'Middle class' is a con

[NapsForAll]

Concept taken from Gary Stevenson:

There are only two classes. The 'owning class' and the 'working class'.

'Owning class' primarily get all their money from investments and assets, and properties and land. They don't have to work, and they have so much wealth that their money makes money. They don't get taxed on that huge huge amount of money. The UK has 156 billionaires and 45,000 people that have more than 100 million.

The working class is everyone else - the rest of us. Yes there are spectrums within it, but we are ALL people who have to work to get money, and if we don't work, we can't live.

AIBU to say that the term middle class has been invented to sow division, and we are being ROYALLY played by identifying as middle class? It would make more of a difference to our lives and society if we focused on wealth taxes, not who claims child allowance or disability support.

YABU - no, smaller class divides are part of British politics
YANBU - yeh we are literally owned by the rich people in our society. Let's all start calling for a wealth tax.

I disagree slightly, I don't think it is about assets but about your family roots and background and then some people can elevate themselves but still be working class at heart. My mother considers herself working class but has a mortgage etc.. and gave me a "middle class life" but my grandparents have cockney accents. I don't think it's possible to put everyone into a box.

This is just basic Communist theory. The Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat https://www.simplypsychology.org/bourgeoisie-proletariat.html

Marx said owning the means to make capital robbed man of price in his work and that was a major source of unhappiness.

Being working class doesn't mean you can't start a business in 2025. Online has give people more opportunities for free education and no or low start ups than ever before.

It's not easy but in my experience no one thinks their life is. Our struggles just differ.

So the question is what will you do?

The simpler way is to just not buy into any class system as they're all just fabrications based on the ideals of some people. Its all absolute bullshit and I've no idea why so many people are so obsessed with giving themselves a class label at all as it determines precisely nothing about your values as an individual or to society.

This.

OP, why don't you get on with trying to improve your life if you are so unhappy with how it is now.

I was born 5th of 6 in a FSM family. Things were tight to say the least. I've worked since I was 13 and now have a nice life, own home, reasonable standard of living, financially secure, time to volunteer. I haven't given the 'unfairness of the rich' a moment's thought.

Doing something practical gives much better results than whinging.

The very very wealthy are a tiny proportion of the population, to divide us up into them v everyone else is a bit ridiculous. Of course there is a middle class, those who own some land and wealth but not enough to give up work 🙄

That's not true though.Plenty of WC people own their own homes and earn a good living.

It feels like MN is drowning in divide-and-conquer tactics at the moment.

Thread after thread all sowing division and hate, in all directions.

Who hates who?

I think society is just divided. It doesn’t mean anyone is ‘hating’ just that are polarised in terms of the general consensus.

This childish demand that everyone should get along and be kind like primary school children is ridiculous.

I'm in a snarky, sarcastic mood today, so bear with me.
People seem to dislike high earners, yet they have no problem expecting them to pay for whatever they want. They also tend to feel entitled to the benefits without putting in the same effort to achieve the status of high earners. People dislike the wealthy but still expect them to cover all expenses, essentially avoiding the hassle that others don't want to deal with themselves.
Ah, the classic “two classes” argument — reheated from Gary Stevenson’s leftovers and served with a side of doomscrolling. I get it. Some people have wealth so vast it makes the rest of us look like we’re playing Monopoly with IOUs. The owning class is real, and yes, the tax system often treats them like fragile Victorian children who can’t handle the shock of accountability.
The middle class isn’t a scam—it’s just complex. Some people have education and cultural capital but no money, while others earn high incomes but lack financial security. Some can afford private schools and Peloton memberships, while others are still drowning in student loans and pretending to know about wine.
Can we please let go of the notion that “middle class” was cooked up in some secret government lab to divide us like Hogwarts houses? It’s not Squid Game—it’s just social mobility, nuance, and a very British obsession with whether your sofa is from John Lewis or DFS.
By all means, let’s discuss corporate loopholes, and billionaires treating taxes like optional Spotify ads. But maybe without reducing all working lives into one big, angry blob.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make tea, overpay on council tax, and debate whether my £14 M&S wine makes me “middle class” or just perpetually exhausted with taste.

This is meant to be lighthearted, before I start:

I've never really thought about where I am class wise apart from a vague feeling of being upper working middle just ordinary really, all bets being off because I live abroad and fall into the funny foreigner category anyway, if anybody really cared...

...until I did a course a few years ago which was basically to get myself legally approved as a childminder because (quite rightly) you can't just earn extra cash looking after other people's children without some kind of vetting process these days. It was a very mixed course. For some it was the first module in a social work diploma, or working in schools as a TA, you know the sort of thing.

Thankfully my tutor put me right as to where I fitted in:

I was an, "Isolated Marginal."

Perhaps wrongly, I took slight offence to this.
"I don't think I am. I've lived in this small town for more than twenty years. I worked for the family owned bus company for ten of them. In fact, I've always worked for local family owned businesses. I have friends! Lots of people know me by my first name wherever I go...I have my own flat...I've babysat and nannied for..."

Obviously, I didn't say all this to her but I was thinking it.

It was nothing personal. Everybody in our class was given a slightly off social score, as it were.

