What makes you middle class?

[Singlemum90]

So a comment from my mother a few years ago has stuck with me ever since then really. When I was no longer a single mum, and found myself a little less skint, she said 'oh it's so good now you're just a nice middle class mum, I'm so proud of you'

Aside from her clearly looking down at me before this, and deciding class was what defined how she felt about me- I have often wondered what made her decide I was middle class at this point.

How do you define it? (I feel it's very subjective) Is it what family you are born into? Your income?(And what income makes the 'classes'? Is it a specific job type? The way you stick your finger out when you drink tea?
Or is it just a shitty way to divide people and how they feel about themselves?

☺️

Quite. PP has clearly never had to spend a captive lunch listening to my UMC MIL’s strong views on why the Quakers are wrong, how Matisse is overrated, why the Germans cope so badly with rain and the failings of the Hanseatic League.

In an ideal world, that would be true. Unfortunately, I know many MC people who are the opposite. Being confident doesn't mean you are charming and thoughtful. You can also be a bit of an arrogant/boring fecker.

These threads always put me in mind of the phrase money shouts, wealth whispers. (particularly on the subject of designer branding)

I think class is largely based on what you were born into and raised within.
I dont think it's particularly easy to change.

As with so many of these anecdotes from across the class divide, I think there’s definitely the burden of representation at play!

the failings of the Hanseatic League

Has she been mulling these over for the past 500 years?

😆 Given we’ve had lunches that have lasted half a century, I’d say much longer.

I think that's a bit rigid.

If there were no class mobility in this country, then we would be a caste-based society. I agree that class isn't determined by income alone, but it's unrealistic to think that one who can afford a brand new Porsche (not that I'd recommend it as an investment) and a four-bedroom detached house in a pleasant suburb is beneath another who is struggling from paycheck to paycheck but was raised in a more "cultured" family. Status is precarious for all but those at the very top of society who are insulated by connections and inherited wealth. For the rest of us, the differences aren't so absolute as we like to believe, and there is definitely such a thing as downward mobility.

Middle Class...olive oil, quinoa, watercolour painting, thank-you letters, membership of RHS, sailing, napkins,Landmark Trust, NT volunteer, last night at the proms, 4711, Birkos, flower arrangements from own garden, omlette, sourdough, porridge, vegetable soup, white pumps & floral dress, walking, gap year, playing cello, DB surname, Subaru Estate, hand thrown pottery crockery, Maldon Salt, shoe polish, hiking boots, reading books, architect, vet, Remainer...

Almost everyone is middle class now. Very few people have working class jobs and the landed gentry with a lot of fulltime staff have almost entirely vanished. Within the middle class there is everything from minimum wage to executive pay, but they are just different wealth brackets. Sometimes they live in broadly identical terraced houses, but one is in a cheap corner of the country and one an expensive area.

Why would you imagine ‘very few people have working-class jobs’? What class do you imagine do the majority of low-paid care work, cleaning, retail, hospitality/catering/barwork, seasonal agricultural work, zero hour contracts doing stuff like Deliveroo, factory production line work, pick and packer in warehouses etc?

I didn’t say those jobs don’t exist. It’s simply that the term working class dates from an era when we had a more stratified society in which half the population were servants and many people were coal miners, farm labourers and factory workers from families that had done those jobs for generations and communities just like them. These days the variety of life paths is much greater. Educational attainment is much higher and career choices exist in a way that they didn’t in the past. More people go into white plat jobs, farm labour has mostly been mechanised and we have exported most of our manufacturing and mining overseas or made it high tech.

That should read white collar jobs

And yet despite the higher educational attainment and greater diversity of life paths we still have a working class.

My husband and his late wife were working class but their children are middle class, with tennis and riding lessons and both parents being university graduates.

By dint of my dad being a lecturer at a college of further education, I could be considered middle class but on the other hand, my mother was a nursing auxiliary and/or factory worker for much of her life

Try reading. I didn’t say no working class people exist, but that most people are middle class. Those jobs are not all inherently working class jobs and are not always done for someone’s entire career. They are simply low paid jobs. Income and class are not the same thing. The term working class dates from a very specific time in our history and refers to very specific communities. Before WW1 they made up the vast majority of the population (up to 80%) were working class.

I went to a talk once where the speaker had a great self-test:
If you use cloth napkins at mealtimes, you're upper middle class or above, disposable serviettes and you're lower middle class, and if you wipe your mouth on your sleeve you're working class.

I wouldn't call that a great test. I'd think that person was a bit of a twat to be honest.

Thought he was an Aston Villa fan .......

I think the working-class population has remained broadly the same. It's just that there are no longer many manufacturing jobs, so the new working-class is sat behind a desk rather than a factory assembly line.

We’ve got a driver. What happens then?

Loads of books, placing huge importance on education, not having a TV in the kitchen(!), not having plastic surgery. Not many people are middle class. Most are working class.

Earning over £250k a year. Not giving a toss what kind of car your neighbour has. Not having neighbours!

True, but they are also much more highly educated than in the past. Particularly in the 50s and 60s the grammar schools created huge social mobility, with many children from poor backgrounds succeeding in passing the 11+ and going to highly regarded universities (something that was unthinkable before the war). There was a huge increase in home ownership, which largely benefitted the working classes who had never owned property before.

Sadly a lot of that is reversing, with people becoming disenfranchised. Blair’s drive to get half the population to university increased graduate numbers, but reduced funding available for brilliant students from poorer backgrounds ( free university education and the grant scheme was replaced university fees and loans with compound interest). It was also supported by a corresponding increase in graduate jobs. Only about a quarter of jobs require / strongly prefer university graduates. Consequently, we have a large Johore if young adults with university debt in the tens of thousands, but without a career and salary commensurate with it. These people are not ‘working class’ in the traditional sense, but they face barriers to the middle class lifestyle that became far more widespread in the second half of the 20th century.

NB a few types - it was not supported by a corresponding increase in graduate jobs.