From all my exposure to British culture from centuries ago to Doctor Who, it seems that the working class is REALLY hated compared to other countries. Hell the USA almost worships theirs, most others are ambivalent to accepting.
But I mean going back centuries I can find stuff that makes the British working class/blue collar look like caricatures by Maury show standards.
One drawing shows the female partners of men being sent to Botany Bay goodbye, they are chugging booze while saying GOODBYE! That kinda stuff.
In short, You are oversimplifying a complex subject.
The true answer is that of course the British do not hate the working class, since most people would probably include themselves in that definition. In fact I am not sure what the term ‘working class’ signifies exactly. If you want to find a class that the general public dislike most (hate is a strong term) then look no further than the denizens of the City of London. The complete opposite of what you suggest. Whoever made the drawing to which you refer, may have been making some political point.
I get the impression that British society today is more homogenous than the population of the USA, especially the rural parts.
You are the one that mentioned the Maury Show - isn’t that evidence that you like mocking the working classes in the States?
On the wider front, yes, probably Britain is/was a more class concious society than the United States and writers/illustrators - who are almost without exception not working class - played on certain stereotypes like the drunken slatterns waving off their menfolk but I doubt this stereotyping is any worse than in other counties.
I am curious as to what you seen in Dr Who that leads you to think modern Britain unduly hates or mocks the working classes. Remember British culture is inclined to mock anybody and everybody - working classes, middle classes, posh people, royalty, politicians, journalists …
I said the Maury show features caricatures, and it so outrageous I used it as a laughable counter example.
I don’t know why you think I support the USA worship of the working class, which borders on anti-intellectualism and hatred of reason and logic just get us a salt of the earth guy to solve this issue!
I was thinking of early seasons of the reboot where it seemed the show was mocking the companion Rose and her family living in an “estate”.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply I thought you supported “the USA worship of the working class”, I was questioning your premise that in Britain the working class is “REALLY” hated (or mocked) more than in other cultures. Britain has its own anti-intellectualism and reverence for the working class. In lots of areas of Britain you will get a lot less grief with a working class accent than an upper class one. (Though regrettably, not the positive life chances and career opportunities based on merit.) Check out politicians like Tony Blair - public school and Oxford - speaking “estuary-English” to try and sound less posh.
Re Dr Who, I don’t remember the early episodes in detail but Rose herself was an enormously positive character. Coming from the pen of Russel T Davies it was much more likely to be mocking middle class liberal assumptions about estates and the working classes rather than the working classes themselves.
Well Rose wasn’t portrayed as negative or anything, but it did seem like her an mum were used as a source of humor and jokes. I guess if DW was made in the USA they would have lived in a run down trailer park or section * housing or something.
I haven’t seen anything similar for the upper classes in Britain on the reboot.
*If anyone is curious this thread was not made with some anti-British sentiment or anything.
There’s always been a tendency in British culture (as in all cultures?) to be upwardly mobile. Many people then scorn the class they left behind.
The working-class can kiss my arse
I’ve got the foreman’s job at last!
I’d say it’s still true in the UK that most people aspire to be middle-class and having achieved that look down on the working-class. Note this famous comedy sketch with John Clees, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett.
Actually Britain and America are roughly tied as the least socioeconomically mobile nations in the industrialized world.
And plenty of historical cultures have been far nastier and more systematic about keeping people “in their place”*; upward mobility is definitely not a universal characteristic of cultures.
*It used to be standard practice in America for the local authorities to steal the land and money of any black person who got too prosperous, for example.
To me, the weird thing is not people scorning the class they’ve left behind, but rather those left behind scorning those trying to get ahead - the whole “puttin’ on airs” attitude, if you know what I mean.
I was watching a season 1 (new) *Doctor Who *episode last week, the one where Rose found herself back in London with her mother and her sort-of boyfriend Micky. Rose was bemoaning the fact that she was stuck back in the estates, and had to go back to work in the shop instead of travelling through space and time, and then either Mickey or her mum shouted at her, “What, you think you’re better than us?” I found that attitude bewildering, almost horrifying. Who doesn’t want more out of life? What kind of small-minded monster criticizes someone trying to better their condition? It was just so… alien to me.
Class isn’t about bettering one’s condition; it’s about sneering at those below you and abusing them. It’s about status. You can’t have a class system in the first place without a lower class to be sneered at; a society where everyone was well off wouldn’t be a class system.
This doesn’t strike me as a particularly British mentality; I see a lot of it at the (American) university where I work, which has a high population of first-generation students. I know of one case where a student’s family was putting enormous amounts of pressure on her to drop out of the Honors College here and move back home to attend a community college with a much weaker academic reputation. She had a full merit scholarship through the Honors program, and in any case she would probably have been eligible for a Pell Grant, so money wasn’t the issue; it was that they didn’t want her going away to a four-year university, and even more especially didn’t want her in the Honors program learning to be “uppity.”
It is an infuriating mentality, but it is not uncommon.
In my experience the USA is extremely reluctant to even admit that it has a working class. In America, people who work with their hands, and who make enough money to live, even if they have very little to spare for luxuries, are almost universally regarded (including by themselves) as belonging to the middle class. People who are poorer than that if they are acknowledged or conceived of as a class at all) are referred to as the underclass. American politicians never seem to promise to do anything for the benefit of the working class (though they may “working people”, but that is rather different, encompassing everyone who is not unemployed), it is always the middle class whose interests they promise advance (although, as I said, this term is understood to encompass not only management and professional typres, but also relatively poorly paid people who work with their hands - i.e., what is elsewhere called the working class).
Presumably this is all a result of the massive American anti-communist campaign of the mid-twentieth century. If you can convince people that your country has no working class, or convince even poor manual workers that they are middle class, you have very effectively removed (or concealed) both the intellectual basis and the material support for communism. It has left ordinary Americans without the fundamental intellectual tools necessary for understanding their society and its economic structure.
Unlike the United States, Britain freely admits it has a working class, and many people are very proud to see themselves as belonging to it. Furthermore, many middle class people are vocal in their admiration of working class ways and, in many cases, very proud of having working class roots (whether they themselves have personally moved up in the world, or whether it happened one or two generations away). Indeed, middle class people sometimes claim to have working class roots or affinities on an extremely flimsy basis. (I have known such people.)
Furthermore, one of the two major political parties in Britain is called the Labour Party, and, as its name implies, is overtly and in principle (if not always so much so in practice) dedicated to advancing the interests of the working class over those of the middle and upper classes; even their opponents, the relatively right-wing Conservative Party, are not above claiming that their policies will advance the interests of the working class when they think it may be to their electoral advantage.
The OP appears to be living in a fact-impaired looking-glass world.
Very interesting article, which I basically agree with. However, the article itself notes that there could be an exception among families of recent immigrants, many of whom have seen great upward mobility.
I know that lots of the most successful people I meet in my daily life are the children of immigrants. Myself included.
I haven’t watched very much Doctor Who, and only a part of it has had Rose as the companion, but I’m confused here about estates. I think of an estate as being a very fancy place to live, like Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice. Was Rose actually a servant at an estate? It’s my understanding that service class is a subset of working class.
You are thinking of the classic country estate, where you have a collection of land, farms and villages owned by one family who live in The Big House. Estate has a number of meanings, including simply any developed area of land, which may be residential housing or industrial buildings. There were many ‘estates’ of urban and suburban residential housing build post WWII by local authorities for the working classes. Rose lives in one of these. They lack prestige because the units are often small flats or houses with small rooms and limited outside space, and many were poorly built and have become run down.
