Good Morning and Lil Owen

[SamphirethePogoingStickerist]

Is he on every day? I've only never read him before. But OMG is he so very confident that he is right in every bloody subject under the sun?

Yammering, finger pointing, "I'm a plastic Northerner, betrayed my working class roots - so my opinion is more valuable", over talking, raising his voice to talk over the female guest, Ella?

She was quite good, little eye rolls and at one point said something about idiots accompanied by a very slight hand movement in his direction 🙂

But mostly, even when only listening, nor realising who he was, I found him really objectionable.

Sorry, just musing. Second car ownership is not necessarily a feminist issue. But OJ talks over, shouts down a woman on any random subject probably is!

OMG @Cardboardsnoreboard I suppose I should have guessed!

I have aunts who used to work as 'domestics' in one of the private boarding schools in Cheadle Hulme in the 70s/80s. They were usually reminded of 'their place' on a daily basis. twice before breakfast! It has long been one of those very Us and Them places!

@SamphirethePogoingStickerist
Yep I swear that's the truth ! Not the nicest of folk tbh .
That sounds awful re your aunts. It's the lack of opportunity and unfilled potential that makes me sad. My maw was a sewing machinist in a factory and I remember when we got sewing at school and I did something my maw had taught me ,the snotty schoolteacher asked what she did and I told her . And she dismissed my maw's skills as nothing and not a proper seamstress because she was a factory worker. My mum and aunts were so sharp and dead good at maths - if they had had the chances...
Owen is one of these fair to middling middle class weans who would not have done anywhere near as well if he had come from a council estate. I tell my children that they have to work twice as hard as the posh weans as we don't have people who can put a good word in for us etc

Aye! I grew up in council housing, working class background - Nana worked the biscuit line at Jabobs! Nobody had much. Actually Mums's dad had aspirations after the war but few opportunities.

DH was much the same, but more Southerly.

Now, because we were brought up to do more, be better etc, we are, as adults, no longer working class, I suppose. In our heads we are. We grew up piss poor. It was only as adults that we put ourselves through University. I do sometimes wonder what we would have been had we been 2nd generation MC.

I'm willing to bet my roots are are working class than LOJ's. Of DD's four grandparents one was down a mine at 15, two were brought up in poverty by single working mums, the other two had pretty extreme violence in the home as children, they all lived in mine and mill towns and no one had been to university in the whole family.

But then two did go to university, moved, and we are firmly middle class. Which is how it works. And you'd expect a class expert like him to know that, wouldn't you? Intergenerational mobility was invented before him.

Intergenerational mobility was invented before him.

God yes!

From subsistence living in Scotland, fishwives in Wales, Flatboatmen and women, lots of single parents, lots of family tales of violence, workhouses etc, all culminating, for me, in dock, factory and service working GPs on both sides. How the hell my DPs got their act together as they did I will never know - they are the only ones in their generation to have moved on, out, away. And DF was one of 11!

Which is part of why I am still working my way through how LOJ used his mealy mouthed words as he did. It's bloody insulting!

He doesn't HAVE working class origins to betray.

What good would a 'broody' lesbian be to LOJ - surely a broody woman would want to keep her baby?

Not that it matters a fuck to him. Although it's nice to get a glimpse of his understanding of facts, and that women are the ones with the wombs.

It's how he gains value. Not through integrity, but through creating a strong image and people buy into it!

60% of people think of themselves as working class.

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jun/29/most-brits-regard-themselves-as-working-class-survey-finds

"Although just 25% of people now work in routine and manual occupations, 60% of Britons regard themselves as working class, a phenomenon described as a “working class of the mind” that has withstood dramatic changes in the labour market.
Although politicians have on occasion declared that “we are all middle class now” the survey shows that Britons have clung to working-class values even when they have moved up in the income scale. Nearly half of people in managerial and professional occupations identify as working class."

Yes, it's rotten and unfair. I say that as a vaguely middle class person, but I've worked in schools all over Glasgow and the disparity is both heartbreaking and fucking infuriating.

It's not even just the connections; its the confidence. A thousand tiny, invisible cuts, daily, from birth. But nobody talks about class anymore.

Surrogate!

No-one, and I mean no-one, in the working class communities I grew up in had a parent who had gone to university in the 70s. In fact, it was very unusual to have a parent that had stayed on at school to do A levels because working class households generally needed the extra wage from 16 onwards throughout the 60s and 70s.

Definitely know of working class people who went to Uni in the 1970s. Grammar Schools fed them in and then comprehensive education started to really allow WC children to go to uni, though real massification of HE didn't start until the 1980s and women didn't start going in larger numbers until then either.

That said, he's not working class. My parents definitely didn't go to uni, had no qualifications and manual jobs. I'm not working class.

