But even within a pub, birds of feather tend to flock together and roost in their own corner.
My local Wetherspoons pub is like that. Cheap food and beer attracts all sorts of people. Whether they actually talk to each other is a different matter. It is a huge place.
Different classes are interested in different things. The bunch of students tweeting, facebooking and gossiping have little in common with the third generation immigrant community or the East European builders or the dodgy Albanian gangsters and the crack dealers who do deals outside.
Conversely some pubs get colonised by gangs and local criminal families who don’t take kindly to strangers in their midst.
Next door is a restaurant/bar frequented by the foodie middle class professional couples quaffing over priced wine and fussing over the menu. Neither would find any good reason to set foot into the others domain.
These worlds rarely collide, they seem quite oblivious to other and unconcerned about the others uninteresting pre-occupations.
Besides the ghettoised tendency of US cities that comes from immigration and historic segregation, there is plenty of space. So you don’t get people living on top of each other, discretely ignoring each others existence as you do in the UK.
I know a guy who runs a few local blogs in London. He says that if anything defines to conversation about a neighbourhood it is class. Outrageous snobbery and inverted snobbery about shops, businesses, anything in the public space. Huge rows between dog owners over the use of the local park. Much of it very petty stuff. It gets serious when news of a planned alteration to a building is made public. Envy over property and who has a nicer home often detonates tirades about style and taste.
I would like to think people are not quite so neurotic about class in the US…but I stand ready to be corrected on that point.
US doesn’t have royal family, but it does have political dynasties such as the Kennedy, Bush and now the Clinton families. The US President also looks distinctly regal and a lot of fawning seems to go on, which is never good for any politician. Watching the UK PM being roundly abused by the opposition is very satisfying.
Meritocracy in the US?
So the dumb people are at the bottom of society and clever ones are at the top? Sounds like a good idea, but the 2008 financial crisis and the Iraq war suggests the meritocracy might need a little fine tuning.
It’s a perceived meritocracy in my opinion, not an actual one - so we’re in agreement on that point, at least to a certain extent. It’s also perceived that these families win their elected positions - explaining why people perceive things this way is not something that I could answer.
So, as you can guess, I think the difference in class system in Britain and the US is in large part a difference in perception.
Because income inequality and the lack of socio-economic mobility tend to be correlated. “Tend to be correlated” means that ranking nations on each scale will produce similar rankings but not identical ones. I mentioned income inequality because the thread is about the class system. This has some relationship with income inequality.
I would say it also depends on professions. A Barrister or an Army officer is always a “middle class” even if the background of the individual in question is nothing but.
I knew a QC and a Full Colonel who were both from Liverpool dockworker stock and quite proud of it, but who were pretty solidly middle class. A plumber who owns his own business can easily earn more then a QC and a Colonel, but he will always be working class.
(Incidentally, the relative ease of movement into lucrative and powerful professions such as the military and the law for talented boys regardless of background is one of the reasons for Britain’s success.)
Class still matters enormously in Britain. Especially when it comes to the law. For example:
Several young men get together to form a semi-official group dedicated to minor law-breaking. They regularly arrange to vandalise private property, with the explicit aim of causing as much damage as possible. Fights frequently break out in the course of this. This group has leaders, a dress code, insignia which are earned by acts of criminality. Drug taking is par for the course on these occasions.
If there names were Jayden, Lee, Aaron and Scott and they met at Hackney Secondary, they’d be a criminal gang to be arrested. But if they’re (you know where this is going) Gideon, David, Boris and Nathaniel and they met at Eton, then they’re over-exuberant young men letting off steam.
It’s not the behaviour that makes the criminal, it’s class. (And yes, class won’t let you get away with murder, or armed robbery. But at the lower end, it certainly does.)
More seriously, it affects victims. Recent sex-abuse scandals in Rotherham and Oxfordshire have shown that poor/working class victims are often disbelieved and dismissed. E.g.
I am not sure the Oxfordshire and Rochdale exploitation cases tell us much about class in the UK.
There are plenty of other exploitation cases that have affected what you might imagine are the privileged classes who had an expensive private education. The names of schools famous for producing the political and social elite in the UK have many skeletons in their cupboards. Talk to anyone who had been to one of those all boy schools knows that they were often a place where sexual exploitation and physical abuse of children happened.
These children were isolated and vulnerable and duty of care that was entrusted to the institutions that were expected to protect them from exploiters failed conspicuously. I do not see much difference between expensive schools, social services or religious institutions. They all failed in their duty of care and young victims suffered as a consequence.
It does not tell us much about class, nor does it tell us much about religion or education. It speaks volumes about self serving institutions that were clearly quite prepared to ignore serious exploitation taking place and did nothing to prevent it, presumably because they decided the damage done was greatly exceeded by what they thought to be a ‘greater good’.
