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.

What is considered a 'middle class job'?
A bank manager used to be highly thought of - now though, there are thousands of managers in the head offfice of banks. With our focus now on the Service Industry, the offices of today are the factories of the past.
A nurse was considered to be WC but now they are highly educated workers - are they still WC?

My first day at my firm, they took me out for sushi and I couldn’t use chopsticks - it’s the lack of experiences that make you working class - the things you don’t know you don’t know until you have an aha moment

Lots of moments like that but probably at a younger age for me, certainly from 11 onwards. I do remember my primary school in a working class area trying to be quite progressive though. Vividly remember a lesson where we tried to pick up mandarin orange segments with chopsticks, led by a Chinese girl in the year above who could do it properly, of course. I didn't actually have a Chinese takeaway until I was about 16 years old, but I still love Chinese food (and tinned mandarin orange segments! )

@Graciebobcat that’s taken me back - our mum wouldn’t let us watch either Grange Hill or Byker Grove because she said it would rot out brains! Hence I have absolutely no nostalgia about either for a person of my generation. So funny.

To me your job has no relation at all to your class. Your class is fixed. It's how you were brought up. Also has nothing to do with how much money is in your bank account.

E.g. Alan sugar will always be working class, his kids obviously not.

The Queen in a council house on the dole is still not working class.

@thepeopleversuswork

It's been like this for at least 50 years: since the 60s really.

I grew up in a very affluent area and almost everyone affected a faux working class accent.

Really? Wasn't like this in my part of Scotland AT ALL. In fact, the exact opposite. Constantly being told at school to "speak properly" because speaking any sort of scots dialect was a very working class thing. I'm in my twenties and remember vividly my mum putting on a "posh accent" when on the phone to anyone who mattered. Similarly when I started working at an engineering company full of middle class, well educated people, I did try to hide my accent for about five years before having a fuck it moment.

I have a friend who is a successful lawyer earning well over £70k a year with her own home etc who still claims to be "working class" because her dad was a manual labourer. I don't think that washes any more when you're in your 40s.

Disagree completely. The friend is working class, even in her 40s. Now if she had children and raised them since birth on a 70k income then presumably they would be middle class. But your friend is still working class.

I earn more than your friend does, that doesn't change the fact that I grew up in arguably the most deprived area of the city, sharing a single bedroom with three people, and lived there until my mid-twenties! I speak like a working class person, my friends are working class, I know what it's like to survive on top-up benefits and be a single mum in an ex-council high-rise flat saying hello to the local junkies every morning, my children still go to school in a deprived area etc. The fact I earn more now will never wash away my entire upbringing and I think it's madness to think that it can .

I think this is confusing to some immigrants as a lot of other countries fix class to job. More like a caste system. We have a history of impoverished aristocracy which may have lead the view class is fixed rather than about actually cash.

I really don't think income is necessarily a good way to determine social class. A lot of women 'downgrade' professionally once they have children. So there a lot of highly educated and experienced professionals doing low-paid jobs to fit in with family life. Of course, there will be some men (but not as many) in this position too.

Class is really complex and what makes it more so is that a lot of people have their own definition of it.

Really in the UK there's only the "working class" and "middle class" that most people define themselves as. Ok there is an upper class but it's a very small number of people.

You can't group the whole of a society into two categories, so there's a lot of leeway really as to where people put themselves.

I don't read much into it tbh and I'm not even sure where I would put myself.

At secondary school I was thought of as quite posh (I had a mum who banned Gladiators and Blind Date and had painfully self conscious rules about fizzy drinks and shell suits); people who are actually quite posh think of me as common as muck. It amuses me but I'm not really sure why.

[quote BarbaraofSeville]Immigrants also escape the sexism in the education system. Meaning a lot of women in STEM weren’t educated here or their parents weren’t and instilled the value and their confidence in their technical abilities. Working class brits don’t easily escape generations of being in unskilled roles

I think I'll now identify as an ex-Soviet immigrant.

According to the BBC Calculator I'm in the Elite. Expect a red carpet for the next thread, please.

