According to Angela Rayner 'Working class people do not want "handouts" but support to find jobs.'

Galaxy

Anyone who is pretending that class doesn't exist should follow my daily journey from one side of the city to the other, visiting schools in the various different areas of the city. It is like moving from one country to another the differences are so great.

That is not class, it is money.

In fact, nearly everything said in most of the posts about are about differences in the amount of money people have.

MOnica I think you said you were brought up in a military
family? if so you will witnessed the most awful class barriers , I lived in a barrack town , three camps nearby , yes class ?

It isn’t only money Monica. Money is an important influence but there’s more
Education is so important. Some parents are so impoverished despite being financially secure

Galaxy

Anyone who is pretending that class doesn't exist should follow my daily journey from one side of the city to the other, visiting schools in the various different areas of the city. It is like moving from one country to another the differences are so great.

Yes, this.

I agree the "A to E" classification system is well out of date but still used.

M0nica

In fact, nearly everything said in most of the posts about are about differences in the amount of money people have.

Family background, education, social circle and experiences are key, money is secondary in the class structure these days. People make very different choices in life determined by their background and values.

I would include politics and views on a variety of society's issues. It's why the 'elite' class get blindsided by events such as the Brexit vote.

Galaxy

I would include politics and views on a variety of society's issues. It's why the 'elite' class get blindsided by events such as the Brexit vote.

I doubt many of the higher echelons of society voted to remain in Europe Galaxy?

Sorry when I say the 'elite' class I generally mean the vocal middle class, who are ever present in the universities, the media, politics, and whose views rarely reflect the views of the 'ordinary' people. The two groups struggle to understand the others perspective. So when I say elites I don't really mean the Boris Johnsons of this world.

Casdon

M0nica

In fact, nearly everything said in most of the posts about are about differences in the amount of money people have.

Family background, education, social circle and experiences are key, money is secondary in the class structure these days. People make very different choices in life determined by their background and values.

Agreed.

IMO background, values, morals inform all choices.

I agree that we are all defined by our background, and there’s a tendency to view others as alien - I don’t think though that that is restricted to those you describe as the ‘vocal middle class’.

But all backgrounds mix these days and share much in common. In almost all the things I do, the people I am mixing with come from all kinds of different backgrounds, rich and poor, joined by a common interest.

We went to a local smart restaurant recently for our wedding anniversary and were followed into the car park by a chauffeur driven Rolls Royce. The people who got out of it were stereotypical East End. Cockney accents, loud, one elderly lady was wearing crocs. No one took any notice. They were obviously local and regulars at the restaurant.

On our village history society, the local postman has done more extensive research into the village history than anyone else and written several articles on it. I have also been on the committee of a local environmental group with a peer of the realm. Lord X, he had no great estate and had always had to earn his own living, even though he had been to one of the great public schools.

Casdon You have it the wrong way round. It is how much money people have that governs their education and social circle. As for family background, when I look round the people in my social circle i see a wide cariety of backgrounds. My background lies in the Irish emigrants that came to this country during the famine or enlisted in the army, One of my grandfathers was a dock worker. Other friends come from several generations of middle class professionals. DH's father worked on the assembly line in a car factory.

I went to see my GP today. It was someone I hadn't seen before. He stood up when I came in, a big shambling man dressed in blue scrubs much like a road worker, he had long dreadlocks, an accent that was pure estuary, the kindest face and I felt very comfortable with him. Like me he is of immigrant stock, although whether his is Africa or the Caribbean I am not sure, but, like me, his family have been British for multiple generations. Anyone care to slot him into a class? Was he privately educated or made good from an inner city school? Is his father a doctor or a bus driver or anything else. Does it matter?

Class is dead, I do not understand all the nostalgia for it.

But your post is dripping with class consciousness .

Dressed like a road worker, middle class professionals, estuary accents, 'made good' - all of those phrases are incredibly class-based.

I don't think anyone has spoken of class in nostalgic terms - people are just saying that it exists, as your post shows, I'm afraid.

I don't think that people are saying that it is not possible to move through the class system, my grandparents were working class, I am middle class. For the times my grandparents weren't too badly off financially, this did not alter their class.

Well both sets of my grandparents were extremely wealthy and lived in what these days would be described as ‘ posh’ houses. They both worked extremely hard all the time and worked up from more or less nothing because they were innovators. Class didn’t enter into it. I think things have deteriorated by the sound of it. I should add that my great grandfather who was the primary inventor left school at age 8 so he put his head down and work,work, worked. We never had any of their money I should add, and we did not expect to, either. Everyone carves out their lot in life, don’t give me stuff about ‘ disadvantage’ - we get to choose.

Doodledog

But your post is dripping with class consciousness .

Dressed like a road worker, middle class professionals, estuary accents, 'made good' - all of those phrases are incredibly class-based.

I don't think anyone has spoken of class in nostalgic terms - people are just saying that it exists, as your post shows, I'm afraid.

Precisely, and that is why I used those descriptions, to show just how inappropriate they are. You cannot judge what people are or do or where they appear on some mythical class scale. If that was the case, this man would not be a doctor because he breaks all the 'class' rules for what a doctor ought to be.

In fact if class rules were what everyone claims they are, he would not have got into medical school.

You are wrong, there are many children now living as Angela
Rayner lived , they don’t have parents encouraging them to reach for the stars and paying for extra tuition for them. Not every child has the ability to become doctors, many worked in
factories, steelworks, coal mines which are gone , a single mother working as a carer couldn’t afford the lifestyle of professional, well educated parents .

