are you absolutely working/middle class?

(read: thoroughly posh boho)

What do I win?

working class = either you or most people you know are from single-parent families, you live in a terraced house or flat with no front garden, you have a car but its crap, you and/or most of your friends have a drone-type job e.g. factory, shop/store, mundane small office, you read a redtop newspaper, you like watching football and/or soap operas on TV, you eat fry-ups for breakfast regularly and eat junk food 3-5 times a week, you dont have an ISA, you dont know what an IKEA is, you actually phoned up and voted a Big Brother contestant out, your name isnt in the Bible

if you meet MOST of those then i suppose you would be considered working class

middle class = you/your family/most people you know have a holiday home in addition to the semi-detached or fully detached house you live in in suburbia, you have a job that befits the degree you obtained at the university of your choice and you actually have a career, you have a nice car as do your mum AND dad AND silbing(s), IKEA for you is like church (i.e. every Sunday morning), you read a broadsheet newspaper, you like watching football/soap operas on TV but pretend you dont, you eat cous-cous more often than junk food, you have an ISA, your name is in the Bible

if you meet most of those then i guess you'd be considered middle class

i've just (only just?) realised how pointless this thread is but what the hell...why not talk about how your own background/lifestyle is a curious hybrid of the two described above

Now Middle Class except crap car, prefer junk food to cous cous, don't have an ISA or a holiday home.

It feels to me more like the economic/education x-axis may have drifted upwards, but the cultural/accent/connections curve hasn't flattened out that much.
Oxbridge selection procedures to thread? *ducks*

I went to school and got general grades at GSCE's at general level (don't know how this translates to other eductational systems). So I'm usually in dead end jobs when I am working, though I have had decent enough jobs. Think footballs boring, but like computer football games. Only enjoy fastfood when I have a hangover, unless chinese takeaway counts.

Feel slightly more middleclass thank working class though. Don't know why. Think it's the posh house thing.

And I got one yes for the working class bit, I like watching football and soap operas sometimes.

I guess I have no particular class identity.

No car in family, don't go on holiday often, don't read the papers often, some of my friends have good jobs some of them don't, never eaten cous-cous & couldn't stand a fry-up for breakfast, have a masters degree and don't make the most of it, been to IKEA once, used to live in a terrace house in Acton, now moved out west to the semi-detached suburbs, keep meaning to get an ISA.

I was raised lower-middle U.S. class (two-car family, one decent-one crap, decent sized house but never big enough for each child to have their own room, vacations were always camping as it was cheap, first year of college paid for) and now am probably same, as I have a working car, nice loft, know what IKEA is, have decent musical toys and a posh computer, and am working on a post-grad degree (although I'm about $60k in the hole for education thus far.) Oh, I also hate junk food and refuse to eat it, and I love sushi.

I am not sure where that places me, but I do now have an overwhelming urge to purchase a piece of Swedish flat-pack furniture with a silly name.

I always thought of myself as coming from a poor family but I think that's mostly because my parents divorced and I was raised by my mom and we had to move around lots and lots and live off food stamps, that sort of thing. And I always feel like I could be making more mula considering how much I (continue to) paid (pay) for college. Parents couldn't help me out with that cost at all, which makes me feel working class.

Feel like one day I'll be securely in middle class position. Will own a house. Maybe make babies one day and raise them in middle class environment. Who knows.

by the old (ie pre-Thatcher and even further pre-Blair) criteria, I am BY DEFINITION neither working nor middle class, in that I come from a strongly Labour-supporting family but I've always lived in the outer suburban south of England. my father is far more culturally proletarian than my mother, but somehow that's never stopped them getting on.

See, I have far more in common with Stevem's description of working class than middle, BUT I don't have a job so how can I be working class? The middle class description, with having a holiday house and cars for both parents and children, seems more like "rich" to me.

but come on! lots of 'working class people' dont have jobs! yes that means the definition is contradictory but its still applicable

also, i DO think my suggestions for criteria just go to prove how nonsensical the classes notion really is, but we do experience the remnants of it in society still

mark, I have not the pleasure of understanding you!

I think Snowy's point is very good.

My rule of thumb is that anyone who goes to University is middle class, regardless of background. Not everyone who doesn't go to University isn't.

Not sure about the uni thing, alot of people are very snobbish in the UK about the uni you go to. The whole red brick been around for years thing for instance.

but, tom, with the huge changes over the last 5-8 years, how reliable is this as an indicator anymore?

Today's middle classes are (in some ways) the equivalent of the working class in the industrial revolution - long working hrs, no job security etc. At least we have M+S ready meals and DVD players.