Moreover the Rochdale and Oxford cases were not dealing with ‘working class’ children. These were of kids from broken homes where their parents had themselves serious problems. Historic abuse, addictive illness, mental health problems, criminality, violence.
I guess that is a special class in itself, a persistent underclass.
The social, welfare, health, police and judicial services spend a lot of time trying to limit the damage.
But the cases you reference are about abuse *within *the institution. The police were not the abusers, nor the institution within which abuse happened; they were external and should have been focused on preventing crime. But ingrained attitudes to class prevented them from seeing what was in front of them. And yes, working class is probably the wrong term. But when middle-class children are found drunk in the company of strange adult men, the police do not just leave them to go about their business, or describe them as “streetwise” or “prostituting themselves”.
Those girls were supposed to be under the protection of the social services and were living in a home run by social services.
True, they were not abused within the home, but nonetheless they were underage and neglected. That neglect allowed abusers to target them. As I recollect it was taxi drivers paid from a social services budget that had the job of ferrying to school who took advantage of these girls. Clearly a failure by the social services and the police.
There were ample warnings from frontline social social workers that were ignored and the police thought that there were other, more important, priorities than dealing with chaotic teenagers, as indeed did local politicians.
It is good that a light has been shone onto this murky affair and hopefully it will be put right.
Are these girls part of a separate class?
Well, it is clear from the attitudes expressed by the police and social services, they have a very poor opinion of these girls. Is that snobbery? I don’t think so. The police and social services have to deal with some extreme cases. People who barely function in society and are riven with all kinds of mental and addictive illnesses. By the time they are teenagers, they are a lost cause.
It is clear that attitude prevailed amongst those at the top of these institutions and their public policy was one of containment and they were not about to expend resources on trying to address an intractable social problem, when these girls would soon be old enough to be discharged from the responsibility of social services…for a time.
It is also the case that there were other opinions lower down the ranks, that something could and should be done to stop a cyclic pattern cascading from generation to generation. They were ignored.
I don’t see the snobbery there, just some very poor leadership and a questionable policy that allowed a social problem to develop into criminal exploitation.
Given due care, many of these women have been able to face their accusers in court, bring order to their lives, and even become forceful advocates on behalf of other abuse victims. Their cause has been won. Dismissing them because of how they grew up, and having a poor opinion of them because they swear, and wear crop tops, and mouth off in the wrong accent is pure classism.
Describing their troubles as an intractable social problem is, again, the purest of class thinking.
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The Rochdale Serious Case Review that I quoted (link here) is a hugely detailed, painstaking investigation into all aspects of the way police and social services these matters. It had access to the police’s detailed notes on interviews, intelligence reports, no-crime decisions etc. It concludes that issues of class and background played a role especially in how the police treated victims, based on how the police themselves described their decision-making roles That was the section I quoted. I’m honestly a little baffled that you think this conclusion is baseless. Do you think the methodology was poor, or the evidence doesn’t support the conclusions, or what?
The “regalness” of the President is a combination of powerfulness of the office and danger to the occupant. The President is orders of magnitude more powerful than most other politicians.
As as for “being roundly abused by the opposition” goes, you clearly have never paid attention to American political discourse. The level of criticism and vitriol has been consistently high since the Founding Fathers.
Who is smarter? The worlds best janitor or waitress or the dumbest engineer or lawyer. People who are very intelligent can still make mistakes or act unethically.
As a general rule, yes. It takes a certain amount of hard work and intelligence to be a lawyer, doctor, engineer, investment banker or any other well paid profession. That’s not to say that there aren’t smart people who for one reason or another are in low paying professions and there are a lot of well paid sales guys who are dumb as shit.
Also there’s a lot of competition to get rich. If it were easy, everyone would be rich.
But therein lies what is at the heart of class distinction. Does a smart hardworking person born into one set of circumstances have a distant disadvantage in the competition to get rich?
It’s not easy to run a marathon, but if some people start at the 10 mile mark and others start behind the line then the competition to win has a different meaning. Some who start out behind will catch up, some who start ahead will never finish - but the experience will be different for all involved.
Of course. Having parents who can afford to send you to good schools and who have the time to help you with your studies or just even provide you with good examples to live by is a huge advantage. Maybe a better analogy is everyone has to run the same marathon. But some people get the benefits of better training and conditioning beforehand.
But more important IMHO are the barriers that prevent someone who may be poor, but intelligent, hard working and motivated from achieving their full potential:
Not being aware of the available opportunities
Not having the finances for education.
Being crowded out of a good education by alumni legacies or students from the “right” high schools or neighborhoods.
Being stereotyped
Lacking the mannerism and behaviors that indicate “successful person”.
Lacking the right network (IOW not being part of the old boys club)