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Epiphanies 2021: Class (In General) - Siblings, Faith & Downward Social Mobility
GarethMoon
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Hello this thread was moved from Purgatory and as discussion has broadened out, we've broadened the title to reflect that.
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Louise
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I’ve noticed that among a surprising number of my Christian, middle class acquaintances whose parents were also middle class that they would say some of their siblings or siblings children would be a different class. Or hold different “cultural values”.
Not traditional working class, but definitely lost a lot of the markers of whatever variation of middle class they grew up as.
I’ve always thought that the reverse was more common- working class individuals gaining more middle class markers through education and/or marriage and their kids being fully middle class.
I also mean from a British point of view, as it’s not all about money here to the extent it is in other places.
But personally I’m seeing more of the downward mobility. Maybe it was always this way, but especially with friends whose children are say 25-40, moreso with children of Anglican clergy too for some reason. It seems their children who remain more middle class in culture, outlook, taste and the like either went to a University that wasn’t an ex-poly, got a classic graduate job or ordained or work for a Christian charity (those who worked for regular charities or government linked ones seem less likely for some reason).
I’m also under the impression that siblings who don’t do any of the above but retain their Christian faith seem to retain more of their social class than their siblings who also don’t do the above and additional don’t retain the faith of their upbringing. Perhaps that just reflects that British Christian culture tends to be white and middle class outside some big cities?
Maybe the difference between siblings a good thing, less snobbery? But downward social mobility does seem to be happening on a larger scale and quicker than I recall previously.
Does anyone here have siblings/children who they think have experienced downward social mobility when other siblings haven’t?
Does it bother you/them? Are there benefits? Has it made your family closer/more distant?
Hello this thread was moved from Purgatory and as discussion has broadened out, we've broadened the title to reflect that.
Thanks
Louise
Epiphanies Host
Hosting off
I’ve noticed that among a surprising number of my Christian, middle class acquaintances whose parents were also middle class that they would say some of their siblings or siblings children would be a different class. Or hold different “cultural values”.
Not traditional working class, but definitely lost a lot of the markers of whatever variation of middle class they grew up as.
I’ve always thought that the reverse was more common- working class individuals gaining more middle class markers through education and/or marriage and their kids being fully middle class.
I also mean from a British point of view, as it’s not all about money here to the extent it is in other places.
But personally I’m seeing more of the downward mobility. Maybe it was always this way, but especially with friends whose children are say 25-40, moreso with children of Anglican clergy too for some reason. It seems their children who remain more middle class in culture, outlook, taste and the like either went to a University that wasn’t an ex-poly, got a classic graduate job or ordained or work for a Christian charity (those who worked for regular charities or government linked ones seem less likely for some reason).
I’m also under the impression that siblings who don’t do any of the above but retain their Christian faith seem to retain more of their social class than their siblings who also don’t do the above and additional don’t retain the faith of their upbringing. Perhaps that just reflects that British Christian culture tends to be white and middle class outside some big cities?
Maybe the difference between siblings a good thing, less snobbery? But downward social mobility does seem to be happening on a larger scale and quicker than I recall previously.
Does anyone here have siblings/children who they think have experienced downward social mobility when other siblings haven’t?
Does it bother you/them? Are there benefits? Has it made your family closer/more distant?
Comments
Surely if one member of a couple is marrying up, then the other is marrying down?
When I think of 'working class', my mental image is either of older people, or of the relatively small number of young people in manual occupations. Which makes me think that 'working class' is a shrinking population, which in turn would suggest mobility is upwards.
However I think what is actually happening is that there's now a sort of two-tier middle class, created by the rapid expansion of university education. Lots of clerical and administrative jobs that were traditionally for school leavers are now mostly taken by graduates, but these tend to be the weaker graduates. And these graduates are partly upwardly-mobile children of working-class origins who want to aim upwards but are held back by the disadvantages of their background, and partly downwardly-mobile children of middle-class origin who aren't the most successful but who went to university anyway because It's What You Do.
Then there is the upper-tier of traditionally 'professional' jobs, i.e. doctors and lawyers and teachers and so on. Which obviously contains some very academically successful children of working-class families, but which is also much easier to get into if you start from a family of 'professional' background.
