The Cabinet Office strategy which is something to do with Gordon Brown and his government has released a report showing that people are socially mobile again after decades of stagnation.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s despite the explosion in home ownership and material prosperity young people tended to stay on the same rung of the social class ladder as their parents.
Now, the report goes on to say, we are seeing movement between social classes indicating that social mobility has returned to British society.
Could it, we wonder, be anything to do with people having their houses repossessed and joining traveller communities?
PS
It is harder now to identify somebody’s social class. Income is no indicator and changes in education and community structures have cause traditional class indicators to blur. Other measures, pronunciation, grammar, corrrect punctuation in written communication have all become meaningless. So what defines our class?
Punctuation
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Social mobility studies should come with the warning:
“Social status can go down as well as up.”
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I think trading the four bed house on a Charles Church development for a cardboard box under the railway arches is a visible enough warning to those who seek upward mobility through materialism 🙂
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the biggest catalyst for Upward Social Mobility was maggie.
Thank you maggie for making it possible for someone from a working class family like me – to get a job in the city and make loads of cash.
amen.
‘course the socialists hate it – but f* em right.
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Maggie was actuaaly the biggest obstacle to social mobility. She might have said that ill mannerer oiks from Essex (or GTrantham) had become middle class just because they owned mortgages and drove leased Beamers, but anybody with the “right sort” of education knows money was never the arbiter of class.
Oh and Maggie was never middle class, she was more Hyacinth Bucket than Celia Featherstonhaugh (pron Fanshawe doncha know)
course the “nous” (nouvelle riche) will never understand that but fuck ’em, right. (BTW a truly high class person would never balk at using an anglo saxon word.)
A trades manager at BZW (now absorbed into something else) once told a group of consultants his criteria for hiring a dealer was that they had dropped out of school at fifteen and made their living as a street trader or had been expelled from public school for cheating in their exams. QED
You’re just never going to win on this topic Semafu, but nice try 😉
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