What makes you middle class ?

[toddlerdanger]

Inspired by another thread. Just for a bit of fun.

MN is obsessed with this. Let me start- I am not originally British - so I wasn't born into this system. But I understand it somewhat. But I would like to understand what it is that makes you middle class.

Here are my thoughts, gathered from 20 plus years of living here, please correct me if I'm wrong. I don't want to offend, I find this topic fascinating, especially since reading so much about it on here:

• speaking in an RP accent, so not in a regional accent

• living in a period property or cottage ( an old house basically )

• playing board games and scrabble

• loving puns and word play

• having read all the classic books because you grew up with them and your parents showed you/ talked for you about them since you were young

• having parents who don't do manual jobs/ are entrepreneurs. Middle class parents seem to work in academia or in the corporate world in general.

• having parents who have a degree

• having parents that have been to private school

• having been to private school ( but not 100 percent necessary )

• having a degree yourself

• not driving flash cars, think more like a Volvo rather than a Porsche

• shopping at Waitrose

• not piercing your child's ears until they're in their teens

• not having too much flashy designer stuff. The odd bag is OK. But not constant flashing of designer stuff. More understated

• the Christmas lights things. Not too many colours, but more subdued. Think warm white vs ice white lights

• antiques in the home

• not into football, but more into rugby

This is all I can think of right now.

Worrying about class = middle class

@toddlerdanger

MC also love a quiz...

I despise a quiz or board games or scrabble.

What? I’ve never known a Hyacinth Bucket type to enjoy quizzes or board games. All their time is taken up worrying about and/or judging what everyone else is doing.

greatbritishmag.co.uk/uk-culture/what-is-the-british-class-system/

@Marimaur

Worrying about class = middle class

Or aspiring to be.

I am middle class. I have a degree, as do parents. Chief exec job, but I'm 50 now, so not meteoric rise.

But, 1970s house and view waitrose as expensive.

No interest in literature. Science was my thing.

Two cars, skoda and dacia.

So, it's a mix of things rather than a list of stuff.

Been said already in many ways but those most troubled about their class and that of others seem to fit the MN bill of middle class.

Faux 'lighthearted' threads about children eating hummus (supermarket) and centreparcs

@TearifficTaz

Well none of that is what makes someone middle class

It's based on your job and income mostly

White collar workers are middle class, the best definition I've seen is the middle class shower before work, working class shower after work.

Then this further confirms for me I am more working class! I work in 'white collar' education too.

The point being that you can tell relatively little from accent alone.

Exactly, so "RP accent" is not relevant to class. Maybe it is a bit in the south of England, but nowhere else.

Another class-obsessed thread on mumsnet. Hasn't been one for a few days. I guess it was time. Another (boring tedious) thread I need to hide.

@HelloFrostyMorning

Another class-obsessed thread on mumsnet. Hasn't been one for a few days. I guess it was time. Another (boring tedious) thread I need to hide.

Why bother to comment ? Some people are having a bit of a laugh on here.. kill joy

@fawnfrenchiemum DW has working class background. First in family to go to uni. Parents in trade type jobs.

Middle class in the UK is thinking that only people who live in nice houses, have an an office based job and have been to university are “educated” and read books. It’s a level of small minded arrogance that enables them to believe that anyone outside of their own tiny frame of reference is a bit thick and common. So basically it’s a state of mind.

Decanting pasta and cereal into jars.

I think there are a lot more 'groups' in society now than the old system of three - five classes (depending on how you split middle class) with everything aligning in each one. Like, in the OP there are a mix of categories such as profession, money, culture, education, interests ... I think it's quite common nowadays for people to tick the MC box for some of these and not others. So, for example, I'm very highly educated but poorly paid, which as a knock on means that I 'do' a good few MC things (massive selection of cheese, in both fridge and cheese press, for a start ) but I can't afford the period house/Volvo/horse etc. . Other people are in a professional job and the kids are privately educated, but they would identify culturally as WC. Other people have a MC 'lifestyle' but are not degree educated ... and so on. I think there are a lot more people nowadays who have elements of MC & WC combined than there are people who still fit neatly into one box.

I would say I’m firmly middle class - private school, read the classics, mum studied classics at Oxford 🙈, office job, old house. But just looked at the cheese In the fridge and we have cheddar, and cheese strings 😅 my 3 year old likes them! So not sure about that definition!

Hardly anyone speaks RP this day, which means for example not dropping any “t”s at the end of the words. Most people speak a variant of it, for example estuary accent. Basically a looser, more chilled version of RP.

On that basis OP, we must be working class, or aristocracy lol, since we don’t do any on your list other than the ear piercing.