We aren't judging we are using class to explain the advantages held by some. Not just about money although that is important but numerous other factors. The life chances of a child in a deprived area of the red wall city where I work are different to the life chances of the children in my middle class village. Their experiences are different, their education is different, etc, etc.

As Galaxy says, people are not judging. My point is that it is you who is saying that the things you describe are ‘class rules’. Yes, you are also saying that they get broken, but the very fact that you assume we will accept that there are expectations for how a road worker and a doctor should dress speaks for itself. Same with who is privately educated.

I think that class as a concept is necessary to discuss society, as is sex, race disability etc. If we can’t use those terms we can’t explore why children of unemployed single parents on council estates are so unlikely to become successful politicians, for instance. Or why Etonians who study PPE at Oxbridge are so very likely to do so. Class is all about generalisations, and should not be used against (or in favour) of individuals, which is where things go wrong. Studying where working class people have barriers to ‘success’, whilst based on middle class definitions of what that means, at least allows agencies to try to mitigate those barriers, much as studies of sex-based differentials in the workplace (for instance) can help to level the playing field.

Assuming that someone is inferior because of their class, or that they will always be in a particular category because their parents were, OTOH is snobbery and unfair. Class is not genetic, and cannot be passed down. It is circumstantial and often systemic, and those things are often passed from one generation to the next, so we can change the systems and circumstances to ones that help everyone to have access to the same chances. One of the ways to do that is to stop judging on clothing and accent, rather than using them as signifiers of the different groups and ranking people accordingly.

Concepts such as ‘made good’ suggest that the starting point was ‘bad’, which feeds into the discrimination faced by many. We might know that the use of certain vocabulary suggests the user is from a particular background, and that is just social observation. It is when that is extended to expectations about their intelligence or character that it becomes divisive.

I'm afraid some of the posts totally ignore social mobility and the fact that social class in almost all circumstances is based on head of household's occupation not how much they earn. It's most definitely not what we think represents a particular social class or with whom we socialise.
The fact that someone has an interest in local history, has dreadlocks and a stethoscope or wears crocs to a posh restaurant has absolutely zilch to do with social class but quite a lot to do with what people consider as appropriate social norms ( sometimes seen as snobbery) which can be class based.
Often the more money people have the less they feel the need to adhere to social norms so the rich lady in crocs was probably demonstrating that she could and would wear whatever she wanted! Fwiw Balenciaga sell crocs for nearly £1k and Swarovski do a cheaper pair for £160 so restaurant lady might have been making a fashion statement!

There are some good posts here

That’s partly what I am getting at, foxie. The very fact that those things have been identified as class markers speaks for itself.

Also, the old ABC classification system is not applicable to modern life. The wife of a plumber would be seen as C1 in that system, and the wife of a professor as A, regardless of whether the plumber’s wife worked as a surgeon and the prof’s wife as a cleaner. No value judgment is attached to any of those roles, incidentally - they are the Registrar General’s categories, not mine.

The children of the (probably unlikely) couples would also be categorised according to their fathers’ occupation, despite the fact that often mothers have a greater influence on young children’s upbringing (particularly when the father is the higher earner), and it would traditionally be assumed that the surgeon wife would have more cultural capital than the cleaner (rightly or wrongly).

Also, as I mentioned earlier, these days plumbers earn better salaries than many traditionally middle class people, and now that HE has (thankfully) expanded their children have a good chance of mobility, which was not the case when the system (more of a taxonomy, really) was devised, and arguably the child of a plumber would be moving down the scale if they became, say, a teacher or worked in admin at a routine level.

I don’t know the answer to this, but am interested - on the modern housing estates on the outskirts of towns (the 4-5 bed detached box ones), do people socialise based on the husband’s occupation, or do the friendship groups form around proximity or children? My guess is the latter, which again flies in the face of old expectations.

More questions than answers, I know.

The point I am making is that these things are no longer class markers. When you see someone now, you cannot put them into little boxes saying 'This woman wears crocs, has a bad haircut and looks as if her clothes come from a supermarket, therefore she is poor and therefore cannot be a chartered accountant.'

You cannot say 'this man has dread locks and wears scrubs in a GPs surgery and has a non-RP accent, therefore he cannot be a doctor.

Yet this is exactly what people defing the existence of socil class are doing. What defines society now is money, the lady in therolls royce could afford to eat in a good restaurant, own/hire a rolls Royce and chauffeur. It follows that she was unlikely to be in desperate housing need, have difficulty affording her fuel bills and be choosing between eating and heating.

Similarly the doctor, is unlikely to be in housing need, or struggling to feed and clothe any family he might have. In fact GPs are paid very well, compared with many other professions.

It is money that measures people place in the social pecking order, not how they dress, or speak, nor what activities they take part in in their free time.

I am amazed how many people still think they are.

Here’s what the latest survey says, it is interesting.
yougov.co.uk/society/articles/51105-how-do-britons-define-social-class#:~:text=Although%20most%20Britons%20might%20feel,are%20middle%20or%20working%20class.

Certainly it’s money here. Like the USA. No peerage or anything like that. Tradies ,on the whole, are pretty wealthy and very much respected which is how it should be. In my particular part it is also which school you attended but I think that is peculiar to our state, least that is what the general opinion is. A form of snobbery really.