Anyway, going round the houses here, but sthg about social mobility in the UK is that - in eg fancy universities, big institutions - my experience is that being working-class is embarrassing and you need to Act Posh. Know which fork to use, adopt a French accent at will. All still very U and Non-U
I fear my accent gets stronger the longer I spend down here
One man line of defence
Polishing chips is an approach :/
This is Starmer to a T. Given where he started, he spent his whole adult life constructing a persona that enabled him to get on in a world totally dominated by the privately educated and highly privileged. It worked perfectly for the law. It's far less good for politics.
Yes,and it seems to me that Starmer's way of life and of understanding life must have been characterised by those pressures from a relatively early age, as he made his way into the world of elite law. So this is the latest and most extreme version of his long period of adaptation.
It’s interesting trying to find anyone in university management with a regional accent. Were they never there, or did their accents get lost along the way? I have my suspicions.
I mean, look at how everyone loves to have a go at Angela Rayner. In some circles, being successful is equated with knowing how to pass for being Upper Middle-Class and it doesn't matter how smart you are if you can't fit in. And that feels like a *real problem* for socially progressive politics
Indeed. I decided early on that I was an anthropologist observing the strange rituals of the English class system :)
That parliament demands that its history must have precedence over its utility. The weirdness is essential. The unusable building is important. Proper form is all.
So agree with this. I found the bbc a really hard place to work after running a media centre in Huddersfield. I asked Lynsey Hanley to speak at The Story because her description of the ‘in-betweeness’ of social mobility in her book Respectable felt so achingly true.
I think (?) the BBC is probably better now, but TV posh is a whole situation
Tbf, I don’t think anyone knows very much beyond the world in which they happen to live. It’s just that, when you’re in a position in government, this matters to people who aren’t inhabiting the same place.
There’s a lot that’s annoying about local government, but the world is worse for the way it’s been sidelined and defunded.
Local press and radio likewise.
This rings really true and it's fascinating how Starmer (a man with objectively a more normal / working class background than either Corbyn or Farage) is seen as posher than either of those two because he's much more formal
Yes! It's exactly that! Whereas of course the actual mark of someone with real class privilege is that they are almost painfully unselfish-conscious. It's like the pain of the Stuck-Up Middle Class, which essentially appeals to no one
Anyway, nothing very revelatory to say in conclusion, but it does feel like there's some massively self-sabotaging Other-ing going on here, and that we'd all be much better off if Starmer could relax a bit and stop thinking about people as lines on a graph that goes up and down.
I think this is one of the big arguments in favour of moving parliament out of London. Dragging MPs out of their old-school-tie establishment cliques
💯 bsky.app/profile/jimh...
What I think you're describing is the English establishment. It tries to poke its head in here but is mostly kept at bay. British governments are inevitably part of it - whatever their background and starting beliefs, the people who succeed within it accept that.