Britain's obsession with social-class.

 

In England they talk a lot of cant and humbug about social class. England always has been a very class divided and snobbish society, but you will find that many politicians and the elites that run this country, will often try to deny this in public because inequality has to be justified. We're told that people get on because of their ability.  

Prince William has been seen selling the Big Issue and campaigns against homelessness to justify his privileged lifestyle. The Royal Family have numerous under occupied homes but I don't think that they will be opening them up to house the homeless. We've been told that Britain is now a classless society and that all political parties are utilitarian in that they want the greatest good for the greatest number. They will tell you that Britain is a meritocratic society and that it isn't where you come from that matters but where you're going - worth not birth, they will say.

Only around 7% of people who live in Britain, have ever attended what are called public schools, but you will find them disproportionately represented in most of the top jobs in the country such as in the judiciary, government, civil service, journalism and the legal profession. Many of Britain's Prime Ministers have been drawn from one public school called Eton.

There was probably more upward social mobility in the 1950s and 1960s, but this was linked to the vast expansion of the state and the economy after the war. People were needed to fill the jobs in the NHS, education and in government services, and there weren't enough middle-class people to fill them. In today's Britain, the social bank of mum and dad opens as many doors as the financial bank of mum and dad. The social class into which you're born, will very much determine your outcomes in life.

The TV historian, Dan Snow, who married Lady Edwina Grosvenor, has called himself a "Nepo Baby" because he says people believe he owes his success in life to nepotism. The writer and Guardian journalist, Polly Toynbee, has frequently said that her success in life was helped by having the name Toynbee and a famous father and grandfather. White privileged old Etonians, like David Cameron and Boris Johnson, owe everything in life to the social class that they were born into and family connections. Cameron and Johnson will never need to use a jobcentre.