Wayne Rooney and David Beckham are incredibly talented people. They are so rich they probably don't give a stuff. Is Elton John working class?
Paul McCartney? Not really. They're in a different class

I definitely WAS working class - neither of my parents went to university, both had blue collar jobs (dad was a builder, mum worked in shops/cleaned). I was the first in my family to go to university (where I met soooo many working class wannabes). I remember one of my university friends came over to our house one time and said 'oh my God, your area is a bit rough, isn't it?' and it isn't even in the rough area of town. I met so many posh people at university who were shocked that I worked and paid my own rent.

To be honest haven't made that much of myself, but enough that I would say we are pretty much middle class now.

The difference is that when you grow up working class, you don't have that background knowledge or the connections that middle class people do. My children will grow up surrounded by books and going to the theatre and reading The Times instead of the Daily Mail. They won't feel out of place in a nicer restaurant (my mum is still embarrassed to go anywhere above Pizza Express) and they'll probably feel like going to university is a natural step. I didn't have any of that, and it doesn't really leave you. Especially the connections and that sense of 'yes, I can apply to this job/talk to that person/demand this service'. Until I was much older, I definitely felt like I didn't deserve certain things or felt they weren't for me.

I would say my values and outlooks align more with the working classes even now though. I feel more comfortable with working class people and find the constant fretting of the middle classes quite boring. Getting into the 'right' school or whatever. When I go out, I'm definitely the flashiest of all my friends, some of whom go clubbing without make-up or in trainers (the horror.)

I always find questions ( and answers ) like this to be fascinating . I live in a country where this kind of caste \ class system just doesn't exist . I'd hate to live in that sort of culture .

I was born into a traveller family but went to live with settled relatives (themselves in no way rich but much less chaotic than my immediate family) when I was 11. From that, I was able to go to secondary school- something which none of my siblings who stayed with our parents did- and then to a good university. I have a well paid job- not mega millions here but certainly comfortable- as does my OH. By some quirk of nature, I have always had a fairly middle English accent.

Socioeconomically, I was born into what was probably the lowest rung of the ladder in British society. It was, due to the culture, highly improbable that I'd have gotten out of that and none of my siblings really have.

Still, I think it would be disingenuous of me to describe myself as working class. Because I am in a comfortable, relatively privileged position and have been since my 20s. I gather the reason that lots of MC people want to describe themselves as working class is because middle class suggests a level of privilege that they don't want to accept they have. Some may not have been born with that privilege but they have it now. They can say they have a working class backgrounds (and spend the next few hours arguing over what that actually means) but they surely know that, when a politician, for instance, says something along the lines of
"Helping working class people"
"Disproportionately affecting working class people"
That they are not referring to GPs or barristers on high salaries, even if their dads were miners or they have a partiality for Love Island.

The problem with class in this country is that it cannot be properly defined and so can be manipulated to mean just about anything you want.
How can you identify what the main problems working class people face when "working class" encompasses

1. a cleaner on 19k a year in council housing, in an area with poor schools, few amenities and high crime.
2. A bricklayer on 40k a year who owns his own home in a decent area, who may not have attained an especially high standard of education but is living comfortably regardless and whose children will benefit from good local schools.
3. A city lawyer on 70k who grew up in a Northern ex mining town and has done well for herself and married someone even more well off, from a wealthy family. A nice house in the commuter belt. Children at the local independent school. But working class by self assertion.

The same applies when you try to define middle class. Are you talking about stock brokers or social workers?
It is, in my opinion, irresponsible for politicians to continue to split the country into the working and middle classes. Split it into income quintiles if you want to talk about disparity in standard of living. Split it into level of education if you want to talk about disparity of opportunity. But no blow from a policy, recession or housing crisis will be softened by the fact that someone listens to R4.

Another immigrant and I find many of the British ideas around it confusing as well. I've no idea where my upbringing would fit, if anything it taught me that whatever access a parent has through their income/job/culture, that doesn't mean their child has the same access.

I also find the US one I grew up with just as baffling, and there are similar issues within the US of people wanting an identity story with struggle in it to prove that they've earned it all themselves (and that those who haven't, well, that's their own fault). I do think people can drop far more easily than some suggest, especially if it happens young - again, if the parents do not pass on the access they have, then it means little for the child.

