Does the UK begrudge success?

[Viohh]

Just interested in having a conversation really.

My parents were children of Indian (Sikh) immigrants who worked in factories then eventually owned shops. My own parents themselves forgave holidays, nice clothes etc to send their kids to private schools (also corner shop owners). As a family of 5 we lived in a 2 bed flat until I was 16. We did go to private school. I remember the envy I felt of classmates’ houses when we went on play dates. I always went to after school club. Often the last to be picked up.

Fast forward, I’m now a consultant at a big 4 firm. One brother is a pilot and the other is a doctor. Many assume I come from privilege and only the super rich can send children to private schools. The way I was raised has left a lot of psychological damage which current society almost dismisses.

Just wondering if anyone has gone through similar hardships which now is retrospectively being dressed up as ‘privilege’ in modern society.

Yes and particularly Mumsnet Tera hate successful people. How dare people earn six figures etc etc. so much jealousy. We should be encouraging higher pay not dragging people down. If someone has worked hard to get into that kind of role and you havent, it's not their fault is if love

sod all to do with jealousy and everything to do with the assumption that anyone not earning 6 figures is both lazy and stupid. All those earning 6 figures presumably expect the lower paid police, fire people and paramedics to turn up when they call? And expect their children’s schools to be fully staffed with qualified professionals who care about their job? They want to be served their Starbucks with a smile and the supermarket to be fully stocked? Someone needs to be doing those jobs. My beef, such as it is, with higher earners is not their earnings, but their assumption they are somehow more worthy, almost better than the rest of us. It is the level of entitlement you see with those six figures that bothers many, not the 6 figures themselves.

What led you to pay for your son's education?
I am not trying pick a fight, just curious. I don't advocate communism, but I do struggle to justify private school in the UK so I wanted to ask what it was that made it important to you.

@bonafidetidy I mean, his honesty counts for something, but let us not pretend that the ancestors of those immigrants were not also forced to contribute to the success of Britain rather than their own countries and nations.

Everything you’ve said I agree with though.

It's not a binary question of being privileged or not, you can be privileged in one aspect of your life, and not in another.

You had parents who invested in your future success, made sure you had a good education. And they obviously weren't poor - nobody can afford 3 sets of private school fees without being reasonably well off, regardless of how much they scrimp and save elsewhere. You never went without or experienced real poverty.

All of that represents immense privilege.

You also experienced DV. That's obviously not a privilege - it causes trauma and affects your relationships through to adulthood. But it doesn't cancel out the other privileges that you did have.

You may be less privileged than your schoolfriends who were wealthier and didn't experience DV, but you are far more privileged than a child who experiences DV, real poverty, and whose parents don't care whether they get an education or not.

@MCOut Yes I do know that of course, but my reply was getting way to long to cover every eventuality and my Dad realised that also. I think from his pov he was thinking of his family who worked and died in the heavy industries, including his own father who died in an accident in a steelworks at 38 when he was only 2 years old, the compensation his mother received wasn't even enough to cover her relocation costs back to her home town. Now we have a lot of conversion around colonialism and the exploitation of other countries and people by the British Empire and we see it on TV and online but in the 80s it was really an academic realm or for activists and my Dad left school and 15 and just wasn't versed in these ideas at all. He used to be anti-gay marriage as well but again he came to realise he was wrong on that and actually proudly attended at the wedding of two women who live on our street (and are good friends of his) when gay marriage was legalised.

I think my point is that these feelings are normal in a society with deep injustice at its core and that they are then used to deflect that anger away from where it belongs. As you say you agree with most of that.

@TarantinoIsAMisogynist on some level I get what you’re saying, but that assumes that parents are making rational decisions or have the same perception about what constitutes a basic living. I don’t know the ins and outs of the situation but I remember my aunty feeling obliged to feed some private school children in her building, because she was worried that they wouldn’t be able to eat. Children don’t have any say in this decision-making so their experience of the powerlessness of poverty is not necessarily any less real.

Ambition and success are two different things. Ambition is working hard to realise your dreams, as well as having ambition for any children you have.

People can be successful because they're born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Doesn't mean they're ambitious.

The OP hasn't said anything at all to indicate that they experienced poverty or went without in any meaningful sense though.

She says her parents went without holidays and nice clothes (not unusual, plenty of people's budgets don't stretch to these things); lived in a 2 bed flat (cramped, but not that unusual, and in the past there was less obsession with children having their own bedroom than there is these days); and had to work a lot so she attended after school club.

The "hell" which she describes is emotional and physical abuse, not poverty.

@Workworkandmoreworknow geez I really don’t know anyone who thinks people not earning six figures must be “lazy and stupid”. I’ve never come across anyone who doesn’t value and respect nurses, teachers and tradesman etc for their skill and hard work.

In what way does identity politics erode your argument?

There were a few reasons why I have chosen to privately educate my son.
Wrap around care both myself and my husband are working full time and I wanted to continue to do so as I love my job and worked hard for it. Sport - DS is very sporty and the school offered great support with a lot of training/ games - a lot of hours playing the sport that he loves. And last and the most important reason, local schools are rubbish where we live, no grammars nearby and son is very academic and I did not want to be bullied for this . He does have an academic scholarship but it is not relevant in this context as percentage reduction quite small .
Also you make it sound that private schools are only in the UK. Where I come from (former communist country) there were plenty of 'private' schools as well with fabulous facilities reserved for members of the communist party children. Some other sort of privilege but nevertheless a privilege.

The other side of the coin is a communist society where party membership=money=power
The richest, most powerful people were high up in the party. No matter how hard you worked, what profession you had (doctor , solicitor) , unless you joined the ranks you were nobody.
At least in capitalism you have a chance through honest means not by selling your soul to an ideology.