I don't know. Regardless of background? For me background is perhaps the only true way to define class, I've never been entirely convinced with the notion of changing ones class through economic or lifestyle change.
I didn't go to university, nobody in my family has. But take my elder brother, he grew up in a miniscule flat in a tower block in Cheapside, Birmingham. These days he runs his own [small] business, plays golf, can afford many holidays abroad a year and so on: he now leads a very middle class life. I still maintain, however, that he is working class. The background is indelible, that is the class he was born into and it can't just be erased by earning money (if it can then what is the w/class cut-off point in a person's bank balance?). His children (if/when they come along) will certainly be middle class of course.
And what about middle class kids who 'slum it' and live in squats or caravans in their baggy, bright stripey jumpers or the odd wayward toff who loses everything and ends up in a bedsit in Penge, how come they are never labelled working class because of where they've ended up? They get called drop-outs, but still always middle/upper class drop-outs.
I think it's a very middle-class idea that if one of the lower orders is seen to get ideas above their station or merely drift outside of the rigid parameters set up for them then they can't possibly still be the class they were born into. Is this to do with middle-class guilt or something.
And "I'm classless" = "I'm middle class" surely?

I agree, Robin, about your points re: Worcester (crucial during the '97 election for the battle for 'Middle England'/middle-ground, with New Labour targeting something they called "Worcester Woman" which, as far as I could make out, meant the lower-middle class Tesco shopper and traditionally Tory voting working classes)

(haha mark I'm not confident I do either - but maybe if I'd been raised upper-middle class I would tend to always think I did, like most of the self-assured what-about-MY-feelings yahs I often hear (because they talk SO very loudly) in certain Edinburgh bars.)

am I right in thinking that Labour had never gained Worcester before 1997? if they failed in 1945 ... well, surely 1966 is the only other possibility? I've always wondered whether the phrase "Worcester Woman" was coined as a nod to Labour having failed to gain it so narrowly in their biggest pre-1997 landslide, to symbolise the desire to go further into Tory heartlands than they'd EVER managed before (hey, we could have had "Peterborough People" as a similar nod to 1966!)

your depiction of working class is almost purely negative, which is crap. it sucks to look down on people just because they don't have the education, money, status etc. that you do.

funniest thing about this thread is people touting IKEA as a status symbol!! cheap, mass produced and often (not always) shoddy furnishings - "movin' on up"

Although I suppose my current student living is more akin to lower middle class though, what with the computer and my wife's 1999 ford and everything.

Does this make me middle class?

System.out.println(" >>>>>> Load class : "+className);

/* Check our local cache of classes */
result = (Class)classes.get(className);
if (result != null) {
System.out.println(" >>>>>> returning cached result.");
return result;
}

I was taught to define class thus:

Working Class = You HAVE to work to live, you have no choice. (Now the argument is that we now have some sub-classes within this, i.e. Lower and Upper working class. Lower Working class being your unemployed, council house inhabiting, living on the breadline type and Upper being those who own their own homes, own holiday homes, are degree educated etc etc)

Middle Class = You have substantial assets and could choose not to work if you so desired.

Upper Class = You have so much money you will never have to so much as wipe your own arse

Not saying I agree, just saying this is the way it was told to me.

I do think that saying you are middle class just coz you are degree educated and own your own home is a touch on the pretentious side though…

for what its worth if i was to be categorised i would be nothing more than lower-middle class now, and thats only really because i did manage to go to university (and academic progression is a new trend in the family full stop). but i was single-parent from an early age, i did live in a suburban ex council terraced house (and i look forward to renting another one for myself soon!) and my grandparents are all from working class Irish backgrounds. I just find the notion of taking pride in all that silly, tho I am certainly not ashamed of any of it either - acceptance is what I feel, nothing more nothing less, I just want to work to attain a higher quality of living based on what I interpret that to be.

I don't suppose there is a precise meaning for "well off", and I suspect common usage is broad enough to take in both our uses of it here. I'd certainly describe someone that way if they are earning way more than the average, rather than saving it for people wealthy enough that they can live well without having to work.

I'd say that knowing this distinction is a middle- or upper-middle class signifier. I own an urban condo but no second home, which according to Stevem's criteria probably means lower-middle class, or middle-working class according to Smee.

Granted, I suspect that both of you are working from a U.K. perspective on class. In the U.S., "middle-class" is so generously defined that it tends to mean "owns his/her primary residence." While Americans tend to speak proudly of working and work ethics, they shy away from the "working class" label -- I think it's perceived as perilously close to the "white trash" label.

j.lu:
I'd say that knowing this distinction is a middle- or upper-middle class signifier.

j.lu I'd qualify that with: it depends how old you are when you know it, and how you find out.

And let me tell you, not only is running on the wheel hard, nibbling on these pieces of wood is a bother.

Only if posting on ILx is some secret support of the world economy. But I have heard stranger macroeconomic statements.

I am middle class although I've been on the dole for most of the year. Oooh, I'm slumming it lalalalla!

Every post I make = another million Nikes are sold. Er, somewhere.

I'm sorry, but that statement makes my blood boil! I'm so upset I can't even string together coherant argument!!!!

I dunno, it just seems that now more than ever the Working Class are the one true enemy in Britain, and it's just fucking shit how there's not even the slightest drop of liberal heart blood dripping on us.

And, yeah, Noodle V brings truth.

(x-post)

this was a realignment, masquerading as a blurring

class boundaries are as strong as ever,