I do think there are cultural elements to class, but I think like many thing cultural that there are local elements that don't work so well when we're trying to discuss things nationally or globally. I mean, like the debate about art galleries and museums - where I am, museums and parks are the mainstay for kids for those on low income, and has been used here as part of widening access for children to use equipment they're unlikely to get at home or school. They're very much part of working class culture here, but I can see why it wouldn't be in a more rural area. There has always been cultural differences between cities and the countryside too, and between different cities and rural areas -- they're all going to affect how someone percieves their 'class' or other social identities or upbringing.

Class and what constitutes which is complex, but I think the study and articles that have come through on people claiming a working-class background has far more to do with social systems and ideals around being independent in our success rather than how class works. There are studies that grandparents do have an affect on access and class, but it's very small, especially compared to parents (or in the US where many go back much further to prove they're really independent success stories, honest).

It's surely a combination of all the above - upbringing, parents' jobs/backgrounds, income, education, values, tastes. If I was asked I would say I am middle class - both grandfathers miners, grandmother mill worker, dad started work in a factory at 15, eventually rose to a management level, we moved up in the world a bit, and I have continued to do so. My values and tastes have changed accordingly. It is a very hard thing to classify though really.

At secondary school I was thought of as quite posh (I had a mum who banned Gladiators and Blind Date)

@unmarkedbythat OMG in my teenage years, I would have been distraught if I'd not been allowed to watch either of these programmes!

I wasn't allowed to watch Dallas or Dynasty when I was younger and remember stomping up to bed crying "It's just not fair!!!"

I definitely think the class system is more fluid and less easily unpickable in the UK than was the case fifty years ago (or longer).

Education (particularly the widening of university access to more young people) has given lots of people opportunities that they would have struggled to access a few generations earlier.

Mind you, I can think of several friends who come from very MC families (think doctors and lawyers), went to private schools, etc. but whose grandparents were WC ( but benefitted from grammar school education in the 20s, 30s and 40s) to get several rungs up the social ladder in their lifetime.

Victoria Beckham was dropped at school in a Bentley i think? It used to embarass her. Her parents had a success business I think so I'd say she is middle class.

As a Canadian I really don't understand the British Social class thing. In Canada it's entirely based on earnings, and there are no assumptions really about the kind of activities you engage in in your social life.

I'm certainly Upper Middle Class in Canada, due to what I earn, but I didn't grow up wealthy and my past times are camping, listening to country music and going to the movies (not even good ones. Marvel movies and Pixar cartoons). I drive a frigging truck.

I did the calculator and it says I'm elite, but then it says I enjoy high cultural activities when all I selected was spending time on facebook and socializing at home....

I didn't go to private school (which it didn't even ask me). My uni was elite but I was accepted as part of a quota system.

I do socialize with people in a wide variety of jobs....But most of them were friends before any of us ever had jobs and we all went down different paths.

The BBC calculator seems to be going entirely off salary, which from my understanding of the British class system is not what makes someone a certain class...

people have always pretended to be working class. Not a new development.They think it makes them all earthy and real and hard.

People always assume I am become Im from hull and have been to prison and its comedy gold the prolier than thou shit peope come out with when they're clearly anything but. I actually had a standard middle class barratt housing estate upbringing.

@Helmetbymidnight

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.

Skiing is such a class marker, isn't it? I can't even read the word without raising an eyebrow. It's more likely that I'd fly to the moon than go on a skiing holiday (and I could afford it now). That's for posh, that is.

@MrsJBaptiste

At secondary school I was thought of as quite posh (I had a mum who banned Gladiators and Blind Date)

@unmarkedbythat OMG in my teenage years, I would have been distraught if I'd not been allowed to watch either of these programmes!

I wasn't allowed to watch Dallas or Dynasty when I was younger and remember stomping up to bed crying "It's just not fair!!!"

I have some of my old diaries and I would rant for pages about it. Honestly the angst. I didn't know the phrase social leper at 14 but if I had I would have probably glitter tattooed it onto my forehead to Make A Point!

*because