Godot Taxis
Tuesday 25th January 2011 1:45pm
5,741 posts
Quote: Timbo @ January 25 2011, 12:09 PM GMT
That may be the chip on your shoulder interpreting their reaction for you.
Well, it was probably the chip on this forum. From a previous page. "Working class people can't even be trusted to drink sensibly or bring up their children properly, so we certainly shouldn't be spending any money making programmes for them." He isn't joking by the way.
Quote: Timbo @ January 25 2011, 12:09 PM GMT
Working class is a term fraught with difficulty; partly because education is less and less a route to social mobility; partly because self-employment has become the option of the marginalised rather then the entrepreneurial; partly because of a greater appreciation of skilled manual labour and a proliferation of poorly paid white-collar jobs without prospects; and partly because the physical and intellectual demands of how jobs are actually done has changed. Who constitutes the working class in today's Britain is a moot point.
None of the things you mention alters the defining parameters. A window cleaner who owns his own van, ladder, chamois and bucket is still working class because he is utterly dependent on the social and economic structures underpinning society remaining in place. An ex-college lecturer with a slew of post-grad diplomas who has retrained as a plumber is still middle class because he isn't.
