The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #80050 Message #1455608
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
08-Apr-05 - 05:19 PM
Thread Name: BS: Can we discuss the Class system in UK?
Subject: RE: BS: Can we discuss the CLass system in UK?
Class doesn't die off as easily as that. It's as much an obsession, in England anyway, as race appears to be in the States. Cultural class rather than economic class, I mean, which doesn't at all coincide.
I don't mean so much in terms of big class categories, like "working class" or "middle class" - it seems much more about a fascination with people wanting to place other and themselves in a very complicated gradation, with infinite number of divisions.
It's an obsession that is implicit in much English humour, in stories in TV soaps, in advertising. In fact it's the guest at every table where strangers are meeting.
But I notice that American politicians seem to spend a lot of their time talking about class, more especially about "the middle class". English politicians tend to avoid that particular expression, largely because 'middle class" tends to be seen as a kind of an insult - they tend to say sayd "middle England" instead. (I don't think they say "middle Scotland" though - perhaps Giok can confirm that.)