At the care home I was taken under the wing of the two middle class women owners. They encouraged me to train as a nurse and supported my application. Qualifying as a nurse enabled me to leave my home town and move to London. Here I mixed with different people, became a Christian and married a middle class man. I also studied for an Open University degree and was the first in my family to graduate. I am now a university lecturer and live in Cambridge, my children attended the best state sixth form college in the UK and my eldest is at a Russell group university.
I am the only one of the 8 children to become middle class, the rest of my family is working class. I am openly referred to as posh by some of my siblings but they bear no grudges; we are treated as eccentrics. I am pleased that my great niece is going to university though; things are changing for her generation.
I use my own case study to teach students on my youth module the importance of social and cultural capital in young people’s lives. One of my students once pointed out that she had gone down in class by getting divorced, that she lost out financially and her lifestyle had been impacted. I suspect this is quite common, especially for women.
I think my sister-in-law feels that being working class aligns better with her politics, although they both vote the same way.
Does this mean you think your husband's assessment is more accurate?
Yes.
Although it's easy enough to make out a case for a working class background. When my husband was born, their parents were living in a council flat in a rough part of Glasgow; but they bought a suburban semi a year later, and were living there when my sister-in-law was born.
My sister-in-law claims East End Glasgow roots, although she never lived there; my husband claims suburban roots because he was less than a year old when they left the East End, and has no memories of it.
Maggie and Ronnie?????? Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan perhaps?
I agree that my analysis is simplistic. I think anything that tries to divide people neatly into working-class and middle-class is necessarily simplistic.
The simplistic marker of middle-class-ness that I was using is Having A Degree. Cleaning, I would agree, is manual labour and would therefore fall on the 'working-class' side of my marker.
'Caring' jobs are interesting because ISTM they have become a lot more 'academic' (if that's the right word), and therefore closer to my middle-class marker. I believe nursing degrees are a relatively new phenomenon, and I believe even the non-graduate roles require a lot more in the way of college-based training, HNDs and NVQs and so forth.
(Someone Told Me that a lot of immigrant healthcare assistants are actually quite highly qualified in their country of origin but the UK does not recognise their qualifications, but I'm not sure how true that is.)
Hospitality seems to me to be dominated by students. I remember hearing unqualified unemployed school-leavers complaining, with some justification, that they couldn't get a job in a bar or a restaurant because they were crowded out by students.
That's really interesting - I've pondered long on working class vs middle class jobs, because going by what some plumbers are raking in compared with FE college lecturers, it isn't income alone.
I go into work. Well, these days I log into my laptop. I can take a look through Service Desk tickets to see if there are any indicating a systemic problem, or I could do some more planning on that Configuration Manager migration to full HTTPS I was planning. Or I can poke through SolarWinds for repeated alerts that make me suspect an underlying fault. My ongoing project work is subject to a schedule negotiated between me and other parties to the project. I'll have to do all these, but I decide when, and what to do about any of them. I could probably do bugger all for a couple of days if I pulled a sneaky all nighter to catch up and no-one would notice.
It's an unashamedly middle class way of working enabled by an unashamedly middle class management style.
Field Services and Service Desk - not so much. This ticket is assigned to you - fix it before the SLA is hit. You're covering the 8am next week. That's more working class, within the same general line of work.
Despite registered nursing (as opposed to health care assistant/carer work) becoming a degree profession, I would say that nursing is very mixed class-wise. Those who reach management or specialist nursing level probably already are or become middle class, like I did.
Now I have the unquestionably middle class IT engineering job described above and she's an occupational therapist (not managerial, by choice.).
The stupid thing is she's the one really earning her crust and making a real direct difference to people. I work harder at convincing myself my job is vital than I do doing it, I think.
It's all skew-whiff.
That's right, sorry.
I don't know how my Mum votes, but my Dad (no qualifications, left school at 15, manual factory work all his life) also thought Thatcher was great, and voted for Boris last time around. I know quite a few older men like that. I think the 70s really turned them off Dave Spart.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were others out there doing the same.
The eldest Gamaliette ekes out a living making and selling cards, prints and crafts- although she has had one excellent children's book illustration commission.
She's done plenty of bar and waitressing work and call centre jobs.
Most of their pals, both graduates and non-graduates are in minimum wage or relatively low paid jobs.
I don't know whether this is downward mobility or what - but from what I can gather neither the USA nor the UK perform very highly in the upward mobility stakes compared with other OPEC countries.
