Penetrating the Impenetrable: The British Class System
Matthew McMahon, BSc Politics, Philosophy, Economics
For as long as Britain has existed, social class has been everywhere. Indeed, a frantic obsession with a lust for superiority has allowed for the class system to ooze into every part of public and private life - over time gaining a chokehold on the social animals that form its society.
Having been allowed to shape all sorts of interactions, dynamics and functions, class retains a strong grip on the formative experience of anyone growing up in the United Kingdom. Recognising the power that it holds, people have scrambled to clearly assign characteristics that are to serve as class markers that put people into distinct categories. Where many are eager to draw the line at wealth, the British have taken it a step further, delving into accent, food, clothes, hobbies and haircuts, all in the hopes of understanding where someone is situated within a crude social hierarchy.
What is then produced is a vicious cycle, widening class divides and the fuelling of class hatred. As a class connotation is attached to any attribute, it is appropriated by a group that seeks to exclude others from ownership, harshening, districting and frustrating the disposed.
This unbridled fanaticism of self-reproduction snowballs into a level of polarisation that the rest of Europe and the World can hardly fathom. As other nations faced revolutions, Britain doubled down into protecting their elites. At this point, a firm case can be made that the UK does not want to breach any gaps, as pushbacks on all sides paint a picture of a grim entrenchment of this backward social order.
Britain’s love for class has led them to rigidify their categories - nothing or no-one can exist on the fence between two classes. This curse is extended to foreigners entering the UK for the first time. Indeed, the moment that they enter, they are subjected to a meticulous analysis of all that they hold dear to themselves, in order to assign to them a place in this rigid system.
In typical fashion, the criteria used stem from a purely native understanding of what constitutes class, and how different practices shape you - rejecting all foreign understandings. Such a troubling problem would not be so pronounced if class distinctions would have stopped at wealth, yet its omnipresent insistence makes international peoples devoid of any clear class affiliation.
People are forcibly squeezed into cramped metaphorical class boxes that feel claustrophobic. Whereas someone having grown up in Britain feels accustomed to the confines of a space, this is because they grew and developed with it, making its shape and size feel instinctive. On the other hand, those forced into it are compelled to conform themselves in the hopes of feeling any degree of comfort.
This is not to say however that class is not a thing in the rest of the world, but simply that it functions in different ways than in Britain, meaning different things and manifesting itself in different ways. British people do not question people entering this system about the place they previously held in their country of origin, as to ask someone about their class would be impolite or crude.
The options presented to foreigners are slim. The first of these is to conform into the British class system, stripping themselves of part of their identity synonymous with peoples who occupy their class back home - an unnatural and unnecessary suppression of who you are. The second is to attempt to survive in a so-called ‘class limbo’ - to sit on the fence conforming to the criteria most familiar to you.
For internationals entering the UK, uncomfortable choices are inevitable. With an inevitably delicate nexus of un-consented trade-offs, what is one to do? In a society where class is everything, you can’t fight it, all you can do is begrudgingly join it.