I was sorely tempted to ask the tutor where she thought she fitted in but didn't. Another student who was a more bold than I was did though. No doubt smarting from being called in an oblique way, "Marseille white trash." The tutor didn't really answer but muttered something about trades unions.

I still won't buy dear tutor's family label wines from their vineyards. Only because they are a bit too sweet for my uneducated palate.

I couldn't give a toss about tutor's family background and I've met plenty of lovely people from all walks of life but really!

"Isolated Marginal!"

Congratulations...you have won the Internet today! Lets be friends, regardless of what "class" we fall into.

pours M&S Wine into poundland wine glass and sips with delight

P.S you are probably NOT middle class because you call dinner "tea" x

I've no idea who Gary Stephenson is but he's wrong to think people who dont work don't pay tax on savings, property etc.

Applause for @ThisTicklishFatball ! The French do le snob quite as well as les Anglais.

Apologies... the applause and comment should have been directed to the @Redheadedstepchild !

I work with very wealthy people.
It is a case of haves & have-nots.

There are degrees though, I agree.
I’m lucky to not be poor, for sure.

Some will sell their soul to join up.
I’ve seen a lot of unhappy rich folk.

If middle class is a 'con' 'invented to sow division' it happened a ruddy long time ago

I wonder how Stevenson defines class. He seems to be talking more about financial status than social class. More fool anyone who identifies as and buys into any class.

May be check where there are more millionaires each year and class background. A clue obviously not in the U.K. where everyone who is not very wealthy or very poor don’t contributed much in terms of taxes. We in the middle have not much room to create wealth. It gets worse and worse each year. All goes in bills and taxes. However, many do not care about it because they are either prop up by the government or very wealthy.

Agreed; there is just as much difference between these two categories of people as there are between the QC/Consultant and the landed gentry.

The culture capital of the children of all three of these groups would be wildly different and it seems absurd to bucket any two of the groups into the same bucket.

Both the QC and the refuse collector work for their income, but the QC has studied hard to hoist in a vast body of the law, and the bin collector just hoists vast bin bags into the truck. Both are necessary to a functioning society, but the bin emptier probably took four hours to train, and the QC may have spent 4000 hours reading.

It's alright. One of these days I'm going to write a comedy sketch about that silly course and my tutor.

We all had to sit there whilst she drew pictures of religious buildings on a whiteboard.

"What is this?"

(Rectangle with triangle on top and cross in the middle.)

"It is a church. It is for Christians." We all chanted in unison.

Another rectangle with a dome on top and a crescent.

"It is a mosque. It is for Muslims." we all sang again like six year olds.

At this point, she lost her way and couldn't decide what a synagogue looked like or whether or not the Star of David was the proper symbol so just bluffed it and said,

"Some people are Jewish."

Then, like an idiot, I opened my my mouth to say, "There are also Hindu and Sikh and not maybe very many but Buddhist people and...I know Vietnamese and..."

"DOES NOT EXIST IN FRANCE. WE ARE ALL LAIC."

At this point, the very moderate Muslim woman who had previously been asked by dear tutor, "What would happen if your children ate sweets with pig gelatin offered by friends at school?" and had replied very meekly, "It doesn't really matter. Things happen."

Well, she kind of lost it and said, "You wear a lot of bracelets." Kind of leaving the implication hanging in the air.

Dear tutor believed in crystal healing and had every kind of rock either up her arms or round her neck.

It was just comedy really. You couldn't enter into a debate about the rights and wrongs of the French constitution or the division of church and state because she was just a daft banana.

She gave up tutoring halfway through our three month course and went on to doing some kind of, "Your ancestors are all to blame" private therapy. Not exactly past life regression but close.

We all just sat there pretending to redo our CVs on Canva for the last few weeks overseen by somebody else.

There's not much friction between the successful tradesperson and the gentry. I slip across a lot of social barriers and like or dislike people for exactly the same reasons as everyone else. Posh folk are much more polite about expressing their sentiments but share information in the same way that I ask my tradie circle whether x pays promptly or is difficult to work for.

No competent tradesperson takes on a new customer for a big job without a reference from someone they know and trust who says they were paid.

After 25 years in the same house, we plan to move. With the sale, IF I like the buyer, I will pass on my file on the trusted trades who have done a good job looking after the house. The chimney sweep, who will phone in September, and have you sorted before it gets cold. I will give the purchaser the names of my trusted tree surgeon, electricians, plumbers, central heating engineers, the lady who cleans ovens, even my brilliant odd job guy. People who have the skill and knowhow to do jobs well that I can't.

Respect this file. It's But if you think none of that money needs spending, or that you can bargain with these people, you will pay twice.

It may be bullshit to you but class bias exists and if you’re disadvantaged by it, people saying it’s ’all bullshit’ is actually quite painful.

And if you are horrible and stuck up but willing to pay for the house, then I will sell it, but without the useful file.

YABU working class relates to a specific group. Your classification is too broad. Working class isn’t just about working as such. It’s a community, a mentality, an identity.
YANBU for highlighted the bollocks that is the rich!

Who said that? I've never heard anybody say that if you work hard enough you can be rich - genuinely asking where you heard someone say that?