I'm not sure the traditional class distinctions make much sense in a UK context any more, except that the toffs continue to run everything as has always been the case.
My impression is that as it becomes bigger - in line with the growing number of elderly - the care sector is becoming increasingly professionalised and so there are different layers of carers.
I also have several middle class friends who think they are working class and this amuses me very much, as they often know little about working class culture and are even sometimes snobby about it.
My experience is that there are plenty of people who will loudly proclaim their working-class credentials even when it becomes marginal at best.
He learned Greek, Hebrew and Latin. We were very proud of him. He became a real community minister and we moved about every five years.
I became a teacher, my brother a ships engineer then a farmer. My other brother became an engineer. I met and married a teacher. He had a similar background. His granny was a weaver and his grandad a cabinet maker.
One of our sons is a nurse and the other an airline pilot, soon to become a captain.
Where are we social class wise? Middle class, I think, with working class left wing values/politics.
Of course there are layers within "working class" and snobbishness within that. Where I grew up there were a lot of folk who'd left school with minimal qualifications and gone straight to work at the helicopter factory and made good money, and bought new build detached houses and cars. Their culture wasn't the same as that of the big council estates, where folk were likely working in retail or care if at all, and different again from my own middle class culture, a separation that we unconsciously self-segregated into a secondary school. Not totally or without overlap, but I came to realise that most of my friends had parents in middle class occupations (doctors, naval officers etc.).
In Australia, people from communities of first generation migrants sit to one side of class. They tend to be supported/exploited by members of their own communities and cluster around their traditional places of worship. Greeks are presently into their third generation, and there remains a distinct community, but the ties loosen. The Vietnamese remain tight into the second generation, and the Sudanese, the major African community here, are mostly first generation. I very much hope that these recently arrived communities (the Vietnamese are not recently arrived) will become with time as fully Australian as me.
I choose to identify as Irish Australian rather than Australian because I want us to get away from the old idea that real Australians are from the British Isles. Multiculturalism works best when there is no standard Australian and we all celebrate our culture of origin and our identity as Australians.
So class structures here are complicated by the immigrant experience common to most of us. Only after the third generation (to be general), do class markers assume greater relevance. In the first generation, most immigrants work manual and low skilled jobs, but that changes quickly, when the second generation has access to education.
Thanks,
Doublethink, Temporary Purgatory Host
Nowadays, I suppose I am objectively middle-class, but frankly, I don't feel I fit completely into either the working-class or middle-class 'cultures' as stereotypically depicted. I certainly don't read the Daily Mail with its 'middle-class' obsessions, and I would rather be summarily shot than vote for the Tories. (Especially these Tories.)
Of course loathing the tories and reading the Guardian or Independent are very middle class.
It's the second biggest island in the archipelago.
Please check out the Epiphanies guidelines if you haven’t been there recently, as they have just been updated. This should allow you broaden out your discussion.
Hold on to your hats !
Doublethink, Temporary Purgatory Host
Without derailing the thread, the position of Indigenous Australians is different. There are treaty processes ongoing at State level and a push for constitutional reform federally. Our place in their land has never been by agreement. There is also the issue that the term Australian is our settler name for this place. Some indigenous Australians may not want to identify with that.
It's... complicated. There's a sense in which people of colour in the UK are outwith the normal class structure, nonetheless there are well-known class differences, particularly among those descended from immigrants from parts of the former empire. For example Muslims of Indian descent tend to be more middle class (particularly medical and legal professions) than those of Pakistani or Bangladeshi descent. In schools with large numbers of students from both communities the differences are stark. The Ugandan Asian community, descended from those expelled by Amin, is different again, tending more towards petit bourgeoisie - small businesses, entrepreneurs and the like. That's very broad-brush, and at least partly stereotype, but it illustrates that what from a distance could be thought of as "British-Asian Muslim" identity is pretty diverse. Then of course there are Sikhs and Hindus of Indian descent, Black-British folk of both African and African-Carribbean descent, and smaller communities from elsewhere in the world.
There is a bad habit in British discourse of differentiating by class within the white, non-recent immigrant descended population, but treat minority ethnic groups as homogenous. This leads to rather silly claims that white working class boys do worst in school, when (say) working class Bangladeshi-heritage actually do worse but get hidden within stats for all students of Bangladeshi descent.
