing on the countless benefit bashing programmes on mainstream TV that portray w/c people in a certain light?

Also, on chav - I have noticed the same thing. I think there are two uses, one of which is far less noted than the other by official histories of the word. The working classes, in my experience, use "chav" to mean "blingy" or "tasteless" - a top-end barbie-pink Landrover with bejewelled rims would be 'chavvy'. The middle classes use it to mean something very different and more discriminatory against the underclass/working class - a kind of synonym for having 'working class taste' (someone in an Adidas tracksuit in McDonalds is a 'chav').

I have to say that Catherine Tate sketch is so funny and true, she was good in her time

I’ve never encountered anyone calling an average working class person a chav who wouldn’t fit into my mums meaning though?
So a school dinner lady, a bin man, someone who works in the local co-op, would never be described as ‘chavs’ just for being working class, in my experience.
The man in the Mac Donalds in a tracksuit would. But he may have been to private school, and be a millionaire!
It’s about taste, not class in my experience.

So sgree and all the worst of this can be summoned up in two words Owen Jones.

Regards chav that’s three words ‘Jeremy Kyle guests

@DrScully As a working class person I agree with your definition. Around here someone would be called a chav based on their intelligence, morals and how they dress and present themselves.

An average working class mum working as a cleaner would not be seen as a chav.

As anyone who has ever been involved in left-wing politics is well aware, university educated middle-class leftists have always either patronised or despised the patriotic white working class.

The leftists ignore working class concerns about uncontrolled mass immigration and the effect it has on jobs & communities.

They care more about Palestine than Preston.

And then they wonder why white working class people vote for UKIP & Brexit...

I think the reason so many people hate him is actually that he shows up the very faultline in the left that is the subject of this thread - the difference between genuine socialists (who want significant redistribution and transformative social change) and those who want only an empty badge of leftism without any meaningful content whatsoever (Blairite/Brownite/blue Labour)

I think a lot of people hate him because they have projected Brexit as being a left/right issue. JC himself has been a life long eurosceptic and has said many things that indicate that to bring through his socialist reforms he needs to stop FOM.

There are just as many Sharon's on the remain side, but they have conned themselves into thinking they they are somehow more intelligent with there film studies degree as it helps them a better starbucks barista.

The "left" in general have always had purity purges so it's nothing new, but the idea that the real working class should not think for themselves and only vote a certain way is evident even on this thread.