The average annual wage in the UK is £28k, I'm talking about a family where 2 adults earn not much more than that each.

School fees around here are around 16k and some families manage it on a combined wage of around average. I had a friend move to Kent and HAVE to put their child in private because there wasn't a school place for them.

This why many families are panicking about Labour getting in and taking away private's charitable status, causing fees to go up, because they're NOT 'rich' and cannot afford a few more thousand a year.

@autrejour no, that is the kind of false dichotomy the very wealthy would like us to believe is the only thing there is.

The other side of the coin is countries like the Scandinavian ones, where you pay high taxes but you get something good back for them, where the safety net actually means something and where you can afford to go to work because there is affordable childcare. There's no such thing as utopia, but there is middle ground between two shades of bad.

if anyone can afford 16k, they are rich

I noticed this - the kids who grew up with certain degree of privilege - it being private education, or foreign travel, or just a room full of coolest toys - resent it and would happily swapped it for "simpler lives" - like less pressure and stress, more relaxed and loving parents, lower expectations of success. But then they grow up they can see the grass isn't greener on the other side.

I understand what you are saying. I.am second generation south asisn and I had a horrible physically and emotionally abusive childhood. Looking at me and siblings now, we are so damaged inwards but externally we are a success. Meanwhile our parents got away with the abuse they threw at us. I am angry because me and siblings cannot hold them accountable. I have tried to get them to acknowledge even a little part of our childhood but become get raging mad. It's like they want to delete a massive part of us. I want the the world to know what they did and I want them to know they cannot delete my experiences. They pretend none of it happened.

What sort of salary would you consider super rich? My DSs fees are just over £1k a month, that is equivalent of a less than average mortgage where we live, we can only send him to private school due to DH losing his mum tragically young so we no longer have a mortgage. I think you have a weird view of super rich.

I think you would be surprised at some of the salaries people have with their kids at private school. Certainly not super rich, decent earners perhaps though.

It doesnt really matter so much what income is, but what disposable income is. Obviously having 12k a year to throw at private education is beyond the wildest dreams of most people. Definitely super rich!

Following on from my previous post, it is a mistake to underestimate the importance of historical land and land ownership.

There is a large hill near my rural town and I was sitting up there one day, enjoying the view and picking out landmarks, when it dawned on me that almost the entire landscape that I could see was owned by one of three large local estates or the National Trust. The houses and gardens owned by average people, even those in expensive houses, were in total just a pocket handkerchief compared to the size of the estates. But it’s not the extent of the land, it’s what you can do with it.

Estate 1 - now owned by a multi-millionaire. Entirely private and no business use made of the land, apart from perhaps some tenant farmers.

Estate 2 - passed down from original owners to another family, in default of heirs. Valuable businesses on the land including farming, brewing and tourism.

Estate 3 - still with the original owners, inherited from centuries back! Valuable businesses on the land including farming, retail, a restaurant and a brewery.

While of course it takes skill and dedication to create successful rural businesses, any business is easier to setup if you already have the freehold land. You are only really limited by your own capabilities and what planners will allow. The income generated from land can sustain the owner throughout their life. Their children already have jobs, if they want them. The owner has security forever.

The system of land inheritance builds wealth, security and advantage far beyond the realm of what an average person can achieve in their lifetime.

Most people who have a mortgage will be spending at least that though, we were unlucky enough to lose a parent too soon so paid the house off and used the mortgage money for private school. It's still not super rich and is actually less than the mortgage would be.

I haven't said we are not privileged but we are not super rich.

@AnonyLonnymouse isnt it the case that most countries in the developed world which have a significant agricultural base have large tracts of land owned by individual landowners or corporations? Most farms aren’t economic unless they have significant land holdings.

I accept that is quite probably the case.

But, what I would point out is that land ownership in the UK is either a hangover from the feudal system or resulting from the enclosure of common land - quite literally taking it from the poorest people.

Estates 2 was basically gifted by the monarch to the original owner!

Not necessarily.

After independence (and even before) Irish small farmers won the right to ownership of the land they farmed. My ancestors bought their land (back) from the local landlord family they had formerly paid rent to.

The Land Commission was tasked with the breaking up of large estate assets, with small farms awarded to the farmers who had lived there with the shadow of eviction hanging over them for generations.

There has been a good deal of consolidation of farms since the 1940s but the average farm is just over 32 hectares. Dairy farmers tend to belong to farmers' cooperatives which started small and are now massive enterprises, global in their reach.

Part of the British post-war success was down to the demolition of Germany and most of the rest of the industrialised parts of western Europe, meaning Europe couldn't produce the goods it needed.

The US economy was the real post-war winner both in the short term and long term, and part of what created the modern economic behemoth that is the US was the GI Bill under which returned servicemen and women (and their children) were able to attend university.

No such forward thinking policy was created in the UK, and so a generation returned from war to the shop floors with no possibility of bettering themselves apart from joining unions and engaging in the old dynamics that had characterised labour-capital relations in the UK from the 19th century.

Third level education remained out of reach for most, despite the development of polytechnics and the introduction of comprehensives. The idea that the economy might need to grow, to compete, and develop in different directions - and education was the key to all of that - didn't seem to have crossed the mind of planners. The only way the vast majority of working class Britons could ultimately establish wealth was by buying their council houses.

TL:DR The post-war years were years of wasted opportunity and failure to see the way the wind was blowing. It was a massive failure with far-reaching consequences. By the time the UK joined the EEC it had iirc nine out of ten of western Europe's most deprived regions.

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The last sentence there illustrates the fundamentally flawed "finite amount of pie/ cake" theory that bedevils the British understanding of how an economy works.