Working class wannabes in the News

[Oileo]

It’s been reported in a few papers that ‘47 per cent of those in middle-class professional and managerial occupations identify as working class’ and 24 per cent of people doing middle-class jobs whose parents also did middle class jobs identified as working class too. The gist is that it’s now cool to pretend you rose to your position/ wealth on merit- rather than pretend to be posh.

It got me wondering (again!) about the class system. When do you change class?Can you easily in a generation? I had a middle-class job, yet I don’t know how I’d reply in that survey. I still personally feel a gulf between those who grew up wealth and a middle class background. Even in my 40s I have a bigger mortgage (no inheritance), my interests often don’t match (can’t play an instrument, I don’t know many ballets or plays in conversation for example, no ‘hobbies’ or skills outside education). I feel sometimes it’s obvious networking at work or in my dress (I wear hoop earrings, a number of colleagues over the years have made snide comments as a small example, but it’s more than that in presentation of yourself).

Part the reason for my fascination with class is that I don’t really fit as an immigrant. My parents were a cleaner and a security guard, but I/ they had access to a good education and the Soviet Union was a system that simply can’t be applied here. I have certainly earned here on merit money wise, but have also had better educational opportunities that many British working class. So I don’t really fit.

So
Yabu- your job defines your class
Yanbu-class is far more complex, and somebody may identify as working class if those are their roots.

Or Victoria Beckham? I very much expect she would challenge the assertion that she's not upper class now.

Not a chance is VB upper class. She is pretty much the definition of working class nouveau riche.

She has none of the class signifiers that an UC person would have.

OP, I recommend reading Jilly Cooper’s book, “ Class”and/or a book called “Watching The English” for a quick guide to class in the U.K.

out of curiosity

if the father is a manual worker and the mother a professional lawyer

the children go to private school

then work at manual jobs

what class would they be?

did they start as working class or middle class - do they stay as middle class or working class and what would they be now?

Reading this thread I'm more than relieved that there isn't a 'class system' in Ireland. You are who you are irrespective of job or income. I'm 50 years of age, I mix with people who have inherited millions, those who have earned millions and employ hundreds, those who struggle to pay their rent and those whose rent is paid for them, people who can trace their family here back to when records began and those who arrived within the last few years, I know little or nothing of what their parents did, where they were educated etc and I care less, thankfully this is normality here.

Class is as much cultural as economic. It’s taste, vocabulary, leisure pursuits and unwritten rules.

My family is such a bizarre mixture of different backgrounds (although more UK than immigrant) that I never know where I fit in either, sometimes I feel very definitely one thing and sometimes I fell quite differently, but that’s the weaknesses of class as a system. It’s too broad brush, not that it matters.

However, I work in a creative industry now and class feels far less relevant there than it did in my previous sector, so it does vary.

I think honestly the whole system broke down more than fifty years ago, in the sense that the rigid barriers came down and people are now much harder to categorise neatly.

@BarbaraofSeville in my view, education is a way out of the confines of the class system.

So a WC child who has worked hard at school, got into university (traditionally an Uc and MC thing), then gets a MC job has accessed the economic status of the MC.

The child (now adult) may find themselves culturally wrong footed at times, not quite fit in. Or they will have worked hard to “improve” themselves, to learn the rules of their new class, which can be a joy (art galleries and the like, are generally not visited by the WC family who are scraping by to even feed their children).

Things are changing as we become more aware of these inequalities.

The only real answer to scrapping the class system in this country is to abolish the royal family, the house of lords, the private education system and equalise society with more taxes. It is really as simple as that.

Do we have the stomach to go through with it?
I think not.
So we will stay where we are for the foreseeable.

Victoria Beckham is not upper class

She is barely middle class. She is working class with money- so the old nouveau riche. The way she spends her money demonstrates that.

You can't become upper class- it is by birth.

I think there is some fluidity between the WC and LMC/MM. I think you probably can move between them in a generation. I don’t think you would break into the established MC/UMC or UC in a lifetime but your DC would.

The report - if its the same one you're referring to - op was really interesting.

It suggested that those who work in the arts, particularly acting, consistently play-down their privilege and make out that they have risen on...on...talent and/or grift alone.

This echoes my experience. I know loads of people who I would consider absolutely middle-class or even posh who seem to think because their great grandparent was a miner or a maid or because their grandparent - shock horror - did not go to university then they too (despite lovely house/holidays and private school) have clawed their way out of a ghetto.

Its a delusion people like to have about themselves.

art galleries and the like, are generally not visited by the WC family who are scraping by to even feed their children).

That’s quite a snotty thing to say and, IME, not particularly accurate.

Hello from another ex-Soviet immigrant in STEM. We don't fit into the class system here, it is a futile task to even try.

Here, as in MN presumably.

I'm not convinced that anybody outside a few on this forum gives it much thought on a day to day basis. It is irrelevant in modern society.

This "claiming" to be working class has much more to do with not wanting to be middle class than what people think of as success

I totally agree with this.

I've noticed that people get very exercised around the idea that working class = working class for life and you retain that marker in perpetuity like writing through a stick of rock.

But no-one gets too bothered about people who are downwardly mobile: ie trust fund drop-outs or people who just don't particularly move class. I've known quite a few of the former who have gone out of their way to ape what they see as "working class" traits and behaviour. You don't see the all up in arms about how they are "upper class for life" etc.

It's absolutely true that class is much harder to define than a simple calculation of income etc. But the idea that class is something "essential" which is defined at birth and which you can't ever shake off in your lifetime is bollocks IMHO.