Class is such a minefield. I went to a direct grant school in the 1970s. DG schools were independent, fee-paying secondary schools which took a fairly large number of pupils from state primary schools on full academic scholarships, awarded for coming high enough in the entrance exam (previously excellent 11+ result before 11+ was abolished). The fees were paid by the local Council/central government out of taxes/rates. At my school I believe it may have been as high as a quarter of the intake. Other pupils who had attended state primaries were accepted if they did well enough in the entrance exam and given means-tested places - so parents on low incomes would pay next to nothing, and there were discounts for siblings. In spite of this, I would say there were next to no working class girls in my school. Lower middle class, yes, lots of us, so you could say we were moving up the scale, but not from outright poverty. I also know that some girls at the school who did come from very low income households found the experience difficult and didn't achieve their potential in the way they might have done in a more socially mixed state school. There were a lot of shibboleths to fall foul of - they lacked cultural capital, to use a more recent term.

This is interesting and I see this in the manufacturing culture I work within, with people who are earning at least £40,000 a year talking about being working class. Yet their cars and lifestyles are very much middle class but they seem to feel ashamed of being middle class.
Yes they do manual jobs but these are highly trained people with specialist niche skills who are paid accordingly.

I'm perfectly happy to say that I'm middle class thanks to the opportunities that post war Britian offered my grandparents, my GF was a barrow boy, my GM was in service at 14, they are also still helping with my children's chances as well as they set up a trust when they bought some farm land in what is now a nice town just outside London. I don't think anyone should be ashamed of who they are none of us can change the circumstances of our birth.

I see at lot of the OJ types in the southern towns around me, always talking over people and virtue signalling.

I know I posted this on the last OJ thread but it's just gold.
Nimco Ali and Owen Jones from 2019.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/election-2019-50728428

OJ: Can I explain the stresses that poverty did put on the lives that I saw of my friends growing up…
NA: You saw it, I lived it. And I still see it every day, so the whole point to you is like token and anecdotal…

Bit later:

NA: If I was 7 years old again today, and I was living in the conditions which you describe as ‘you knew friends of’ but I knew and I lived myself, would I…
OJ: I’m talking about the people I grew up with, I’m talking about my community, that’s what I’m talking about.
NA: No, no, but you grew up with them, I was them.

Nimco nails it. From about 6min 45.

It wasn't common , but it certainly wasn't unknown. I grew up in industrial east Lancashire where I went to secondary school in the late 50s and early 60s. My father was a charge-hand in a paper mill and my mother was a school dinner lady and eventually a school cook. Neither of them had even had secondary education, both having left elementary school at the age of 14. I was the eldest of 4 sisters, all of whom went to the local grammar school and on to university between 1965 and 1980. We achieved that because our parents were passionate about education, having had so little of it themselves and were willing to make huge sacrifices to enable their clever girls to go as far as they were able, in my case to Oxford in 1965. I must have been the only Oxford undergraduate whose home still had an outside lavatory. Of course our university education and subsequent careers mean that my sisters and I are indubitably middle-class, but our origins certainly weren't.

My mum went to uni in the 70s from a working class background. Although this only happened because my gran really pushed for this when it wasn't necessarily usual amongst my mums friends. Gran was definitely in the aspirational w/c bracket probably best described by the brilliant Terry Pratchett here:

"When you got right down to the bottom of the ladder the rungs were very close together and, oh my, weren’t the women careful about them. In their own way, they were as haughty as any duchess. You might not have much, but you could have Standards."

She grew up in terrible poverty as did my other gran. Both had to live with their grandparents for a while as children in the 30s as a child as their parents couldn't afford them/to look after them while they worked. All my grandparents left school at 14 and got jobs in trades/farms/shops.

However after the war was a transformational time and my baby boomer parents had the opportunity of grammar school. My mum got a uni place, my dad failed his a levels but got as a clerk in a bank and ended up in a very senior position. This is not an unusual background. The baby boomer generation probably experienced the greatest social mobility in the UK since the industrial revolution.

I had a solidly middle class upbringing and I would never presume to lay claim to anything else. I may have working class roots but my childhood was a million miles away from that of my grandparents. I can't believe the staggering arrogance of claiming that having a couple of wc grandparents means you can be such an authority on wc culture that you can write a book called Chavs.

Dp grew up in a nice part of Stockport (probably not as nice as OJs). It's not exactly Moss Side! Bramhall where OJ went to school is a positively bougie suburb with loads of big detached houses popular with footballers.

Everybody hates a tourist

I think some of it as well is who people end up surrounding themselves with like if you go to Oxbridge and meet people whos parents are massively wealthy then I can imagine relative to that one could feel a bit deprived.

I do think some people think working class means anyone whos parents had a job. A friend of mine whos Mum was a nurse and Dad was a civil servant recently described herself as growing up working class.

My Dad grew up working class left school at 13 but ended up solidly middle class although it took him a lot longer than those who went the university route. I would never describe myself as working class because I know what life was like for him as a child and it wasn't the same for me

I think some of it as well is who people end up surrounding themselves with like if you go to Oxbridge and meet people whos parents are massively wealthy then I can imagine relative to that one could feel a bit deprived.

I do see how one might feel that way but TYOJ's parents and grandparents were all pretty comfortable. He was always destined for uni and, even at Oxbridge, I don't think he'd have stuck out that much.

I think it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to describe yourself as working class with his background.