'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 don't think it's as complicated as Britons make it sound. In every country there is implicitly "more" to class than money - even in America, the great capitalist machine, connections count nearly as much as how much money you have.

If you have savings, above a very modest security net, £6000 for uc, it seems pretty fair that you should expect to use some of that to soften any loss of income while finding a new job.

I approve of the state helping people out in hard times for a time limited period. I was once married to an American, who lost his job. He had 12 months to get another. After 12 months, nothing. Creep back to your family for help and start again.

The super rich have bought resources and now sell them on subscription, so cancel subscriptions. Buy the DVD or the CD for $1 and play it forever.

It's pretty much impossible to be part of the Aristocracy unless you marry into it or receive a title from the monarch, that's quite the barrier compared to the U.S. I would imagine.

Class rigidity is nothing special (nor something to be celebrated). Many pre-modern societies had classes or castes that tried to be hereditary. It's awful. Thankfully, no matter how much we romanticise the aristocracy, elite status in Britain is no longer exclusively tied to noble blood.

I don't think you know what "conspiracy theory" means 🤔

You're kinda outta date. There was a brief period in our civilisation where social mobility actually did exist, feudalism was majorly disrupted and a middle class rose up and demanded democratisation. That era of history is now over, it was a brief anomaly and we are returning to feudalism.

A new set of nobles have been established and we live in an "inheritocracy" (see Dr Eliza Filby) bloodlines are back

It’s ludicrous to suggest that class wouldn’t exist if people would just stop ‘labelling’ themselves.

A sex worker with a broad regional accent and university educated businessman with a cut-glass accent and Savile Row suit are giving evidence in court. Which one will be believed if their accounts contradict each other?

Classism is a thing. Denying that fact won’t change that. It’s only middle-class people who are privileged enough to claim it means nothing.

In today’s world, I wouldn’t be surprised if the university-educated businessman was a sex worker (Savile Row suit paid for by a client).

I Don't think anyone is celebrating it - I get it, the poor will only eat cake for so long but the idea that it no longer exists is pure fantasy, the United Kingdom is just that- a Kingdom, with the landowning classes mainly being the Aristocracy, a tiny percentage of people own 30% of the land and this is only due to an accident of birth or via marriage which arguably makes it a pretty exclusive class.

Why is it better to replace the Aristocracy with the wealthy elite, there is nothing special about them either!

It’s not just the super rich who are the asset owning class though. 1 in 6 baby boomers own more than one home. There is huge generational inequality.

One in 6 baby boomers own more than one home? Do they bollocks! 😂

Evidence please....because I think this is total tosh.

I'm 62, most of my friends and siblings are boomers, and only one owns a second property.

It must be really for you. Thoughts and prayers.

I just don't agree with it being as small as £6k. Now that ESA has stopped and the disabled moved to UC, £6k isn't necessarily enough for a decent car. In the case of my full time working, LP DD. She could never save a house deposit. She works for the NHS. It would make more sense for her to own her own home, than rent, for herself and society.

But there is no difference in those groups apart from effort, education and a big dollop of luck.

The trouble with that is £6k isn't much. I had to pay more than that to replace the roof on my house two years ago. It took me years to save up.

So just before it was replaced, was I affluent with a leaky roof, and after it was fixed, I was poor with a watertight roof ?

In reality I am neither affluent nor poor, but just scraping by while responsibly saving for essential repairs.

I think "owning class" is too simplistic. In most cases it's not an aristocracy.The richest people (men) of our era had ambition and drive to innovate and make all our lives better (debatable maybe but most people like Google search and goods delivered cheaply to their doors and silicon chips in their devices).
I don't like a lot of these billionaire ego boys but they employ millions of people and created trilions in wealth for families of all stripes who own their stock.
Maybe people in the UK should be asking instead why they don't participate in wealth creation such as by investing in stocks, like aspirational Americans do. (8% vs around 45% of personal wealth in stock.) It's not wealth held in a vault, it's available to all albeit it comes with risks.

In the UK it 'is' the Aristocracy that own 30% of land, why pretend otherwise, what's your agenda? The rest of your post about becoming more like the Americans doesn't make sense as we live in more of a feudal leasehold system than we do in the 'American Dream'.

I don’t understand the obsession with land ownership. So what if the aristocracy still own a lot of land? They are fools. If they had sold it a generation ago and invested in the stock market like American rich people do, they would be much better off and able to maintain their big houses instead of having to open them to to paying visitors just to replace the roof.

How many hereditary aristocrats are in government? How many run the biggest businesses? How many have any sort of meaningful power? Almost none. With the exception of a few families - notably the Grosvenors, already mentioned - they are irrelevant.

If you’re concerned about inequality in Britain then focusing on titled aristocrats is a distraction.

My point is that people who are in the middle class have a nicer lifestyle than people in the working class. That is a genuine difference.

You're just describing how people END UP in the middle class, which is right but I don't see how that negates the point?

Chances are that a typical doctor has a nicer house, nicer holidays, and fewer money worries than a typical nursery school assistant. That doesn't make the doctor a better person, and it might well be because the doctor had education opportunities to get them into being a doctor in the first place - but it's different, and it's a genuine difference, and Gary Stevenson pretending that everyone who works is somehow in the same boat is false.

No, land ownership holds no fortune or control over property value or developments at all does it!

The only redeeming thing about the situation is that the American way motivated purely by money has not been contemplated!