Basically if you are sufficiently concerned about changing your class and prepared to put the work into it you probably will. Most people quite rightly can't be bothered to worry too much about it and we all care less about it these days. Which is a good thing.

art galleries and the like, are usually free to visit, so why would scarping by to feed their children have to do with this?

I consider myself working class, I grew up in social housing, we didn't own a car and never had a foreign holiday. My parents worked in unskilled occupations. Both were very well read, intelligent and well spoken, but still very much working class by income and background.

I went to Cambridge where I stuck out like a sore thumb because even those who went to state school usually a) went to a selective one in some form and b) come from wealthier, more middle class families where parents were degree educated. I was the first person in my family to stay on at school past 16, let alone go to university.

Although I have various professional qualifications and am a reasonably high earner, I still consider myself working class when compared to, say, my DP who is middle class, grew up in a large privately owned house with parents who were respectively a lecturer and HCP, although DP left school at 16 with a handful of GCSEs albeit he is now very senior in his field and outearns me.

The above just illustrates how complex the class system and our perception of it can be!

@LakieLady I agree with you.

I'm university educated, well travelled, have a 12 month buffer of savings in the bank, husband and I combined earn comfortably over 100k. We have a mortgage on a London property in a decent area. I work in STEM.

BUT... Husband and I both grew up very poor, we holidayed in caravans if parents could afford a holiday that year, my entire extended family almost entirely live in rented or social housing. At my core is a working class upbringing. I never skiied, I never rode horses, I never had foreign holidays growing up. I'm still a working class person. My daughter however will have a different upbringing but still the extended family, food habits and caravan holidays!

There isn’t a class system in Ireland? Funny how all the Irish people I met at Oxford were from Foxrock.
I think there are cultural aspects that can persist even after a family has changed classes, and that’s what makes people identify WC when they aren’t.
My parents were born WC but scraped into the lower middle before I was born. I went to Oxbridge whereas my mother left school at 16. So many of the habits I learned at home are WC.
My kids go to private school and are quite firmly middle middle class. I imagine they will stay that way even if they don’t earn like I do as adults.

Basically if you are sufficiently concerned about changing your class and prepared to put the work into it you probably will.

Of course. I have a friend - w/c family/town, state school, first to university, married 'well' and now super posh, he's never not skiing, they have all the staff, and he wears pink jumpers around his neck. If he still identifies as w/c I would be very surprised.

I'm not convinced that anybody outside a few on this forum gives it much thought on a day to day basis.

its own the newspaper this week and although its not a weekly or even month occurrence it is certainly something that thrives in England. There are books on this thread mentioned written about the subject, academics have studied this matter - Im sure they are not all on MN

FFS. Not this again. MN is proper obsessed by class.

@RickiTarr

art galleries and the like, are generally not visited by the WC family who are scraping by to even feed their children).

That’s quite a snotty thing to say and, IME, not particularly accurate.

I agree (see my comment in my first post about MC people having a lot to say about the interests of WC people and conflating WC with 'deprived').

Art galleries, museums etc are generally free or quite cheap, so a good choice of day out the cash strapped. My entire childhood was spent tramping from one museum, art gallery, sculpture park, country house grounds etc to the other.

And other than during the miner's strike, we were generally fairly comfortable financially, albeit partly due to parents being quite careful and frugal with money.

There isn’t a class system in Ireland?

I got the idea from Normal People that the place was riddled with it! ;)

I'm on 40k but I'm definitely not middle class! I live and grew up in a city in the north east, lived in a council estate etc. Amazingly despite awful home circumstances I did well at school and college, but didn't even have an understanding of what a Russell group Uni was or that a choice of University meant anything, and it certainly wasn't explained to us at college, so simply went to the local crap polytechnic. Which was poor and I ended up dropping out.

I ended up working at a Russell group Uni years ago, and it was such an eye opener. I felt a million miles away from those students. I'd never even been exposed to people like that before and it gave me a shock, the privately educated well-off and their behaviour... I didn't even know it existed.

I live alone in a 2 bed terrace, admittedly in a nicer area of the city, but christ I'm nowhere near the "middle class" despite my decent job.

There’s two different ways to define class - essentially by your job/education and by your parents job/education. I and most people put more emphasis on the latter.

Doing a well paid middle class profession doesn’t make you working class if you grew up in poverty and have a working class accent. It will almost certainly make your kids middle class though.

Also the old definitions are seriously outdated. Only about 20% of the population now fit into the old “working class” category, so it makes little sense to divide just between WC and MC. There are half a dozen social classs in the UK now.

It's terribly complex.

I'd say it is a combination of your parents, grandparents and their careers and wealth. For example, my direct family are firmly middle middle class - both parents worked professional jobs, kids went to private schools but it was a stretch, dad came from immigrant refugee parents so could be classed as working class but it's not easy to define if you are a 1st/2nd generation immigrant. Mum came from an upper middle class family and I would say a subset of my cousins still belong to that category - large country houses that have been inherited, go to public boarding schools that their dad/grandad went to, family money. But they're not upper class - that basically requires a title or extremely longstanding family ties to that type of people. And my own direct family and other cousins have slipped down to middle middle class or even lower middle class - working less professional roles, have heavy regional accents. But it's almost impossible to define. I'd say it takes at least 2 generations to truly change class, and is most often done by marriage - just being rich in no way makes you upper middle or upper class (although I'd say the transition from working to middle class is quicker - some money and sending your children to schools where they won't have heavy accents is probably sufficient for the children to then be middle class).

I agree that someone on £40k claiming they are working class is deluded of course.

So would someone who was a semi literate builder be working class? Because that was my dad, who earned much more than £40k, and far more than me who's a so called professional.