Class
Britain has been famous for its class differences and its class distinctions for years - if “famous” is the right word. In America you are supposed to be able to live a life in the pursuit of happiness without being hindered or helped by your class. (whether if this is true, is another matter). In many European countries too, such as the Scandinavian countries, class is not today thought to be a major problem. But class is still considered a problem in Britain, as we shall see in a minute.
Some of the factors that place a person in one particular class are:
Things like the way you talk and dress. Your job is, however the most important factor.
The babies, how they are fed by;
working - class mums: bottle-feed their babies
middle - class mums: breastfeed them
upper - class mums: let nannies take care of them
George Orwell described England as the most class-ridden society.
“The most class-ridden society under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege.” He said this in 1930s.
Jean Blondel was a French expert on political science. (or a “homogeneous” society as himself called it). In 1960s he said that there was a tiny class of aristocratic families called the upper class. Certainly, to the average person in the street, the terms “middle class” and “working class” were the most obvious ways of designating the main classes in Britain.
In the late 1980s there was an opinion poll on whether Britain was still a class ridden society. The result was: 90% of the people questioned placed themselves in a particular class. 73% agreed that class was still an “integral part” of British society. 52% thought that there were still sharp class divisions in British society.
The working class was created in its modern form by the industrial revolution, which started in about 1770. As this class grew in size, it organised itself in, for example, self-help societies, football clubs, burial clubs, social clubs of different sorts. It organised trade unions and it also organised itself politically, although this took some time, and the result was the Labour Party, which emerged as an independent political party at the very beginning of the 20th century.
In the beginning of the 20th century the British working class continued to grow. But in the last thirty years or so there has been a new trend. The people who worked in factories, mills and coalmines steadily got less. A reason for this was that new technology, like robots and computers and machines began to do more and of the jobs that used to be done by people. The other reason was that many factories, mills and mines closed down and many thousands of people lost their jobs. Meanwhile small-scale industries and high-tech industries started to flourish, and a massive modernisation of British industry took place. The new jobs in the new small-scale industries are not typical “working-class” jobs, and people doing these jobs no longer feel they belong to the old working life in typically working-class jobs and in their forties and fifties were in typically middle-class jobs. The result? A smaller working class, and a larger middle class.
But it depends. A person can be registered as middle-class, but they can still feel themselves working-class, and may still be considered working-class by other people because of all the small signals they send out, such as the way they speak. Another point worth noting is that the established middle class does its best to protect itself, if you see what I mean. It can, for example, send its children to independent schools, or move to areas where the local school is known to produce good exam results- this pushes house price up, which makes it difficult for non-middle-class people to afford to live there. So, as you see, it is a complicated matter.