Their culture includes:

Distrust of outsiders, indeed society itself

Complex, Masonic Trades unions and divisions of labour (quite different from working classes in other countries)

Distinct shared activities (sports, brass bands, pigeons)

Autistic, regressive values

High gender differentiation

Cynicism and pessimism

Hatred of religion, and attempts at middle class cultural coercion

Cultural and social insularity

I mean, there’s a culture right there. What the hell is it if it isn’t a culture?

Puffy, see this is hard to apply to Indians… because by defualt when you’re ten you know you’re going to do a degree. No, I’m not joking. When I was ten I remember thinking what university life would be like. It was inevitable.

I’ll try and look out for the negative slippages next time – it’s been a long time. Ken is the one who did Carla’s Song – Mike is the one who did Secrets & Lies.

I have mixed feelings about them (or is it just one of them?). In any case the Ken Leigh who did Abigail’s Party and Life Is Sweet may be a brilliant film maker but he clearly despises the working class (and especially their middle class aspirations – remember the restaurant scene in LIS?). I don’t think this is necessarily conscious, but it’s there, I think. Or is that heresy too?!

Thanks for sharing – sometimes it’s the ordinary tales that tell you more about class than thoeries of the classes, their histories and mutations. I liked your story by the Sainsbury – we’re not all endowed by social capital to know how to make the best of our talents, and there’s something about nature versus nurture in your story which is testimony to how much middle classes can enable, groom, unlock talent – this is a good thing. I can understand why you might disgree with my hunch – for it was just a hunch – nothing more. I stopped trying to figure out class a long time ago – largely because it’s difficult to define, and the only thing that made sense to me were little stories like yours that make you aware of our class backgrounds.

Anyway, speaking of role models – I thought some of the best working class heros are to be found lurking in Ken Loach or Mike Leigh’s movies.

Well according to Halima that makes me working class then (and there’s me thinking I could pass for posh folk). I disagree, for what it’s worth – as a child who went to a comp in a suburb of north London, it was quite mixed between the working and middle classes. I remember going to my first girlfriend’s house at 16 (ok, I was a late developer) and being shocked to find:
Books, a piano, “ethnic” wall hangings, and her mum and dad sharing a glass of vino (red at that) in the afternoon.

I had stepped into another world.

Another anecdote – at 17 I had left school and was working in Selfridges. A girl joins me in the canteen and we get talking. She asks me what I’m doing here and explains she’s a student. She says – why don’t you do a degree? I had the A’s after all. And do you know what? I HAD NEVER CONSIDERED IT. It was what posh people did . It was simply outside my and my family’s frame of reference. Anyway, the girl persuaded me to look into it and two weeks later I was an undergraduate. Otherwise I might have worked my way up to floor manager by now.

That’s class for you, in my experience. I never saw the girl again BTW.

And yeah, I do agree that Kat from Eastenders and Bernard Manning are probably not useful WC role models, although Bert seems to have gone down that route anyway.

Halima, very interesting points… I think I largely agree.

That’s a biggie.
And I suspect it’s also eroded the self-worth of a generation or two of immigrant populations who have benefited from the dole. And here I’m thinking of my British-Bangladeshi countrymen.

Does the welfare state have anything to do with this? Has it given dignity yet taken pride?

I tried to figure class out a while ago and came to the conclusion if you are still taking money home to your parents to help them eat and sleep – that’s pretty much working class. It’s the middle classes that give their children a helping hand with house deposits, wills which are the stepping stone into a more mobile future; for working class kids they still have to support their Mums and Dads. OK – you might say then that’s what Asians do – true, but this is actually what the white working classes do, and the avoidance of this contribution is what enables middle class mobility.

This is a positive feature of working class life – and that solidarity extends to neighbours and community networks. Middle class values, on the other hand, are more to do with individualism and individual social mobility, and when this is exhausted, the middle classes invent the need to volunteer and form mutual associations to support ‘community’. Working class families on the other hand are busy helping kin, Mums, Dads, kinship to help them out of poverty. They don’t have time to be volunteers – they are volunteering 24/7 in life. These strike me as some of the main differences – the flow (or reverse flow) of money from one generation to another.

Thankyou Sid, but learn to spell – spell pheonix wrong, and spell Scroobius right.