Olivia Hughes
The class system has been ingrained into the UK for centuries, impacting cultures, communities and identity, but is it time to ditch the labels?
The difficulty with the class system in the UK is that it is hard to define. According to Easy Sociology, class hierarchy is determined by economic position, occupation, education, geography and social habits.
But these factors can create a paradox of class for an individual by being ‘middle-class’ in one aspect and ‘working-class’ in another.
Hearing the phrase “I’m middle/working class but…” is more common in my experience than people outright believing they fit into one class category.
This guilt has been built into our vocabulary, ready to explain away our complex lives to people to justify, one way or another, that we are NOT simply a single class.
Class In The Past
In 1851, officially classifying the British population by occupation and industry came into practice.
By 1911, the government recognised class on the census, dividing the public into three categories: upper, middle and working class.
Since the Second World War, the public has generally deemed class to be linked to home-ownership and higher education, with the role of women in the workforce playing a part in a shift in dynamics in class categorisation.
Up until 1946, women had to resign from workplaces when they got married, and after this, the positions women held were mostly clerical.
The Class System Today
As of April 2024 the gender pay gap was at 13.1 per cent, meaning that social mobility is still systemically harder for women than it is for men.
This plays a larger role as to why we need a society without class labels – with gender pay inequality women are disproportionately represented in working-class roles.
Stigma still exists around being working class, but women cannot access social mobility in the same way as men. By feeding into a classed society, we continue to negatively impact women specifically.
In 2011, the BBC devised the Great British Class System, which split the population into seven categories.
The precariat (the poorest and most deprived class group), the emergent service workers, the traditional working class, the new affluent workers, the technical middle class, the established middle class and the elite.
After taking this test with my family, we were all graded as widely different classes from one side of the scale to the other, further proving that if our individual experiences are different enough, even parents and children can have vastly different results in terms of labelling our class.
How Do Class Labels Define And Impact Us?
How people choose to identify with the class in which they are raised can have an impact on psychology.
A series of studies in PNAS found that higher-class individuals behave more unethically than people from lower-class backgrounds.
However, being from a lower-class background has also been linked to greater prejudice against ethnic minorities and immigrants.
But are these class differences reinforcing each other in a never-ending self-fulfilling prophecy?
A lot of people are proud of their class identity, and taking it away takes away a part of who they are.
A social mobility barometer report, published in 2021, found that around half of the British public think they are working class (48 percent), and 36 percent view themselves as middle class.
Almost 80 per cent of adults across all regions say there is a large gap between social classes in Britain today.
Data from CIPD shows that social mobility in the UK hasn’t improved in half a century and that there is a clear ‘class ceiling’ pay gap.
One study looking at the backgrounds and pay packets of managers and professional workers found that those from working-class origins earned 17% less than those from a middle-class background.
So if class labels were removed, would the gap between social classes and pay diminish? It would be hard to hypothesise on this because removing class labels wouldn’t fix the class issues deeply entrenched in our society, but it could work towards changing attitudes and removing stigma by not dividing the public further.
My Experience With Class
Growing up in Bolton – one of the most deprived towns in England – I have always been aware of the true meaning of a working-class community, and identified with this regarding social habits.
My Mum has lived in Bolton all her life and grew up in a typical working-class family, so I was raised in a strong community of working-class people. But my Dad is firmly middle-class, making me feel like a fraud in both aspects.
I have been told ‘You’re so posh’ when working at various different jobs across Bolton, because my accent isn’t as thick as other people’s.
But at University, where people I mostly encountered were from the South, they said the exact opposite. In one geographical area, I am middle class, and in another, I’m working class. But I am neither, and I am both, and that is the problem.
Who Do Class Categories Benefit?
A key question to be asked is what is the purpose of the class system? If society no longer knows how to identify what class they are in, then who does it benefit?
The answer remains the same as it always has. Those born into higher privilege continue to benefit from class categories.
An ONS report from 2019 shows that the better off are nearly 80 per cent more likely to end up in professional jobs than those from a working-class background.
This, coupled with the fact that even when working-class people get into higher professional positions, they are on average paid nearly 20 per cent less than their middle-class counterparts, proves the urgency for removing class labels and more importantly, the stigma around class that exists in this country.
The Social Mobility Commission said in this report that inequality is entrenched in British society from birth to work and that the government needed to take urgent action to close the ‘privilege gap’.
Six years on from this report, and getting rid of an outdated class system that perpetuates stigma is still as urgent as ever.
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Featured image courtesy of tillbrmnn on Pixabay. No changes were made to this image. Image licence found here.