And yet our cars cost 80k combined, we have no mortgage or debts and DH earns over 200k a year…..in transport. We have another house. DC were the first in our family to go to university but went to state school.

Tbh, I couldn’t give a shiny shit what we are or are not. Born and bred British with Irish history in the 1880s so not unfamiliar with class.

There must be loads of families like ours who grew up in the 70s in private housing but blue collar or manual jobs who made good later in life.

Class is bullshit.

We do have Tomme, Stilton and a block of Parmigiano Reggiano in the fridge with the Cheese Strings and Red Leicester so maybe I am a bit middle class after all.

@DoTheMerengue

Decanting pasta and cereal into jars.

Decanting milk and also not having any water bottles or drink bottles on the table when having dinner, but decanting all the drinks.

3 cheeses in the fridge, tick
decant rice, pasta, cereal, also washing powder into boxes, tick

Does having a fridge freezer and chest freezer count as middle class?

The thing that always strikes me about people who really want to be seen as middle class is that it's almost a 'paint by numbers' personality.
Judging other peoples book/TV choices etc. I work with a lovely lady who continually reminds us how mc she is. But her little spark of personality seems to be gone. Everything is so deliberately curated in her life, to be the things that a middle class person would like. I have a really silly example, we were having a work buffet some years ago and she made a big deal of bringing in hummus, rocket , quinoa salad (I'm not joking here, she really did) all was delicious. Other members of our team brought in mini scotch eggs and really cheap sausage rolls , much joking about cheap food and how she didnt eat it etc etc then I came back in later in the day to find her scoffing them out of the fridge. I've met a few people like this, they don't quite have the courage to embrace their quirks. I can understand it. I like a lot of things that what be considered 'common' in their eyes and at times you do feel judged.

I also wasn't born in this country and I'm somewhat intrigued by the class distinction in England.

I have lived here for 8 years and still don't get what makes someone middle class or working class.

I don't think it's about money. I used to have a work colleauge that owned seven houses and was quite well-off.

He very clearly wasn't middle-class though. He grew up on a council estate, dropped out at school at the age of 14 and had a prison stint as a young man. The way he spoke, often in quite a rough and abrupt manner, was also quite distinctive.

I think middle class is probably more about the way you talk and express yourself? The kind of values you hold, the things you are interested to do in your free time? I think the middle class also values education.

Decanting milk and also not having any water bottles or drink bottles on the table when having dinner, but decanting all the drinks.

What if you have to decant milk because the big milk bottles don't fit in your narrow fridge? That's what I do!

And I don't know what you mean about decanting drinks on the table ... like drinking out of a glass instead of a can or like pouring the wine into a carafe before serving? They're quite different behaviours (not sure either of them is MC, but the first one definitely isn't).

There is no class. Everyone is worth the same

Tearific Taz: Well that's what you think, but it doesn't align with reality

Job type is the traditional form of class distinction, and since that isn't overly helpful in todays world, most also overlay salary onto this too to get a true view of 'class'

For example - the OECD defines the middle class as households with disposable income of between 75% and 200% of the median (or mid-point of the income distribution, adjusted for the number of people who live in a household).

The OP is talking about middle class in the context of UK's class system, not the world generally. Which is why I said the class system in the UK is more subtle than job and income. Quoting OECD is interesting but ultimately irrelevant.

I consider these economic categories, primarily.

You are middle class if your income is fairly median, you probably work for someone else though you might have a small business, you will though have access to things like pensions or some investments for the future.

There are things you can associate with this - for rxample most middle class people can reasonably expect their kids might go to university and it's fairly likely that they might have gone themselves, but that's more a correlation than definitive.

It's also a bit confusing that lots of jobs that used to be working class are now more like middle class jobs because of the pay and benefits associated with them - trades jobs in particular, certain military jobs, that kind of thing.

As a kind of quick imperfect heuristic, I tend to think of the difference now between a working class and middle class person to be whether they have access to investments and pensions or similar ways of growing their money, at least to take care of their retirement.

The cultural elements of class, like values, the sports we like, and so on, can come as much from our parents' class as our own. So since as a society we have a lot more class movement than some others, especially in the past, it's pretty common to get people who may themselves inhabit a particular class but their cultural roots are in another.

For example, in my grandparents generation, I have examples of that in two directions. My paternal grandparents grew up very working class, and for years were themselves working class, but later moved into the middle class - which was not unusual at that period of time as many families were increasing their standard of living. Their culture remained very working class, as did that of their kids who were older by the time they moved up. My maternal grandmother on the other hand grew up as a quite posh until her early teen years, but her family became poor after her father died - enough so that she had to quit school early and go out to work. But her values her whole life remained much more shaped by the earlier family culture even though she married into a very middle class family.