I mean for a start there's the size issue - the next biggest cities after London (Birmingham and Manchester have very similar population sizes with a difference of around 100k between them) have less than a third of the population of London. London is also much less suburban than either - obviously there are suburbs but there are more people living in the truly urban areas. I'm not all that personally familiar with Manchester but I know Birmingham well, and Birmingham's city centre is actually very compact (obviously relatively speaking) and much smaller than the city's large overall size would suggest - compared to other large UK cities it feels a lot smaller despite having such a big population. London feels big in a different kind of way to even the other big cities though.
I think also the London mayoral system makes a huge difference along with things like TfL being municipal in a way other UK cities' transport isn't - I know that other cities now have mayoral systems but they haven't been around for long enough to really become part of the city in the same way. The London mayoral system makes London more like other global large cities where this is the norm. In my experience there is quite a big divide between people who live in London and those that don't, in the sense that the rest of the country barely exists for those that live in London. People leave in order to go on holiday/vacation or to visit friends in other places, but it isn't usually a regular thing in the same way as outsiders might regularly visit London. I think also the lack of a megaregion or multi-city metro area is significant - there isn't a large city nearby enough to form a megaregion/metro area with more than two cities. Within the commuter belt it's quite isolated, in contrast to say the Liverpool-Manchester area or the Leeds-Bradford area, or even smaller examples like the Thames Valley region.
I am working class, even though my income and property would indicate to many that I am middle class.
My daughter is middle class but my son is still working class.
Yes. Self identification. My son had loads of jobs, mainly manual, still lives in The Black Country and now keeps a pub. My daughter and her husband are property millionaires living in Sheffield
After WW2, my father spent, what should have been the best years of his life. the majority of his working life in a Foundry. At 37, he was able to get out of the foundry to manage pubs, but he was still dead at 47.
One of my favourite tv series was Boys from the Blackstuff. In the last episode George Malone is wheeled round the derelict docks of Liverpool because of his COPD. He talked about his life. He suddenly stands and says,
"They say that memories live longer than dreams. But my dreams, those dreams of long ago, they still give me hope and faith in my class. I can't believe that there's no hope, I can't".
A few minutes later he is dead.
I'm looking a little at the history of the ALP. What hits me between the eyes was how fundamentally socially conservative it was prior to the 1970's. Its like there's a whole history of working people that I for one never really noticed, how divided it is politically once you move away from industrial rights. I don't think I noticed it because by the 1980's it was very much a party of the middle class, just as much as it was one of the working class. In part, that's because free tertiary education from 1972(?) to 1986(?) allowed for many more kid from aspirational families to get educated. They were working and lower middle class kids, and they became the union officials and ALP leaders of later decades.
That's strikes me as the root of the problem with the ALP, this divided character it has on so many issues outside of the industrial sphere.
I think that's true in the UK too - my grandfather was the son of a miner, only bad eyesight kept him out of the pits and in work as a storeman. He and his mates never voted anything other than Labour all their lives and read the Daily Herald then the Daily Mirror when the Herald became the (very different both politically and tonally) Sun. Through the Durham Miners Association he was borderline communist - and remembered Ramsay Macdonald (who he met many times) as a sell-out. He idolised Manny Shinwell. At the age of 85 he was getting two buses just so he could continue to shop in the Co-Op rather than the supermarket at the end of his street.
He and his mates at the miners welfare club were the most right wing socially conservative people I've ever met. I asked him about it once - he basically wanted a workers co-operative government with the (Jack Jones era) TUC in charge, but to keep the Monarchy 'because we're British and that's best.'
funnily enough, when my mum had a black boyfriend in the late 1960s my granddad was on board with it. At worst, I think he thought (correctly) that they were both young and nothing was likely to come of it in the longer term.
My grandmother was the one who had a breakdown (an actual, sectioned, one) but then she was very fragile anyway because of a whole host of things that had happened in her 1920s East End childhood and what really scared her was that my mum would be bringing attention on herself, or marking herself out as different - and her lived experience was that bringing attention to yourself was when things went wrong.
In my family experience, it wasn't being different that was the issue, it was what the neighbours would think, and the cold dead influence of being 'respectable' or not losing face - because they'd come from nothing, and got so little, that they were really massively insecure in who they were.